People More Interesting Than Me — Alberto Gallego

People More Interesting Than Me: Lucas Fischer

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Almost 2 years after I interviewed Alex, this section is back. I wanted to pick it up again, and there is nobody better to do it with than Lucas. I had been following Lucas for a while (on Twitter, not physically) while he was building Futureland. But it was his work on Amore that got us talking. We have many ideas in common, and we share many values about software development, but also about life.

We talked about computers, care, the App Store, and what happens when the thing you worked on for years doesn’t work out. I hope you enjoy as much I did.

First things first: can you introduce yourself?

Hallo, I am Lucas Fischer, a full-stack design engineer from Germany who loves computers. Popular projects I have worked on include Futureland, Monologue and Amore.

How has traveling changed you?

The thing I love most about traveling and visiting different cultures is seeing that in a way we are all the same. It’s beautiful. We share the same problems, grief, and worries but also feel the same joy and bliss. Experiencing that makes me feel more part of the earth than a single nation. I wish everybody would have the freedom to travel and live wherever they want. It would be good for us.

It probably changed me in ways that other people could describe better, but I noticed that it made me feel less sensitive and more open. I was a pretty picky eater, but now I enjoy everything. Exploring a new cuisine is one of my favorite things to do abroad.

Before Amore, how did you end up here at all? I’m curious about the path into development and specifically why the Mac. It’s a smaller, stranger platform to bet on than the web or iOS.

I have been in love with computers since before I could read. The family computer was mostly occupied by me, and I would spend hours exploring what I could do with it. I played plenty of video games and experimented with every other program that was available to me at the time. That was around the Windows XP and Windows 7 era.

When I started high school, I had a side job as a bartender, and the cool thing to buy at the time was an iPhone 4, which introduced me to the Apple world.

At that point I still wasn’t coding or anything. Not much later we had an excellent computer science teacher who taught us Pascal. While my friends absolutely hated computer science class, I got hooked on coding immediately. Before that moment I was thinking about a career as a chemist, but after compiling my first Pascal program I knew this is what I want to spend my time on.

A good friend of mine had a MacBook Pro, and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I saved up all the money from bartending and got one myself right before college.

The coding part of college felt easy, and so I didn’t have to attend classes much, which gave me a lot of time to play around with my Mac and Raspberry Pi. That’s when I started to build my first little web apps.

During college I got lucky and found my first few freelance clients, which taught me a lot about web development.

I always adored native Mac software, but I found it challenging to work on it myself. I tried a couple of times to get into making apps with Objective-C but always gave up after a couple of hours. It felt too hard.

When I worked on Futureland, we decided we wanted to have an excellent experience on iOS, so I learned Swift and got to work. Since then, I have barely worked on anything apart from Apple platforms.

While there is a lot of excitement about iPhone apps and the App Store, I always found myself more excited about the Mac. I think it’s because I spend way more time on it compared to my phone. It’s a great platform that doesn’t get the love it deserves from Apple.

I just love the Mac. I hope I can make a little dent and help other developers to build great software for it.

I love your work. It’s always very detailed, and I like how seriously you take small details. Where does that come from? I’m interested in the unglamorous part too: what your process actually looks like when you’re designing something, and where you go when nothing is working.

Thank you <3. When using something, no matter if it’s software or a physical tool, it makes me incredibly happy when I notice that something was created with great care.

In software today, I see that less and less, unfortunately. Most of it feels cheap and careless. In the end I just want to create something that I use myself and that I can proudly share with friends and family. If I can’t stand behind my work, why even do it?

I rarely design something in ‘design software’. I believe design is how something works and feels. That’s difficult to figure out with a tool like Sketch or Figma.

What works best for me is a lot of prototyping. On the web, I made heavy use of HMR (Hot Module Replacement), and on the Swift side, I depend on SwiftUI Previews.

When nothing works, I ask my much more talented friends for advice and look through my ‘inspo’ folder, which contains hundreds of screenshots and screen recordings from apps and interactions I like.

Additionally, I find it useful to record my work and share it online. Right before I hit the publish button is usually the moment where the weaknesses of my work are most obvious.

Building on the App Store can be frustrating in ways that are hard to explain to people outside of it. What’s been the most difficult part for you, and what is Amore trying to do differently there?

It probably comes down to freedom. Having a single company decide what I can and can’t do on an iPhone is super limiting and frustrating. There are numerous apps that will never be built because they would have to go through Apple’s review process first. It’s not really possible to build personal software that’s only used by me and some friends and family.

It’s also limiting for larger projects I have worked on. Sometimes important updates don’t go out to users in time because Apple claims the app is against their guidelines when it’s not. There are thousands of stories like this.

The App Store is great for visibility, though, which seems to have changed for the worse recently too.

