Since July, I’ve been working on a device whose aim it is to provide one essential feature of our smartphones (async communication), without all of the distraction. I have a working prototype, yay! And using it, I felt how it helped me retain uninterrupted flow of thoughts.

It makes me very motivated to keep working on this. It’s sad to think how rare it has become to experience a mind that’s not craving random pieces of external information all the time. Our continuous desire for a device to tell us what to think about next is strange and exhausting!

We’ve grown tired of smartphones. But what could be a new direction for personal tech? I wrote about what using an iPod taught me: our interactions should be single-purpose and intentional.

In the same vein, I created a communication app called pager that allows you to send one message to someone’s menu bar. I’ve been using it for a few months with a person I’m seeing, and it really gives you this feeling of putting a note in the lunch-box of a loved one.

Spending time in Barcelona the past few months made me realize there is just no good cultural event calendar, so I built one at cartelita.co! It’s strongly inspired by the great jazzin.amsterdam.