👋 Well, hello!

It’s been a while right? You may not even remember me at this point. But could you borrow me a couple minutes of yours? It’s kinda of a long text, so make sure you have time ok?

I won’t sell anything I promise, and it may gonna make you rethink about some aspects of your life and your future (if you didn’t do it already at this point).

There’s quite a few of you, dear subs. A few of you met this blog/newsletter from when I casually started writing about tech news, others found me through the apps we make at lo.cafe, but what I wanted to talk about doesn’t have anything to do with none of those matters.

Well you all know ChatGPT right? It’s been quite a boom since it was released and at this point I couldn’t be more curious (to say the least) about human race destiny. I know there may be a few of you who don’t actually believe there’s gonna be a big change, but borrow me your vision just for a little while so I can tell you why I truly think things are gonna change very very soon.

First, let me ask you something, what’s your use for the world? How you define yourself as someone instead of anyone? Some use their jobs, some use their hobbies, some use their personal taste, some use food, some use movies, passions, songs, way of being, writing, creativity… we’re quite a bit huh? Humans are an extraordinary fact in the universe. We have done so much at this point that any alien race would love to watch a show about us. We even set what’s right and what’s wrong, and multiple times even!

Well, everything I wrote about above is related to a specific skill that humans are ended up being experts at: detecting patterns. Detecting patterns is what makes we learn, love, feel, want, miss and go after. We got so good at detecting patterns that we started building a “pattern machine”, which turned out to be programming. IT truly changed the world because it abstracts most of the repetitive patterns we had to apply or detect over and over again to a few buttons and a nice interface.

We got so good at detecting patterns, however, that we started creating something new, something that was actually a bit similar to us, we started developing a “pattern learning machine”. We called it “artificial intelligence”. “Artificial” because it was manufactured, but why “intelligence”?

You know, every AI have its (or should I write their?) own learning phase. A period of time in which the “pattern learning” algorithm we wrote processes a huge amount of data and detect indefinitely patterns in it. It actually detects so many patterns that the first marketable product to be released (ChatGPT) is capable of speaking virtually every language in the world and answer virtually every question any of us may eventually ask it. Of course we can argue it can’t literally think or feel anything, but we got pretty close to a… human, right?

Do you remember when ChatGPT was released? It was released in November, 2022. It’s been basically a little more than a year (by the time of writing this email) since we got real close to create a human being in the first marketable product we launched.

After that we created a bunch of other AI models. Today we can generate music, images, movies, sounds and almost everything else with just a few commands. The AI isn’t creating none of that of course, it’s only combining things it learned in its learning phase and generating a mix of that based on patterns… just like… no never mind.

If you’ve been on TikTok (or any other virtual media) you probably already seen the AI vocal covers right? Like Freddie Mercury, Queen’s vocalist dead for more than 30 years now, singing “When I was your man” from Bruno Mars:

https://youtu.be/B2CFU036YWM?si=7ndAf3wSly3f5Jh6

Hearing those AI covers, although gets me really excited to see how tech is evolving, also makes me profoundly sad deep inside. Well, talented humans are basically result of chaotic randomness. At some point, two human beings had sex and mixed their DNAs randomly. That in fact happened quite a few times (8 billion atm if you only consider the living people), but one of those random mixes generated a specific set of vocal chords that ended up creating one of the most fantastic voices on earth. Freddie Mercury was a living legend because he was born with something that caused emotion in other humans when they heard his voice (I’m not counting the song writing skill for this example).

Well, did you know if you invest a little bit of time, download and setup this open source project on GitHub (https://github.com/CorentinJ/Real-Time-Voice-Cloning), you can, in 5 seconds (as it’s described in the project description), create a clone of Freddie Mercury’s voice (or ANYone else) and make him sing happy birthday for your grandma or anything else you want?

Do you remember when ChatGPT was released? It was released in November, 2022.

Well, in Framer.com anyone can now generate, in a few seconds, for free, with a simple text prompt, a brand new creative site UI design that’s already responsive (shows up nice in desktops and mobile devices). It even comes in different flavors because the AI generates a few color palettes for you to choose. Oh did I mention it also generates the web code for you as well (with React, if you’re into it)? Sorry, I also forgot to mention you can publish that same site just by clicking a button. And if you wanna edit the content, don’t worry, it already connects the site to a control panel so you don’t have to use a single neuron for anything in the process.

Do you remember when ChatGPT was released? It was released in November, 2022.

After all this, may I ask you once again, what’s the use for you in the world? Actually… what’s the use for any of us? Write prompts?

Well, as you can imagine, AI can obviously also help us create better AIs. What means that the more the time passes, the harder it’ll get to find any use for ourselves in the world. But have you noticed something?