I am grateful that things are looking different on the Mac. Here we can use Developer ID for direct distribution, which means we don’t need to ask Apple for permission to publish an app and can skip the App Store altogether.

With Amore, I try to make sharing apps with others, no matter if privately or commercially, as easy as possible. There is no app review and no 30% Apple tax. Just everything you need to build apps for the Mac.

Entrepreneurship is wild. What was the worst moment, the one where you seriously considered stopping, and what got you through it?

There wasn’t a single worst moment for me. I think not finding commercial success for Futureland after working so hard for multiple years was the worst thing that happened to me. I am grateful that I went through this time with amazing co-founders that I still consider close friends.

It took me a while to get back on my feet afterward, but it taught me valuable lessons, and I am grateful for where it led me.

What do you value most in life? And is there something you’ve changed your mind about in the last year?

The freedom to spend my time however I want to. This hasn’t really changed much since I started freelancing in college. I find the position I am in extremely privileged and wouldn’t want to change with someone else.

What do you think we will do as humans when work is automated by AI? I’m curious whether it has already changed your own process, and whether there’s any part of your work you deliberately keep it out of.

I honestly have no clue, but looking at the history of capitalism, I am mostly pessimistic about AI. I hope we will spend more time with other humans and reconnect with nature, but seeing how the majority of people are using this new technology today, I am worried about the opposite.

My utopia would be to have more time to follow our curiosity and interests. I would love it if we all had more time for play and spending quality time with each other.

I don’t like foundational models. They are ethical and environmental nightmares. They have utility, which has clearly been proven, but there is so much more to talk about, which is grossly under-discussed.

In my work, I have found LLMs to be useful for research, prototyping, and code review. That’s where they can cause the least amount of damage and be actually helpful. I try to keep them out of the creative process as much as possible because they make me lazy and stifle my imagination.

For software, I’m a big admirer of Reeder by Silvio Rizzi and Ivory by Tapbots, as well as Martin Lexow’s work in general.

When it comes to music, I find a lot of inspiration in the work of Kieran Hebden and Damon Albarn.

To unwind, I enjoy reading and watching films. “The Courage to Be Disliked” is a book I read years ago that still resonates with me. For movie enthusiasts, I highly recommend “Sore: A Wife from the Future”, which is, in my opinion, the best Indonesian film I’ve seen to date.

People More Interesting Than Me: Alex Fox

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

About a year ago, I discovered mood.camera on Reddit while I was in Greece. A camera app that emulates film camera filters sounded interesting, so I decided to give it a try. I really liked it—the results were impressive, and the app felt almost like using the phone’s native camera.

Some time after that, I received a message from Alex on WhatsApp, asking if he could use some of the photos I’d taken for his website, and that’s how we started talking. I’d been wanting to do written interviews with people I found interesting for a while, so I asked him.

And here we are, a few months later. My first guest, Alex Fox.

First things first: can you introduce yourself?

Hi! My name’s Alex Fox, I’m a developer from London and the creator of mood.camera.

How did you discover your love for photography and decide to spend more time on it?

I’ve been a keen photographer since I was a teenager, but my passion really came alive when I bought my first decent smartphone, a Samsung Galaxy S3. The fact that I could have such a capable camera and photo editing device in my pocket was super exciting. There was also a lot of innovation in the space at that time. Every year, phone cameras were getting better and better. Apps were getting more advanced. I would happily spend hours capturing and tweaking photos, trying to squeeze the most I could out of the phone I had at the time. Even thought I had a decent DSLR, I always came back to my phone camera. You can’t deny the cliche of the “best camera is the one you have with you” but somehow the photos felt more special, like you were defying the norm.

But more recently, despite advances in resolution and low light performance, I’ve felt less inspired to take photos with my iPhone. In the quest for ever sharper and “perfectly exposed” images, it feels like photos have lost their character. I also felt fatigued from my editing flow. Capturing photos in ProRAW was great in theory, but I felt overwhelmed with 100s of photos to edit. The once “fun” point-and-shoot phone camera is edging ever closer to the DSLR experience.

I tried a bunch of different apps to try and bring that character back into the iPhone camera but none of them quite hit the mark. That’s when I began to envision my ideal camera app and around this time last year, I started building a simple prototype, which would become mood.camera.

What kind of resources or research processes did you use to understand how to build Mood from a technical and business perspective?

I’ve been developing apps for a decade so the core design and technology came fairly naturally. The two biggest technical challenges were building the image pipeline and balancing the user experience.

