It's been a while since writing on here, is this microphone still on? The past few years I've been spending my spare time on a mac app - specifically a multi-touch gesture to make using design tools like Sketch, Photoshop, and SketchUp faster. If this sounds like something up your alley go sign up at thimblemac.com first, I'll wait for you :) .

Back? Okay, let's dive into how on earth I made this thing.

Discovering Touch

I started thinking about this around the summer of 2012. I finally switched to a mac a couple years earlier and was always impressed at how the trackpad worked compared to anything else - from the glass surface to how it detected resting thumbs and palms.

Gainfully unemployed that summer, I finally had time to learn Objective-C and play with ideas. There were already apps that let you create gesture shortcuts from drawing characters or finger taps, but they felt like a burden to customize and remember. Instead I wanted to pair a single gesture with a complementing interface instead. The gesture in mind was combining a resting thumb on the trackpad with scroll to select, simple as long as there's some processing to ensure it doesn't conflict with normal scrolling or other gestures.

As far as ideas using the gesture, the first was a faster way to switch between application windows:

Between having none of my friends try my demo and feeling like it wasn't a big enough pain, I talked myself out of this idea pretty quickly. Simultaneously though, I was working on a web startup and found making tweaks to graphics to be tedious - especially when cramped at a tiny coffee shop table without my mouse. After talking to a graphic designer that saw the same frustrations, I set off on making another prototype.

Thimble's First Prototype

During the winter of 2013 I made another quick prototype - this time the gesture repurposed for selecting tools within Illustrator.

It was crude, but good enough to get interest at some small design shops and motivate myself to build a teaser site. Without much marketing beyond a reddit post, it lead to some notable tweets and nearly a couple hundred signups. Not quite enough to quit my dayjob, but enough to stay motivated to continue working on it.

I thought I could just fix a few things and 'ship it', but the app had plenty of bugs. Most scary was a seemingly unsolveable one where calling the Illustrator API would hard-crash Illustrator at random times and cause users to lose work. So I took a break for a while then restructured Thimble to support multiple apps, starting with Photoshop. Eventually it got to a point where I was ready to redesign the interface.

Redesigning Thimble

The prototype interface had a lot of issues - it only supported a single row of tools, which couldn't hold enough things to let you entirely avoid an app's toolbar. The interface's main class was an 800+ line 'massive view controller' where the icon positions followed a wacky spacing algorithm rather than a simple Gaussian function. Finally, it looked hilariously dated in a post-Yosemite macOS world, where 'vibrancy' (i.e. blurred transparency) started overtaking greys and gradients. So it was time to scrap it and start anew. I started by plotting gaussian equations in a jupyter python notebook, then migrated to coding the real interface with a separate 'designer' build.

Once I got a decent outline of the new interface figured out, I started diving into making the selection mechanism feel more intuitive.

The tool selection 'blob':

Some of the complaints with the first prototype was that there needed to be some better indication when selecting items. At the time the only indication was the selection text change. I initially played with some simple ideas like alternating a background color but it didn't feel right. Inspired a bit by the Google's material design, I came up with an amorphous blob stretching and jumping to the selected item. This involved a bit of learning with CAShapeLayer in terms of preserving the point order between different change directions, but am happy with the result.

The column selector:

Having a column selector at first seemed like a simple affair, just have a long trapezoid-ish object stretch and move like the selector with horizontal movement. But things didn't feel right without having rounded corners on the column selector. To do this right though, the corners on the selector have to move both along the curve of the row selector and the bottom edge curve of the whole interface. To interactively trace along curves without learning bezier math, I came up with a hack called CGPathQuery that does work on a hidden graphics context to find points along the curve.

The column hidden icon indicator:

Maybe I went too far, but one little thing that bothered me was not having some visual indicator to show when icons were hidden after scrolling up a column. So I added some subtle dot indicators that, through CGPathQuery, traverse along the top edge when scrolling horizontally.

Filler Dots

The little grey dots aren't there to indicate missing icons, they're there just for aesthetic reasons. Without them the interface doesn't quite hold it's form together - especially when scrolling on the first or last column.

Scroll direction locking between 'gesture pauses'

I didn't want some type of freeform scroll akin to the Apple Watch homescreen, which meant I needed a way to 'lock' onto either the horizontal or vertical scroll direction. Basically when the gesture starts (or after a pause), the scrolling direction locks to whatever direction you start scrolling in until the gesture pauses or ends. The other thing that happens upon a gesture pause is that the selected tool gets recentered.