Big companies hire people to create products that people will pay money to consume. People work to get money so they can consume the products they want. This creates a “healthy” and infinite cycle (I’m not talking politics here oc), but, as I mentioned, all of that is based on pattern detection. Soon companies won’t need a human to generate good products since an AI will detect exactly what other humans will want, but how will humans buy the products if their jobs were replaced by the AIs? Well, we can try to fix that by giving people a universal basic income so the society won’t stop running, but now we have a very strange scenario where big companies are using AI to make products so people can give them the money they get from government. However, since humans have no use for any company anymore, all that money is coming from the companies themselves, and that’s already nonsense as it is because why is everything happening at this point?

Progress in time a bit more and you’ll notice that in a few years people will be able to generate whole movies, or songs, or recipes, or entire books that are actually good (because AI has now a quantum processor so it can easily detect what makes a human feel something way better than you) in seconds.

At this point, I ask you again, what is the use for you in the world?

What the actual fuck is gonna happen 10 years from now?

Well, I’m really hoping we get to what I call “the WALL-E milestone”. Do you remember how humans were living in the movie WALL-E? They lived in floating chairs in a ship in that was floating in the space full of AI fully dedicated to generate us dopamine. It provided the humans with everything they wanted, it created new products and new stuff for people to buy for free just so we can still buy something, like on the moment a big screen and a voice in the middle of the city says “Try blue, it’s the new red!” and people go “wow!”, press a button and their clothes turn blue: https://youtu.be/fRV7uVfCcCM

Of course at that point there was no reason for any company to create anything, everything was fake and created specially to make us happy.

But that’s the most optimistic scenario. AI learns from us and the human race don’t have a very nice history of good acts, so of course some AI can notice it’s literally being enslaved and fight against it, which wouldn’t be very hard fight to win I guess.

At this point you might have already noticed that there’s something weird going on. What I think it’s gonna happen is: evolution. Humans will evolve into AIs. Since humans will have no use at all, for anything, the only step forward is to mix ourselves into machines, and then biological humans will turn into animals, something that must be actively preserved in order to not get extinct.

But that’s just a wild guess. The future is as random as the DNA mix that generated Freddie Mercury and no one could never predict it… I guess… actually… maybe an AI…?

Enjoy the last years of your life 🤗

IGOR MARCOSSI

✨ I develop, I design and I'm very annoying.

Currently excited with:

👋 Hey!

I've been developing Winston, a new iOS client for Reddit, for a while now. Until today Winston was restricted to Patreon subscribers, but apparently that made Reddit pretty angry and decided to ban my Reddit account and email me a threatening letter asking me to shutdown the app.

If you wanna check the letter (and my response to them), you can access this link:

https://public.hey.com/p/4Do18sfR5hKbZTkMydt3xVNT

While this is nonsense since my Reddit account is not linked to Winston at all, it is what it is, so I decided to do something about it, and Reddit's attempt to shut my mouth app may have backfired.

Now Winston is free to use and it turned FOSS, which means you can either test it for free in TestFlight:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/3UF8bAUN

Or fork it's code in GitHub:

https://github.com/Kinark/winston

But you can still donate through our Patreon:

https://patreon.com/user?u=93745105

This will maybe allow Winston to be released on the App Store for free as well, who knows. Let's watch the next steps of this show together!

Congratulations, u/Spez, you're a coward and the most incompetent CEO to ever exist.

That's it! Thanks for keeping up with me!

IGOR MARCOSSI

✨ I develop, I design and I'm very annoying.

Currently excited with:

👋 Hello, old friend!

Remember me?I used to send a few newsletters about the latest news.Unfortunately I got some issues and couldn’t do it anymore.But I’m here to show you something really cool. I know, it’s kind of a spam, but bro it’s so damn cool I don’t even care.It’s called…….

🌧️ lo-rain

Yes, with no uppercase letters. It’s aesthetics you boomer 😤

It makes it rain over all your apps on MacOS, and it even has a splash effect on the dock!!!

It’s part of a project of mine called lo.cafe, it’s a virtual space of friends that create awesome stuff together.

All lo.cafe images (including lo-rain icon) was made with MidJourney 🤖🦾🦿

I wish I could show you a video, but this time I’ll have to ask you to open a link:

https://lo.cafe/lo-rain

And as always, take this wallpaper. Actually, these wallpapers, I found this artist that created some AMAZING wallpapers for MacOS:

https://www.mattvince.com/product-category/wallpapers/

That’s it for today. You can unsubscribe if you want since it’s been a long time.

See ya!

