Alexander Obenauer

The future of personal computing

How might the future of personal computing better serve people’s lives?

In my current work, I’m exploring new and renewed ideas for how personal computing can better serve people’s lives — expanding opportunity, agency, curiosity, and creativity.

Lab Notes

Documenting my experiments as I explore the operating system of the future, I publish Lab Notes to “work with the lab door open,” inviting others’ thoughts along the way.

Open the Lab Notes

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The Potential Merits of an Itemized OS

An exploration of what an itemized operating system could mean for people and personal computing in general.

Read the Article

Pub. June 6, 2021 34 min. read 34 min. read →

Projects

WonderOS is an ongoing research project creating experimental new environments for personal computing.

Go to WonderOS.org

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Tag Navigator is a plugin for Obsidian that demonstrates an idea from one lab note.

More about Tag Navigator

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Reimagining email

My career began with reimagining email and finding ways to build that vision on top of the existing email protocols.

Ten Years of Designing Mail Pilot and Thinking About Email

A talk on a decade’s worth of product design decisions.

Watch the talk

Available soon →

Available soon

Products

Mail Pilot is an email client that introduced new perspectives and useful features to email in 2012, such as reminders, which was later adopted by other apps as “snooze”. After a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, Mail Pilot went on to become the #1 paid app in the Mac App Store at launch. It is available today as a native app for macOS, iPadOS, and iOS.

Throttle is a service that introduced sender-specific addresses in 2015 to give email receivers fine-grained oversight and control over the transactional and bulk email headed their way, and is often turned to as a home away from the inbox for less urgent email.

2013 · With two days’ notice to put together graphics for a feature of our first iOS launch in 2013, I quickly made ~80 variations, then text them to my friends to help pick which to give Apple.

I’m an independent researcher; my work is graciously made possible thanks to funding from the community.

Become a supporting member to receive all the member exclusives: the Member Magazine, member-exclusive demos, and other perks.

Most importantly, supporters help make more of this work happen — most of which is published for members and non-members alike.

If you’d like to make a bigger contribution to support my work, get in touch — I might have the right project for you to sponsor.

Go to the member portal — Signed-in members will have access to the links within; others can preview.

Member Magazine Issue 2: Directions

Member download →

Letter to the Members / Towards Symbiosis in Personal Computing / Experimental Prototype Computer of Tomorrow / My personal stack of home brewed software / Challenges in Research

Issue 2: Directions

Published: Summer 2022

Length: 5,650 words

Member Magazine Issue 1: Foundations

Member download →

Letter to the Members / Introduction to the Member Magazine / Personal computers are amazing / Thinking Out Loud / Making things better / An item-centric perspective on personal computing / The future of personal computing

Issue 1: Foundations

Published: Winter 2022

Length: 9,352 words

Newsletter

My newsletter is sent out every Saturday that I have something new to share, like Lab Notes or other projects.

You can subscribe with email or RSS.

Dynamic Island and other ways OSs become ours · New ideas for interfaces in the itemized OS · Interface ideas for the OS of the future · What are the fundamentals with which personal computing is done? · The future of personal computing software · The future of personal computing hardware · Taking itemized systems online · All archives »