Learning Thimble (a.k.a. The First Run User Experience)

From watching people use Thimble, it's proven to be a gesture that seems really non-obvious at first, but with a bit of hand-holding and practice it starts to make sense. But I can't personally help every user. So to help users practice I wrote a small wizard that pops-up on the first run and gives the user a chance to practice the gesture first. The wizard also takes care of some other housekeeping from guiding the user to enable accessibility permissions to scanning for supported apps. The underlying navigation code of the wizard is available here.

Coding it all together

I followed a Model-View-ViewModel structure when redoing the interface - where I usually had ViewModel files containing state then the ViewController/View files containing the stateless rendering functions. This enabled me to have tests written against some of the UI math contained in viewmodels, and have better organization for different aspects driven by a shared viewmodel. I also used ReactiveCocoa to try expressing the gesture events through interface changes as signals over time. More specifics on my ReactiveCocoa usage is in the 'lessons learned' part of my xcoders talk.

I regret not rewriting the interface in Swift, but at the time Swift 2 wasn't out yet and ReactiveCocoa Swift support was experimental. Plus, my mind was burdened more with wrapping itself around the reactive paradigms and seeing something work. There's still a ton of other things that I'm not going to bother diving into, but for a fun run-on sentence some of the other work involves hiding (and unhiding) the mouse, changing the render setup when switching between non-retina and retina displays, sniffing packets under wireshark to find a bug in the Photoshop Server sample code, hacks to ensure menu selection via accessibility api works correctly, learning things from iOS Core Animation - Advanced Techniques to make everything work at 60fps, yadda yadda yadda...

What's next?

This week, I'm shipping the beta to a small group of testers. As long as there's no explosions there will be a wider beta release soon. I definately have plenty of concerns with whether there's still interest in Thimble due to my own lack of marketing the product. Furthermore the rumor that the new macbook keyboards will have an top row on-screen display for QuickType and app/context-specific buttons seems highly plausible. Right now though, Thimble's still something I find myself using, and hopefully others want it too. If you've made it this far and haven't signed up yet, well sign up right here.

Extra Bits

I'm frankly embarrassed at how long Thimble took to develop, but it was a spare time sideproject. There were plenty of times where I got demotivated and either took a break or started tinkering with other projects. There were also times where I simply got too busy with my dayjob, but it was really hard to justify Thimble as a full-time startup or as some type of crowdfunded affair. There's arguably some areas where I could've reduced scope such as supporting less applications, or not having a preferences backend. I've never spent this long on a personal project in my life though, so I'm surprised development made it this far. During my most productive periods, my routine was an act of working for the dayjob (remotely) in the morning and afternoon, a context switch of working out, then walking to the library, coffee shop, or NSCoderNight to work.

A few months ago I locked myself out for the second time in a year, and my 'ripstop nylon' wallet was well, ripping apart after five years. Looking at a smorgasbord of crowdfunded 'minimalist'-themed wallets and various keychain alternatives, I stumbled upon one solution that's worked for me and others have asked about.

The Wallet

The wallet I ended up switching to is called the AJ-Wallet, which stood out for having a solid aluminum frame, a foldaround 'comb' for holding cash, and with a trip to the hardware store a way to hold keys.

Anyways, before jumping into the key modification, let's look into a few aspects of the wallet.

Holding Cash

The metal billfold is a neat idea and is originally what drove me to buy the wallet, but feels like a balancing act -- carry too much and the cash becomes too hard to stuff it in-between the metal 'comb', carry too little and cash can fall out. Ideally the comb would have some type of spring loaded aspect to it to help 'grip' the cash, or there could be a latch on the underside to lock it in place.

Without this, loading cash feels a bit too cumbersome, and when shopping I've found myself slipping cash straight into my pocket to load in later.

This wallet can't hold change, but in theory one could replace side with a pouch or rubber material to hold a few coins in place. Hopefully arcade machines & laundry machines will be using [insert new-age bitcoin-ish currency here] soon.

Holding Cards

I can't complain much about how this holds cards. It works well enough, despite being limited to just around seven cards.

Opening Bottles

Yep, it does that too. I'll spare you a picture since you should be getting beer from a tap.

And it can hold Keys!

This thought occurred a day after the lockout, and I immediately biked to the hardware store to try things out. To modify the wallet, you'll need the following:

• An M .25 machine screw - thats point two five.If you have no idea what I just said call a local hardware store or hobby shop, they should have them in stock. Length varies depending on the number of keys you plan to hold, but mine's about 20mm to hold 3 keys.
• Two M .25 nuts - these will be tightened against each other in a "jam nut" configuration
• A few washers to put between the keys and the wallet frame - these should be larger than the bolt size since the keys will have wider openings - I used a mix of M .3 and M .4 washers.
• A hex driver toolset to remove the original bolt (which needs two hex drivers of the same size), and tighten in the new one.
• A small wrench to tighten the M .25 nuts.