My main goal was to create an app that captured photos with character, moving away from the over-sharpened, hyper-real look that iPhone photos often have. I looked to film for inspiration and spent a lot of time researching the subtitles of grain, colour and other photographic artefacts. I wasn’t looking to replicate film exactly, but I could see how these visual properties gave the photos physicality and feeling. Before touching the code I experimented with different techniques to create these filmic looks within Photoshop. Then, when I was happy with the look, I would recreate that image pipeline in the app. It was quite a long process, as after each iteration I would go out and take some photos to test the look. In the end, though, I am really happy with the results. Sure, it’s not a 100% replication of “real film”, but that was never the intention.

My second objective was to create a simple user experience that challenged the typical photographer’s mindset which leans heavily on editing and control. The ability to capture and edit photos, with greater and greater control, is on one hand incredible, but it’s overwhelming. It’s easy to get caught up in micro-decisions, tweaking every detail until the photo no longer feels spontaneous. I wanted to challenge that.

I made two controversial decisions. One, no live preview of your filter. Two, no editing - all the filmic effects and colour profiles are baked into the photo. You might think, yeh just like real film cameras, but it wasn’t just for the sake of nostalgia. I was more interested in the impact that it has on the psychology of taking a photo. For example, when I was testing other apps, I found that having a live preview meant I was more likely to either spend a minute flipping through filters, or at worst not even take the photo because it didn’t look quite right. I wanted to create an experience where you didn’t think too much, just compose the photo and snap. I also found that, for me, editing had the tendency to make it feel like my photos were never “finished”. With apps like VSCO offering 100s of filters, how am I meant to decide which one looks best?

I know it won’t be for everyone, and I’m not saying that editing photos is a bad thing at all, but there’s something liberating about accepting a photo, imperfections and all. Some of my favourite images have come from unexpected “happy accidents.” By limiting control, I’ve rediscovered the fun in iPhone photography, and that’s the experience I wanted to share with others.

I’m actually adding another small, feature in the next few weeks to curb a bad habit me and many other photographers have. I’m not sure if you’ll have heard the term, but it’s called “chimping”. Essentially it’s the compulsion to check what the photo looks like immediately after you take it. The new, optional, setting will disable the gallery button for 60 seconds after taking the photo. I’m looking forward to turning it on for myself, to break that habit.

Yeh, I feel really lucky to have such an engaged community, they really help to give meaning to my work. One challenge is that people are very suspicious of anyone trying to market something in these communities, which I completely understand. For example, I originally posted on Reddit looking for beta testers, and it got such a big response that people were commenting things like, “The developers obviously paid people to post positive comments to this post”. With that in mind, I think it’s important to be as transparent as possible, and tell your story. If you want people to spend the time trying your product you need to give them a good reason to.

It’s also important to talk to your users. Spend the time replying to their questions and engaging with the content they post. If you’ve built a product that truly resonates with yourself, it should come naturally. I like nerding out on photography and technology so talking to like minded people about it is part of the fun!

On the Netflix, I’ve been re-watching “Midnight Mass”, a fantastic horror series. Honestly, anything by Mike Flanagan is worth watching. And if you’re into cars, I highly recommend checking out “Revelations” by Hagerty on YouTube. It’s a brilliant series that takes you through the history of some iconic cars.

To switch off before bed, I’ve been reading some cyberpunk / Sci-Fi books, with “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson being one of my recent favourites. Highly recommend.

A few pictures I took with mood:

People More Interesting Than Me — Alberto Gallego

People More Interesting Than Me: Lucas Fischer

First things first: can you introduce yourself?

How has traveling changed you?

Before Amore, how did you end up here at all? I’m curious about the path into development and specifically why the Mac. It’s a smaller, stranger platform to bet on than the web or iOS.

I love your work. It’s always very detailed, and I like how seriously you take small details. Where does that come from? I’m interested in the unglamorous part too: what your process actually looks like when you’re designing something, and where you go when nothing is working.

Building on the App Store can be frustrating in ways that are hard to explain to people outside of it. What’s been the most difficult part for you, and what is Amore trying to do differently there?

Entrepreneurship is wild. What was the worst moment, the one where you seriously considered stopping, and what got you through it?

What do you value most in life? And is there something you’ve changed your mind about in the last year?

What do you think we will do as humans when work is automated by AI? I’m curious whether it has already changed your own process, and whether there’s any part of your work you deliberately keep it out of.

Recommendations are great, so would you like to share some? You can pick whatever.

People More Interesting Than Me: Alex Fox

First things first: can you introduce yourself?

How did you discover your love for photography and decide to spend more time on it?

What kind of resources or research processes did you use to understand how to build Mood from a technical and business perspective?

A lot of people are willing to share their pictures taken with Mood on WhatsApp, Reddit, and Instagram, which is amazing because you’ve fostered interest in your product and built an active community. How did you create this community? Any advice you can share?

Recommendations are great, so would you like to share some? They can be related to photography or anything you enjoy (videos, articles, books, movies/shows… whatever).