I just realized something devastating

Hi,

How's it going? Tomorrow, I'm heading to New York to meet up with my team at Summer Health. We'll be doing some in-person activities for a couple of days. Even though working from home is fantastic and I wouldn't give it up for anything, it's always nice to spend some quality time with my colleagues, chatting about both work stuff and personal things.

This email was (supposed) to re-launch "User Experiences that Matter", my book that first came out 9 years ago. Can you believe it's been 9 years!? Over the past month, I've been working with my editor to add 16 new chapters, based on blog posts from the last decade. Just the other week, I was outside reading through all of it and had a bit of an epiphany.

It’s not good enough.

😬

Okay, that's not entirely true. I think the book is good, and since half of it is the original content, at least that part is solid, right? Despite our efforts to make everything flow seamlessly, it feels off to release a book written over such a long span of time. I suppose it highlights just how much I've grown as a designer over the years.

As I was reading through everything, two questions came to mind:

1. Who is this book for? I couldn't confidently answer that, which is obviously a red flag.
2. Would I feel comfortable charging money for this book? In its current form, no. This means I'll need to rethink the distribution.

So, that's a quick update on the book. Stay tuned for more updates!

Raycast

I used to play around with Raycast a lot about a year ago, but then it just became my Spotlight replacement and not much more. But that has changed! I've been using it more and more lately, to the point where I can't imagine using my computer without it. I even find myself constantly missing it on my phone.

Some of the day-to-day use cases:

• Emoji picker - Ok, maybe it’s silly to lead with this but considering how poor the native emoji picker is, their’s is so much better!
• AI Chat - It’s really convenient to have easy access to not just ChatGPT but any LLM to ask things. I use it to populate designs with content - no more lorem ipsum - and I use it to ask random questions.
• Inspect website - While browsing the web, I can trigger a command to tell what any website is using including what fonts.
• Test internet speed - When working outside, it’s nice to see that the wifi is still holding up and that my network is ready for my next Zoom call.
• I’ve used Paste for years only to rely solely on Raycast’s unlimited clipboard history.
• I trigger cmd+f from anywhere to bring up Figma’s “Search file” to open any file.
• I have short snippets for everything I keep typing in over and over.
• I hit cmd+space and if I have a call in the next 5 minutes, it places the zoom link at the very top of the list.

These are just a handfull of things I use on a daily basis and I can’t wait to learn more - and to hear how you’re using it! Try Raycast!

Want more use cases? I really enjoyed this video with Ridd from Divecast talking about his setup!

Figma config

By now, many of you probably know that Figma just had their annual conference. AI was the hot topic, especially its impact on design tools. But honestly, I'm just excited about one thing: automatic layer renaming!

I really, really, enjoyed Cam’s talk “The broken promises of design systems”.

Let me know what’s on your mind!

Anton