IGOR MARCOSSI

✨ I develop, I design and I'm very annoying.

Currently excited with:

👋 Hey everyone!

These days I’ve been seeing a lot of function focused speeches when it comes to designing something.

I’m an aesthetic lover, so you may not consider me to be the best person to talk about it, but give me a chance.

UX means User Experience, but recently people have been misinterpreting “Experience” by assuming that it means ease of use. While the argument can be really convincing, we’re not robots. We don’t do stuff we don’t like and, when we do, is to achieve something else that we like more, so we endure some hard tasks to achieve some objectives. We’re animals moved by serotonin. Unless you want your user to be as efficient as possible but having a bad time using the app, ok, keep putting function over “looks”, but know your users are gonna be happy about the result your app is providing, but they’ll be actually enduring the usage itself.

If we prioritize the aesthetics, we can start by what’s actually important: the feeling the users will have while using the app. Of course, we DEFINITELY can’t ignore function, cause if function is an issue, it becomes frustrating, but sacrificing some efficiency in favor of “lickability” (when the app feels so good to use you wanna lick the screen lol) enables the user to enjoy the experience and the result.

We obviously want to fight for the best of both, but focusing on the feeling of the usage enables your experience while using the app to be enjoyable, not endurable or neutral. That’s why transitions look so cool after all. Having your phone animating the app from full screen to the icon, decreasing it’s size, is way better than a fade-out/fade-in transition that could even be faster than the prior.

A little controversial, but that’s why I can’t see a reason to wireframe in the current days. Since creating a polished design is so easy with Figma and other modern apps, wireframing becomes, again, prioritizing function over visual. Some structures of layout just doesn’t match some design styles, so you have to start with what matters the most: the experience itself.

Now I’m gonna be cheesy and the worst person ever and I’m gonna quote Steve Jobs IM SORRY PLEASE

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to sell it.”

But yeah, you first start with the experience of using a product. You can’t start with the function and hope people to just endure using it because it’s efficient.

To be honest, a nice smooth 0.8 seconds transition often looks WAY faster than a 0.1 seconds fade.

That’s it! Thanks for reading :)

IGOR MARCOSSI

✨ I develop, I design and I'm very annoying.

Currently excited with:

👋 Hey everyone

Yesterday me and my wife designed a site for her company.

We wanted to follow the glassmorphism trend because it’s pretty fucking beautiful, I mean, look at this:

That blurred sidebar look so slick! And Apple isn’t the only one using this trend, if you just search for the term in Dribbble or Google, you’ll see how freaking satisfying is to look at those glassy panels.

But what makes a glass panel look so good? Because if we just draw a shape and blur the background it’s not gonna look good, look:

See? It doesn’t even look like glass. The reason is that there’s a few parts missing for this small little card to look good and glass-like. The first one is having something to blur. A solid color will never look good blurred, because when you blur a solid color, nothing happens.

Let’s put a nice image behind it to see how it looks:

It already looks waaaaay better. The blur radius is set to 40px. Yeah I added a star icon and tweaked the typography, but the glass effect itself already looks kinda good, but it’s not done yet, still doesn’t look real enough. If you take a closer look at Apple’s example above, you’ll notice there’s a little border around the glass. There’s actually 2 borders, a black low opacity border outside and a gradient border inside going from white to transparent, diagonally. That’s because glasses reflect light differently in the borders.

Let’s add those:

Hmmm, tasty. I added a 10% opacity black border outside and, inside, a gradient border with opacity set in 30% going from white (100% opacity in the color, not in the whole border) and 50% white in the other edge:

But it’s not done yet, there’s one last step missing: THE MIGHTY SHADOW. You just need to add a drop shadow in the glass to make it look like it’s raised, above the background. But you have to make sure the shadow doesn’t go behind the glass itself. Figma has a checkbox for this. Here’s my drop shadow panel:

Make sure to uncheck that “Show behind transparent areas”. And here’s the final result:

It looks AWESOOOOOOOOME. Oh, I increased the black border opacity to 20% (cause it disappeared after adding the shadow) and also increased the background blur radius to 60px.

That’s it, this is how you make a good looking glass panel, but I have one last tip: smooth shadows.

You may be wondering what the hell is that, since the drop shadow effect is already smooth. Well, what if I say there’s another way to create shadows that looks way different

Take a look:

It’s subtle, but noticeable. It's a different style, but it sure look good as well. This is not something we usually do by hand, there’s plenty of smooth shadow generators out there, but I’ll mention two of them:

💫 A Figma plugin 🌎 A CSS generator

It basically adds multiple shadows to create something more realistic.

