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One year of Flyleaf

Exactly one year ago, I launched the first version of Flyleaf on the iOS and Mac App Store. I built Flyleaf because I wanted a read-later app that offers book-like pagination that isn’t just an afterthought and that also works great on macOS. Back then, I wrote a short blog…

Flyleaf Update 2.2

Free Download for iPhone, iPad and Mac While preparing the just-released 2.2.2 update for Flyleaf, my read-later app for iOS and macOS, I was reminded that I didn’t write anything here about any of the 2.2 patches. So let’s do that now. Flyleaf 2.2.0 The main reason I pushed out…

My Neighbor Totoro

This painting is a study of that famous scene from the fantastic Studio Ghibli film “My Neighbor Totoro”. Since the original is itself a kind of painting, not much could go wrong here.
2024

Nordseestrand #1

I managed to paint another painting in between Flyleaf releases! This one is based on a photo from a recent vacation to the dutch north see. Callantsoog, to be exact. The drawing is a little wonky, but the values and colors are quite successful, I think. And I’m very happy…

Flyleaf Update 2.1

Hot off the presses, today I pushed the button to release Flyleaf 2.1. This release gave me a lot of headaches, mostly caused by haphazard changes and bugs introduced by Apple with iOS 18 and macOS 15. With 2.1, I think I am at a point where Flyleaf is as…

Flyleaf Update 2.0

Today I finally published the big Flyleaf 2.0 update! Pretty much every part of the app has been touched in some way, so there is lots of new stuff. Flyleaf is my “read-later” app that displays saved articles from the web in a meticulously designed reading view, without popups, ads…

Schlendern in Stralsund

I painted this picture mostly to get out of a multi-month rut where I did not paint anything. It’s a little scene of the old town in Stralsund in northern Germany – another holiday photo turned into a painting. What inspired me about the scene were the interesting color contrasts…

Apptisan #015: Flyleaf

I was graciously invited to write about my read-it-later app Flyleaf on Apptisan, a chinese newsletter about indie software: I originally studied theology at university in Germany. But I shifted to software development when I figured out that this is a more reliable way to feed a family. By day,…

Flyleaf Update 1.1

The 1.1 update of my read-later app Flyleaf is now live on the iOS and macOS AppStore. It includes some nice quality-of-life improvements, so make sure to grab it! New Stuff Add PDFs to parse the contents and show them in the Flyleaf reading view An “unread article count” badge…

Creativerly: Read articles like books – with Flyleaf

Thanks to Philipp Temmel at creativerly for writing up this thorough deep-dive on my new app Flyleaf. It’s a very generous summary of the feature set of the initial version of Flyleaf: Flyleaf is a fully native read-it-later app for iPhone, iPad, and macOS, that gives you the possibility to…

MacGeneration: Une nouvelle app de lecture différée affichant les articles en colonnes

I was very happy to learn hat the first media appearance of my new app Flyleaf was in the french publication MacGeneration, in a short review by Félix Cattafesta. I appreciate that it’s an honest review which also points out some issues. But at the same time they also understood…

Why I built my own read-later app

The first iOS device I ever owned was an iPod touch, 2. Generation. I absolutely loved that thing. The first ever app I remember buying with it was “Instapaper” by indie developer Marco Arment. Instapaper was an app for saving interesting web pages to read later when offline. Even back…

Introducing Flyleaf, a “read later” app for iOS and macOS

I built a new app. I’s called Flyleaf, and it’s a “read later” app for iPhone, iPad and macOS. You can learn more on the Flyleaf website. The app is currently in open beta and I would love for you to check it out and give me feedback. The reception…
2023

Saint-Roman-de-Malegarde #2

Another painting of the evening light in little French town Saint-Roman-de-Malegarde. I started painting this picture on location en plein air, but I had to make some adjustments back home to make it presentable.

An der Eygues

I painted this one “en plein air” on location in Saint-Roman-de-Malegarde, France, while cooling my feet in the river.

Karl-Heine-Kanal #1

I took the reference photo for this painting on the Karl-Heine-Kanal in Leipzig-Neulindenau. A very pretty corner of a beautiful town.

Saint-Roman-de-Malegarde #1

A vacation photo served as reference for this photo. Small towns in the south of France are made for painting them. This is actually not my first painting of Saint-Roman-de-Malegarde, I previously painted a different corner of that town. It was interesting to play around with the contrast between dark…

Fabienne

This portrait is of the character Fabienne as played by Maria de Medeiros in the movie classic Pulp Fiction.

Denkendes Kind

Katze im Schnee (Rivo Study)

This is a study of “Cat in the snow” by Lena Rivo.

