Alexander Obenauer

How might the interfaces we think with better serve people’s daily 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.

Getting started

Latest

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

Experiments

OLLOS explores interacting with items across the dimension of time.

Published for members.

Tag Navigator explores views that organize items by their cross references.

Published in lab notes and open sourced on GitHub.

My experiments are “brain breakers” — meant to challenge our assumptions about how software “should” work, to help us think in new ways.

Other projects

Songs I’m Made Of

A radio-style show with songwriters, where we discuss and play their songs and the ones that inspired them.

Simple Habits

A simple habit tracker with widgets for iPhone. You can read my Twitter thread for more context.

Want to purchase this project? Get in touch.

1997.chat

A faithful remake of AOL Instant Messenger — the sounds, away messages, animated buddy icons, and all — made available during 2020’s early lockdowns to connect the world's socially isolated.

You can read my article or the Nylon article for more context.

Acquired by a new owner in 2021.

Products from earlier phases of my career, some of which endure: Mail Pilot is an email client that introduced lots of new ideas to email over a decade ago, which have since become common in most email apps. Similarly, Throttle is a service that is the home for emails which shouldn't be in your inbox, using unique email addresses per sender. Finally, Symphonies is an app that lets you organize your tasks by date.

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