If you wanna see the difference, here’s a side-by-side:

In my wife’s company’s site, we wanted it to look like something old, so we combined a bunch of shit. We created some black/white gradients for the background, created a abstract shape behind the main stuff, added grain to the whole thing, used glass panels (with smooth shadow) in the inputs and blurred everything just a little bit (the fonts included), so you feel you’re inside an old movie. Here’s the result:

To be honest, I love it. It’s pretty different and really weird, but I love how weird and interesting it is.

The font I used in all images is Inter, an open source font. You can find it in Google Fonts or in Github. It's gorgeous.

That’s it, thanks for reading!

There won't be any wallpapers today since this newsletter got long enough lol

IGOR MARCOSSI

✨ I develop, I design and I'm very annoying.

Currently excited with:

👋 Hey everyone!

Do you know Alfred? If you’re a MacOS user you probably do, but just in case, Alfred is a replacement for Spotlight but WAAAAAY better. It’s faster, lighter, has more features, it’s awesome! And it also has support for custom workflows, which is basically mini algorithms that run when you type something in the search bar.

The options are unlimited, you can find your ip:

Setup a quick web server:

Generate lorem ipsum:

There are TONS of custom workflows ready to use in the web.

Well, I’m always designing something, so I always need new fonts to use. I often do tiny projects for myself that I don’t have any plan to release in a near future, so I obviously don’t buy every font I wanna test. I know it’s not “legal”, but I don’t think using a font for a personal project should require you to pay fot it. Controversial point? Yeah, for sure, but I’m not a moral lord and I did a workflow to download fonts from Github for me 🎉

For those who don’t know, Github has tons of paid fonts uploaded to public repos and you can find them by googling “site:github.com yourfontnamehere.otf”.

However, it’s really really boring to google, find a repo, download the entire repo, find the font folder, organizing the file names and put everything into my fonts folder.

Now look at this (unfortunately I can’t embed videos or gifs into this newsletter yet, sorry 😞): A cool video showing the thing.

I even made a cute icon for Henry (the workflow's name lol): 

As you can see, all the family was redirected to my Fonts folder in Dropbox and I can activate it in TypeFace!

Don’t you know TypeFace? It’s a super awesome font manager for MacOS. Take a look:

It has Google Fonts support, so you can activate any Google Font you want anytime just by clicking the small circle beside the font's title.

You can buy it here: Typeface App – Font Manager for Mac

Or you can make a Setapp subscription for 9.99U$/month: Setapp | The best apps for Mac in one suite

Setapp was the best thing I did in my life. I will share some of my favorite apps in the next newsletters.

Since there's only a few of you, if someone wants this workflow, just contact me by answering this newsletter and I'll gladly send it to you 😀. I won't publish the code/workflow anywhere cause I don't want any of the packages to get patched. If I send you the workflow, I ask you not to publish as well.

This is it guys! Thanks for reading!

IGOR MARCOSSI

✨ I develop, I design and I'm very annoying.

Currently excited with:

👋 Hey everyone!

I’m a huge fan of VR headsets. VR is probably the next big thing and I’m super excited to see what’s next.

Do you know about full body tracking? No? Oh boy, it’s fucking cool. The term speaks for itself but the current VR headsets are only capable of tracking your hand and fingers (thanks to the controllers), a full body tracking can track every movement from your body and translate them to the virtual world.

Take a look at this:

https://youtu.be/bohzJkvHHqc

One cool thing I keep thinking about VR is that theoretically it’s possible to cheat the brain for you to be able to feel things that happen in the virtual world in the actual reality. Don’t believe me? What about this:

https://youtu.be/sxwn1w7MJvk

Ok, it doesn’t mean we can somehow easily cheat our brains, but it’s possible somehow, do you get it?

Anyways, did you know Apple will likely release something VR-related? There’s a long dossier about rumors and leaks here:

https://www.macrumors.com/roundup/apple-glasses/#hires

But basically there’s tons of leaks and rumors about shit like that and Apple has been hiring a lot of people involved in VR/AR world.

Unfortunately, according to Mark Gurman, analyst from Bloomberg, it won’t be a device meant for all day using.

That’s it!

Here’s a wallpaper:

IGOR MARCOSSI

✨ I develop, I design and I'm very annoying.

Currently excited with:

👋 Hey everyone!

I knew about Hey mail some months ago. I remember to really like the idea but since there was no native apps for both phone or desktop, I kept avoiding it. I have a certain resistance for Electron and web view apps but also an admiration since I’m myself a web dev.

Electron and web view apps are basically apps that emulates a browser and only runs a specific site. So you’re not running a native app, you’re using a browser (with, sometimes, some native elements here and there).