For the wrench, I used a sweet little thing called the engineer pocket wrench, and while it may seem odd to blow nearly 30 bucks on a tiny wrench, it's managed to serve many uses for bicycle maintenance (notably a wheel spanner wrench), and for electronics work.

Also, when loading the keys, play around with different configurations. The pictures show one key on the backside, but the way I now use the wallet is with all three keys on the frontside, which has felt more 'out-of-the-way' when dealing with removing cash. They key shapes themselves will also influence ordering - for instance below is a key with a large square head that interferes with the other bolt on the wallet, so it has to be placed further out.

Usability tradeoffs

Anything that tries to combine functions and save space means tradeoffs. Beyond the earlier issues mentioned Here they are:

1. Living with metal protrusions - Yeah, the wallet has a metal latch that produces out, and my key hack adds another metal protrusion. I don't notice it as long as I put it in my pocket the right way, but yes it's annoying when I occasionally forget. On the plus side though, I almost never have to deal with a floating keychain poking me again.
   

2. It's heavier than a normal wallet - Yep, it's heavier, but there's plenty of other fancy key holder things that involve metal and probably add weight too.

3. What about the car keys? I don't drive much these days and am trying to keep it that way, so keeping a separate hard-to-find keychain has been a nice environmental hack. The other solutions don't seem to answer that question either.

NOTE: I intentionally didn't link to where to buy one now. While I'm happy with the wallet, the kickstarter comments reveal some shadiness from the maker. I'll also note that the wallet was shipped from Malaysia and doesn't say 'Made in UK' as the original campaign's photos hinted at. This said, I'd love to see someone improve on this wallet in regards to loading cash and holding keys and launch yet-another crowdfunded wallet campaign. I'd do it myself but I'm too busy with my own projects at the moment.

2012 was a rollercoaster. It involved getting laid off, quitting a startup, and generally feeling burned-out from several months of working hard. So in November 2012, I packed up my things in Austin and moved to Tahoe for the season.

I'm writing this to help anyone else who finds themselves in a similar situation, needs a break from city living, or just loves snow.

For a privileged many, our array of choices in life are so much greater than the narrow set we currently perceive.
- David Heinemeir Hansson

Preparing - getting rid of things.

I'll keep this short, but these are the typical reasons I've seen people not move:

• Collections - CDs/DVDs/Bookshelves
  
  If you haven’t already, digitize and ditch physical media. For books specifically, you have three routes - selling it, sending them to a scanning service, or scanning it yourself by cutting off the Bindings and using either an office scanner (what I did) or a ScanSnap.

• All the other things
  
  Again, this requires either growing a selling muscle, or having some home base to leave things at. Craigslist and ebay have been my friends, and there's amazon fulfillment which is even more effective if you're short on time. Again, there's always the option of finding a small storage space for the things you just can't get rid of.

• Pets/Significant Others/Kids
  You've got me here. I'm a single guy who's been avoiding all of these things for now, but have met folks that moved out with their significant others and pets for the season, it just meant that they spent a little more renting a house instead of a pet-restricted condo. Alternatively, who says you have to stay the whole season? There's plenty of families (especially when their kids aren't in school yet) that just get a place for a month - enough time to get the powderlust out of your system.

Despite all this ruthless good-riddance, I still cheat and leave a few things with friends and relatives. And that's okay. You'll always have stuff that just happens to have emotional value that you just can't get rid of. You shouldn't have to become some puritanical 100-things-only minimalist.

Packing the essentials

Assuming you move into a furnished place, this is everything you need to throw into your car to move to a small ski-village area.

• A Desk & Stool - I recommend a small drafting desk along since most furnished apartments won't have much of a home office setup. Pair it with an office stool (such as the swopper or super-compressible ergoergo ) because they're supposedly better for your back, and easily fit in a car.
  
  If you're moving into a really tiny bootstrapper studio, you can use a 39" 4K display in the living room to double as both a monitor/desk and television.

• A rice cooker... - with some type of timer and a steamer basket.
  
  This is for healthy dinners ready right when you get back from snowboarding so you can get back to work, without the cost/oddities of soylent, tv dinners, or going to pricey mountain restaurants. There's fancy ones from zojirushi & panasonic, but you can getaway with a cheap one using duct tape and a timed outlet. The late Roger Ebert has an amazing guide on this topic, along with priceonomics' guide .

• The rest - You need the typical modicum of cold weather clothing, including a hoodie, jacket, insulation layer, some bedding, aeropress, and whatever gear you ride on. Keep in mind electricity can go out a couple times during storms and risk of road closures, so always have some hand warmers and pantry food around.

Ready? Okay, let's figure out where to go.

Picking a Ski Town

This is going to boil down to a few factors:

• Weather - I vaguely recall looking for long-term snow forecasts / farmers almanacs, but at the end of the day the riskiest resorts in terms of lacking snow tend to be the ones in California.

• Proximity to lift - I recommend being within walking distance to a lift so you can take an hour or two in the afternoon out without impacting your work.

• Proximity to a city/airport - This is going to depend highly on your situation, but it's worth keeping in mind that most ski towns are a long away from major airports or major cities. I found myself queuing up several errands for the 2-3 times I drove to a larger town, and making the most out of using Amazon Prime's 2-day shipping.

• Nightlife - this depends on your situation, I didn't care much about nightlife, due to having day-job work and side-projects, but it's nice to have when friends come to visit.

• How much you can afford - There's two factors in this - the cost of renting a place, and the price of your season pass. There's a surprising price spread in the season pass, ranging from the Vail Resorts 'epic pass' costing $400-800, to places like Telluride and Jackson Hole costing nearly $2000. Similarly, with rents it can vary depending on the location - I paid $800/month for a 1-bedroom, but places near nicer resorts can cost much more.

The places I recommend in the US:

Optimizing for cost & proximity to lifts, here's my picks:

1) South Lake Tahoe & North Lake Tahoe - This is the most bang for your buck, and where I ended up staying. Here's why:

• Reasonable season pass prices ($400-800).
• While I'm not against income tax, you can avoid California’s 9-10% state income tax if you stay on the Nevada side, and if you live in the Summit Village neighborhood like I did, you're within walking distance to a less crowded lift at Heavenly. Rent there ranged from $600 for a studio to $1200 for a 2br condo, both offering niceities like a neighborhood hot tub to even a sauna.
• Only three hours from the Bay Area, this was useful in getting out to demo the prototypes of Thimble to meetup groups and design shops.
• Decent nightlife, notably in South Lake Tahoe due to Nevada casinos. Not what I care about, and I never gambled more than a few quarters on Sigma Derby at Montbleu, but it's there in case you get bored.

This said, Tahoe is risky in terms of getting actual snowfall. I lucked out during the 2012/2013 season where there was a decent amount of snowfall to keep lifts open through the season. In the 2011/2012 season things weren't as great, and the 2013/2014 snow has been so scant that the stagecoach lift I lived next to delayed opening by over a month. Because of this, landlords will ask if you're already employed / have money saved, because they've seen seasonal tenants not find local work during a bad season. One option to mitigate this risk is live near Alpine Meadows, where cloud seeding is done (Nevada did this until 2009)

2) Aspen - Another great place with a good village feel. Pricier rent ($1200-1600) but has decent nightlife and a mountain that usually has great snow. Haven't personally been there in decades though.

3) Park City, Utah - I've only driven through Park City to go see Snowbird, but it felt like one of the densest communities I've seen built so close to the mountains. Found locals that have designed their lives to work hard and still make it to the mountains during the week. You should check this area out at least once to feel how light the snow is. My only warnings are the air quality outside of the mountains due to temperature inversions, and the mountains didn't feel as hair-raising as places in Colorado or Wyoming.

4) Telluride / Mountain Village - Telluride's expensive, considering the season passes are up there close to $2000 and the few seasonal rentals there start at $1200/mo and quickly go up. But either village has a gondola that takes you straight to the slopes.

5) Breckenridge - Also a decent place surrounded by a larger village, although it's colder (known as Breckenfridge) and can get crowded.

Honorable mentions:

• Whistler, Canada - Great snow along with nightlife and one of the best village atmospheres. I'd go here if I had time to figure out the legalities of working in Canada. The bigger problem is that due to it's northern latitude, there's little daytime in the early season and all lifts are closed by 3pm.
• Jackson Hole, Wyoming - amazing mountains - generally you either live in Teton Village where the resort is, or the town of Jackson which is a 25 minute free bus ride away. Because of how exclusive and remote things are out here, food is expensive out here, and Teton Village itself is merely condos/hotels, fancy restaurants that close too early, and the Mangy Moose bar. That said, I met people that moved their families and work to Teton Village for a month to take a comfortable break from city life.
• Sun Valley, Idaho - Haven't been, expensive, but have only heard good things about it.
  