Red One Standing By

This painting is obviously inspired by Star Wars. I used this lovely render by GrahamTG as a reference. Perhaps unexpectedly, the most difficult part of this painting was not the two X-Wings, but the clouds in the background. I had to find a balance between believability and abstraction. You can…

Driftless Area #2 (Musil study)

I first painted a study of this painting by Jim Musil pretty much exactly two years ago. Back then I had only been painting for a couple of months and I was amazed that I could at all produce output that had at least a passing resemblance to my reference.…

Mutter mit Kind

Small study of a mother caressing her child. The painting style is intentionally gestural and vague. Hands are indeed difficult to paint.
2022

Lilienstein im Herbst

This is another vacation photo turned into a small painting. It depicts the view of the Lilienstein as seen from Königstein in Saxon Switzerland. I took a long break between starting and finishing this piece, because I was not sure I would be able to turn the reference photo into…

Notre Dame (Chamberlain study)

This painting is a small study of a plein air painting by San-Francisco-based painter Michael Chamberlain. The original painting can be seen (as it’s being painted) in this vlog on YouTube.

Greetings from France

Every now and then, I get contacted by someone who wants to use my old Star Wars Posters for some kind of cool project. I like that, to have created something that people find cool and useful. Last time, a guy from Siberia literally papered their wall with one of…

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw

This painting is a “Master Study” of John Singer Sargent’s “Lady Agnew of Lochnaw”. The goal was to copy the original as faithfully as possible. I chose to only paint a section of the larger original in order to have more room for details in my smaller size. It was…

Feld in Wernershausen #3

This is an attempt at a larger version of Feld in Wernershausen #2. Although it is nice to have more room for details, some of the spontaneity of the original miniature painting is unfortunately lost.

Richard Starkey

A small portrait of Sir Richard Starkey, a.k.a. Ringo Starr from The Beatles. I used this photograph as a reference. Here is an animation visualising my painting process:

Feld in Wernershausen #2

I painted this pair of cute miniature scenes on a wooden Jenga brick as part of a wedding gift. I was inspired by the beautiful post-harvest scenery of the Werratal in the Bavarian Eichsfeld. It was an interesting excercise to paint on a surface that small. It forces you to…

Feld in Wernershausen #1

I painted this pair of cute miniature scenes on a wooden Jenga brick as part of a wedding gift. I was inspired by the beautiful post-harvest scenery of the Werratal in the Bavarian Eichsfeld. It was an interesting excercise to paint on a surface that small. It forces you to…

Mädchen und Tränendes Herz

Work-in-progress animation:

Stillleben mit Sonnenblumen und Klebstofffläschchen

Work-in-progress animation:

Lone Wolf & Cub

Inspired by the Star Wars The Mandalorian TV series. Work-in-progress animation:

Boote am Pier

Wismar is a cozy little town on the Baltic Sea with a pretty old town. And at the pier you can eat lots of fish sandwiches and watch ships. Work-in-progress animation:

Pont de Nyons

The reference photo for this quick study was taken from below the Pont de Nyons, a medieval bridge in the south of france. The river below was a lovely spot for cooling off in the summer heat.

Strandspaziergang

Work-in-progress animation:

Skizze Ostseestrand

This little sketch is my first painting done directly on the beach en plein air. Despite the burning sun, strong wind, and thousands of annoying bugs and flies, the subject is quite well taken.

Selbstportrait #1

Work-in-progress animation:

Zypresse in Südfrankreich

Quick study of a holiday photo of a small town in the south of france.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard

Starfleet captain Jean-Luc Picard, as portrayed by wonderful actor Patrick Steward, is probably one of my earliest childhood heroes. Even today, I admire his principled style of leadership. Here is a little animation of my painting process. I started out with a drawing that was way off, forcing me to…

Cheeseburger

A quick “still life” of a beautiful (to me) cheeseburger. I like that this painting really conveys the essence of the subject and triggers an instant emotional reaction (positive or negative) in the viewer. Based on this photo by Ilya Mashkov.

Mäander

Quick study of a undulating river flowing through Norway. Reference for this painting was a drone photo shot by Norwegian Photographer Ruben Soltvedt.

Unter den Argonath

The “Argonath”, or “Pillars of Kings” are a great monument of the old Gondorian kingdom in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional world of Middle-Earth. This painting is of a scene in the “The Fellowship of the Ring” movie adaptation in which the fellowship guides their small elven boats over the Anduin river…

Lago Di Garda (Foggia study)

This is a study of a painting of Lake Garda by italian Painter Mario Moretti Foggia. This was my largest painting yet. To document this relatively sizeable project I captured a couple of work-in-progress images which I managed to combine into the following animation:

Blick auf den Rathausturm von Wolfratshausen

This is a quick small painting of a postcard motif I was given by a colleague as a painting challenge. It depicts a view of the tower of the city hall of the Bavarian town Wolfratshausen similar to this photo.
2021

Stillleben-Studie (Claesz study)

The original painting I used as a reference is “Stillleben mit Totenkopf, Folianten, Taschenuhr und erloschener Öllampe” by Pieter Claesz from 1630.

Alpenlandschaft im Salzburger Land

Another vacation photo I turned into a painting. I had to make a lot of changes to this originally completely overcast scene. I also invented the little path leading into the woods which serves nicely to guide the viewer’s eye into the painting.

Ponta de São Lourenço

This painting is based on a photo by my wonderful sister.

Blick von der Nürnberger Maxbrücke

On the left is the “Wasserturm”, on the right the “Henkerturm”.

China Cove (Youngquist study)

This is a painting of China Cove, a famous beach in California. I admittedly only discovered that fact after I finished painting it. I believe it is a study after Romona Youngquist. I used this Instagram post as a reference, which I think I captured quite faithfully at my smaller…

Bremsdorfer Mühle

I found this little old waterwheel I stumbled upon during a vacation so charming that I just had to paint it. It is the “Bremsdorfer Mühle” in the “Brandenburger Schlaubetal”.

Landschaft in der Nähe von Meißen

I took the reference photo for this painting out of a moving train.

Breath of the Wild

Gamers will recognize this image instantly. It’s the key art of the Nintendo video game Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The most interesting thing about this painting is the way the sky and midground evoke a lot of stuff happening with only a couple of brushstrokes.

Big Ship (Dawson study)

I always wanted a big ship painting, so I decided to make my own. The effect of light shining on and glowing through the sails was hard to get right. I greatly enjoyed watching it all come together when painting in all the little ropes at the end. The (much…

Day 3 – Land

This was my first attempt at layering sections of landscape with atmospheric perspective. The effect turned out quite nicely. The pebbles in the foreground were a lot of work, but it was worth painting the individual rocks to get a good amount of detail in the foreground. Part of a…

Mountain Stream (Hill study)

This painting went through so many renditions! Because I painted it on a relatively large canvas, I was motivated to try again and again until I could make it work. I really struggled with achieving a realistic perspective on the river. But it was a lot of fun to paint…

Detail einer Altstadt im Süden Frankreichs

I spent so much time on this painting! It is a pretty faithful rendition of a photograph of my son I took during a vacation in the south of France. I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out. The texture of the paper perfectly matches the disheveled look of…

Driftless Area (Musil study)

A study of a painting by the inimitable Jim Musil. The original painting can be found at his website. Update: See also my much improved second attempt at this study.

Einfacher Nachthimmel

This was a small experimental painting that I ended up immediately overpainting, since it did not turn out how I wanted and by far did not look as good as the photograph makes it seem.

The UX of LEGO Interface Panels

Again, something thats right up my alley, combining two of my favourite things: UX design, and LEGO. Interface designer George Cave does an in-depth analysis of 52 different lego instrument panel bricks: At a glance, the variety of these designs can be overwhelming, but it’s clear that some of these…
2020

Altes Herrenhaus in der Nähe von Innsbruck, Österreich

This painting is based on a holiday photo of a house in Austria we stayed in for a couple of weeks. This was my first time painting on a larger canvas and it was very challenging to get a good balance of detail all over the canvas. It was fun…

Northwest Waterfall (Hankins study)

This painting is literally an imitation of an imitation of a Bob Ross painting. To paint it I followed this painting tutorial by Nic Hankins, an acolyte of Bob Ross. It was very interesting to paint on a pure black canvas in the lower half of the painting. It made…

The code I’m still ashamed of

This post by Bill Sourour bringing together code and ethics really resonated for me. He describes working as a software developer and doing some ruthless marketing for a questionable medical drug targeted at teenage girls: Nothing that we were doing was illegal. As the youngest developer on my team, I…

Birken im Herbst

This is one of my first completed paintings. It’s a paint-along of some Bob-Ross-style YouTube tutorial. It was thrilling to see the birch tree trunks come to life by combining whites and light blues. The layout is pretty wonky, but I like the way the colors turned out, especially the…

Greetings from Siberia

Some years ago, while I was still a university student, I had a bit of a creative phase and made a bunch of stylised Star-Wars-themed posters in Photoshop and put them on my website for anyone to download. Not too many people noticed, but every once in a while I…