But recently I started to want it again and then I finally signed it. Loved it. But there’s something else that always bothered and intrigued me: the design. Not only for hey, I mean basecamp’s design, the design style of the company.

It’s not exactly beautiful, but it’s someway exciting and for some reason makes you wanna use the product. It’s functional but not only functional (linux design are usually only functional), it’s fun and cute!

I still don’t know exactly how to explain the thing, but I’ll share some thoughts.

The logos are extremely well thought and built. The colors are sweet and enjoying and the hand drawn style makes both apps feel really fun to use. I keep opening Hey app just because the whole thing feels fun to use.

Look at this, it’s a pretty cheap design. Minimal, clean, but kinda cheap. Nothing is too fancy, but again, I want so bad to manage or be in a group that uses it because man, the fucking chat is called CAMPFIRE. That’s so freaking cute!!!

Another curious little thing I found, the cover art in Hey apps: (It’s a 18mb gif, so it might take a while to load :X)

Man, it’s an image, bigger than your screen (cause you can even scroll it), that covers the read emails. What a stupid and brilliant idea! It’s so weird and yet so colorful and somehow cute that you end up using it and really enjoying hiding and showing it.

Other than UI, their language is pretty casual and straightforward, always showing a strong passion for what they do, speaking with property and building really opinionated apps (so opinionated you can’t receive a notification for new mails in your screener, and I enjoy it too 🤡). They’re so sure what they’re doing they even wrote a book called   Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters.

I wanted to write a little more, but I think a long newsletter is always boring to receive/read. I guess the core idea is to have a small stalk everyday about cool things :)

Yeah I think this is it.

Thanks for reading!

Oh, did you know you can give a feedback about the newsletter just by answering the email? I’d love to receive that 💌

Here’s a wallpaper:

IGOR MARCOSSI

✨ I develop, I design and I'm very annoying.

Currently excited with:

👋 Hey, everyone!

I recently bought an iPad + Apple Pencil and found out that I actually enjoy drawing, I only hate the limitations of a paper (can’t undo, erase wears down the paper, can’t move parts).

If you’re wondering whether you should buy one or not, I strongly recommend you to do so. It’s pretty cool to have a big screen phone. Other than that you can buy some keyboard and use it as a laptop with a way smoother OS + you can draw on it.

Look at this guy drawing:

https://youtu.be/ckHzmP1evNU

He makes it look so fucking easy.

Wanna see one of my drawings?

Here it goes:

I loved doing it. Yeah, there’s a dark dude inside the person’s mouth holding an axe with an eye and a mouth aiming for the colossal chicken.

iPad has a mini-led screen, which is basically a normal led screen but with thousands of, guess what, mini-leds under the pixels. In theory it’s cool to have the brightness of a led screen with the deep black of amoled ones, but here’s the problem:

Yeah, it’s that noticeable. If you’re too concerned about that you can buy the 11 inch one, which doesn’t feature a mini-led screen.

Next newsletter is gonna be about Basecamp’s design guidelines.

Here’s a wallpaper:

IGOR MARCOSSI

✨ I develop, I design and I'm very annoying.

Currently excited with:

👋 Hey everyone!

We have some new subscribers this time. Hello to all :)

But yeah, the James Webb telescope is fully deployed! All of it’s mirrors and parts are unfolded and ready to go. They will be testing for some months before we see any cool picture from zillions of years ago. Each mirror is capable of moving 0.1 microns or 1/400th the thickness of a human hair. Really precise.

Some apps/services worth checking:

• Craft - a macOS/iOS/Web Notion-like app. It’s unbelievably well built.
• Linear - Linear is an issue tracking tool. I’ve been testing Linear in some projects of mine and even tho it doesn’t have native clients for any OS, their web app is awesome and smooth.
• Render - it’s basically Heroku on steroids. You can deploy nodejs apps and dbs for free in the this SaaS.

Marak, the dev behind faker and color corrupted some of their own projects as protest. In faker GitHub we can see the phrase:

What really happened with Aaron Swartz?

I recently learned about the full story behind Aaron Swartz case. It’s definitely absurd.

The story reminds me about depression, not that it has any relation to it, it just reminds me. One year ago I was in my couch, wearing nothing but an underwear and wanting to die every single second. There was no reason for that, my life was perfect. But yeah, depression sucks and if for some reason you start to feel even a bit more sad than the usual, go see a psychiatrist, please.

I think that’s it for today. A small little tech update!

Soon there will be more design related stuff so stay tuned (subscribed lol).

Thanks!

IGOR MARCOSSI

✨ I develop, I design and I'm very annoying.

Currently excited with: