When Apple announced their iMac with 5K display I was hypnotised — it was the best looking desktop computer that I had ever seen. The Mac of my dreams.

Little did I know that it was going to be one of the WORST investments I made in the past 4 years.

This is a story about a computer. But it’s actually a lesson.

“If it doesn’t fit you, it’ll just make you unhappy.”

Until late 2014 I’d spent my days coding on, alternatively, a 2009 15 inch MacBook Pro or a tiny 11 inch Mac Book Air from 2013. Both of them were decent machines for writing code, but terrible whenever design…

He had looked so tired that last time I had seen him, 4 years ago. His characteristic joy and “make it look easy” attitude had been swept away by responsibilities; deep bags under the eyes, stress and lack of sleep showing in.

But now, here he was — joyful, free, relaxed, burdens gone, as if the past 5 years had been erased. His startup bet — many years of hard work, sleepless nights, transatlantic flights and countless meetings — had finally paid up. He was now one of the elite few, the top 1% in Romania. …

For the past 9 years I’ve developed, released and managed over 100 apps for iPhone, iPad and Mac and around 1000 updates for them. I’ve read thousands of articles with tips and tricks on cheap app marketing tricks for that an indie developer could use. I’ll share some of the lessons I learned. Don’t run away — there’s useful information for anyone here — you might not be into mobile entrepreneurship, but you’ll probably want to sell something online at some point(even if only on Craigslist or Ebay).

Let’s play pretend: you’ve just spent a fortune developing a cool new…

[This is a repost from my HackTheDay blog of 6 years ago. But these are rare-to-find tips that are still highly valuable.]

You don’t really need a reason to try out these Mac OSX tips and hacks. But they are fun, probably useful and definitely will get a nice reaction from your friends. They all involve typing some commands in the Terminal.app(each command is followed by the Enter key); if commands start with sudo, you might be asked to also type down your Mac administrator password(which you ought to have set when you first logged to your computer). For instructions…