Parse Bible and Quran versions with ScriptureKit for PHP

Today I am happy to announce I am open-sourcing a key component of my Devotionalium project: ScriptureKit is a PHP framework for working with Tanakh, Bible, and Quran XML files from the Zefania Project and qurandatabase.org. There are lots of free and open source Tanakh, Bible and Quran editions available…
2019

wp-toolkit – An object-oriented WordPress API wrapper

I am the developer taking care of the WordPress-based online magazine Die Eule. WordPress is not known for it’s clean and modern programming API. The WordPress coding style is relatively antiquated and there are many parts of WordPress that do not work in an object-oriented way. This makes it difficult…
2015

Reeder for Mac 3.0 Review

I have been using Reeder for Mac by swiss indie-developer Silvio Rizzi ever since the very first beta and bought it right on its first day on sale. Back then it was the most well-designed RSS reading app availiable for the Mac and with this week’s free 3.0 update, it…

Passing text to your applescripts with Alfred Workflows

The great thing about Alfred, the awesome Spotlight replacement for OS X, is that – unlike Spotlight – you can run applescripts and shell scripts right from the launcher. This makes it a great tool to quickly run all sorts of actions and services1 – just type the first few letters of the name…

How to create a custom LaTeX build system for Sublime Text

My text editor of choice on the Mac is Sublime Text. I use it for taking notes in class, writing in Markdown (I am writing this post in Sublime Text), programming and – really important for my student work – making LaTeX documents. Once you get over the hump of…

WWDC 2015 Keynote recap

This year’s WWDC keynote brought no new hardware announcements. But with the announcement of new versions of OS X, iOS and watchOS, there was still lots of new stuff to cover. El Capitan appears to be a sort of “Snow Yosemite,” bringing few new features an instead focusing on speed…
2014

Dropbox Sync for Heroku

As I wrote before this blog is hosted on (the free tier of) Heroku. A couple of days ago the hosting provider announced a great new feature for deploying apps and websites to Heroku: Dropbox Sync. This is a huge feature. It means that with Heroku and a static site…

Apple Watch

On this week’s event Apple – as anticipated – announced its upcoming wearable: the Apple Watch. But it did not solve the problems smart watches are facing. The Apple Watch's inductive charger. It turns out that I was wrong in hoping that Apple would actually solve smart watches. They simply announced…

Smart Watch

A few weeks ago I started wearing my good old wristwatch again. It’s a cheap analog metal watch, but with a sapphire screen, which appears to be all the rage these days. Plain old wristwatch – great at telling the time. There is one thing that watches do incredibly well: tell…

Fancy footnotes with bigfoot.js

Footnotes on the web are a pain in the ass. You click on a tiny number, get transported somewhere near the bottom of the page, find the footnote you were looking for, and click on a link to go back to where you were on the page. This script looks…

Boot to Bootcamp with AppleScript

Ever since I got my first Mac I also had a Bootcamp partition with Windows 7 installed, because there are some programs that just don’t run on Macs and besides, I like to play the occasional video game. Booting from a Bootcamp partition is a little convoluted. You restart the…
2013

Switching from WEBrick to Thin

One great thing about Octopress is that you can always preview your site in your browser locally with the rake preview command. This is a great feature for fiddling with the design without making every change public.1 But ever since I updated to OS X 10.9 Mavericks, accessing localhost:4000 was…

A Fantastical plugin for Alfred

I wrote a new plugin. It’s a Fantastical plugin for the excellent Spotlight replacement app Alfred. I use Fantastical every day to quickly input new appointments. Its natural language parser is the best and quickest way to enter calendar data. I had Fantastical set to ⌥ Space because I would…

Typography is for everyone

I just finished reading something that had been sitting in my Instapaper queue for a long time: Matthew Butterick’s Practical typography. The foreword is written by famous german typographer Erik Spiekermann, so you know there is some authority behind this book. You are a typographer! Butterick’s primary point is: Everybody…

Anatomy of a Jailbreak Trojan

Highly disconcerting: Ryan Hileman has discovered a jailbreak tweak that is a part time trojan. The tool was continuously downloading invisible advertisments in the background, earning the developer ad revenue every time the device was used in any way. In his post, Hileman explains in detail how it was done1:…

A Mail.app plugin for Sublime Text 3

I wrote my first plugin for Sublime Text. It is quite simple. It takes the text of the current document and turns it into a new Mail.app message. The first line of text is used as the subject line. Originally I wanted it to use converted markdown text, but Mail’s…

Free blog hosting for nerds with Octopress

The point of this post is to briefly explain the technical solution I found for this blog and how I found it. At first I had moehrenzahn.de hosted on Wordpress.com. That was free, easy and quickly set up. Why Wordpress isn’t enough for me The premium features of Wordpress.com are…
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