Not-gonna-mentions:

I'm not going to mention Keystone since the closest reasonably-priced rentals are a long walk from the lifts, nor Arapahoe Basin which is a great place but requires driving, nor Vail where I couldn't find seasonal rentals within walking distance to the lifts. Sorry, this is my personal dislike towards driving. Also, I haven't been to Taos, New Mexico in ages, but from memory most living arrangements there require driving.

Finding a place

This is probably one of the more stressful parts. My personal experience involved surfing craigslist the 6 weeks before the move, calling and emailing people left and right. Then I just drove out to Tahoe just after thanksgiving,stayed in cheap motels for a week, and emailed more craigslist posts telling them I can give pay them and move in immediately.

If I had to do it again, I'd skip craigslist and call real estate agents months in advance, seeing what will soon be available from the pool of retirees using their condos as summer homes. Furthermore, I recommend finding a neighborhood with condos since they take care of all the snow-blowing equipment,etc. Finally, realize that some places may look down the street from the city center, but are actually up a mountain pass! Remember to check the terrain map if you're trying to avoid driving down a mountain pass just to check your mail (mail delivery does not occur in Tahoe Village, you get a post office box).

Behavioral benefits

• You’re in a fixed time environment. Unlike 24-hour gyms, the mountain’s only open from 9am to 4pm. This motivated me to wake up usually by 7am to start work, work solid until about 1pm, schedule the rice cooker, then hit the slopes until they close. Then you get home refreshed and with dinner ready, and get back to work.

• Being around stuff you like to do on a fixed time helps a lot with organizing your day. You’re framing your day less around how to get work done, more around how to make the most of of a day instead.

• Snowboarding isn’t the healthiest exercise, and gets worse if you buy the expensive not-so-healthy food they sell on the mountain. Thankfully when the lift is close to home, you never think about eating on the mountain unless you're with friends. To give some real data, (although weight is just one mediocre measure), I went from about 162-165 lbs at the start of the season to less than 153 lbs by the end.

Finding people and escaping back to concrete jungles

Running away to some new remote village is a bit weird at first, but unless you're going to some obscure place, you're not the only geek into living on mountains. There's enough people to warrant starting a meetup group like the coworking group in Tahoe. You'll also just find yourself inevitably talking to folks on the lift, on the weekdays especially there's a healthy mix of folks from business owners, doctors, students, or just general ski bums up for chatting.

Finally, places like Park City, Tahoe, Whistler, and Breckenridge are only 2-3 hours away from a major city. Park City's famous for being able to get you from flying into Salt Lake City to getting on the slopes within an hour, and South Lake Tahoe is less than an hour from Reno which is large enough to get errands done.

Conclusions

After living in a resort town then moving to a major city, I'll admit I miss it to an extent. There's something nice about only hearing mountain winds at night instead of cars, seeing homes free of the suburban-pressured concept of a well-kept yet water-wasting lawn.

Overall, I hope this guide helps you if you have the itch, and have the position to go out there, even if it's just for a month.

Special thanks to the friends (you know who you are) I met while living out there, and those that came to visit.

Tahoe-specific footnotes

• If driving north to Tahoe via Nevada, watch out for the villages along the way with sudden 25mph speed limit changes. They’re typical speed trap towns.
• Montbleu tends to be the casino to go to for better nightlife, and to gamble away quarters on some of the last standing Sigma Derby machines.
• Cave Rock is worth checking out on a sunny day.
• My biased pick of tahoe-area resorts (as a snowboarder) is as follows: Kirkwood, Heavenly, then everything else. Kirkwood is a drive but has great traverses and a more local feel, along with not—so-resort-priced food down at 7800 bar. Heavenly is despised by folks as the most touristy, but I found Northstar to be even worse. Heavenly has some great pockets on the Nevada side if you want to get away from the crowds. I didn’t get time to really try out the other places, but Squaw/Alpine seem like the next best area to check out.
• You probably don’t need special winter tires, or chains if you have an all-wheel-drive car. There’s plenty of snowplows going through the main streets, even like Kingsbury Grade since they’re state roads.
• Internet - you’ll just have to pay out the nose for this, sorry. In the area I stayed, there were only two choices - Frontier (DSL) or Charter (reasonably priced, but didn’t support all of Summit Village ). Tethering off your phone might be hard since the cell towers up the mountain won’t necessarily have LTE/3G data speeds.

Even more footnotes

Just some cool people I discovered living in the mountains:
- Chuck moore (inventor of the Forth language / greenarrays) lived around tahoe for many years up in Incline Village.
- Seth Brown lives up in the mountains of New Hampshire and made his own weather station, and did an amazing analysis of looking for resorts with the hardest terrain.

- The blog platform (silvrback) this post is on at the time of writing is made by Damian Sowers, who's written about living in Tahoe