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Q&A with Andre Reinegger

Interaction designer and mobile developer from Germany

My name is Andre Reinegger and I am from Aachen (Germany). I have a diploma in design and since the year 2000 I design and develop interactive stuff for many clients. Meanwhile I have an office together with some employees and a great network of reliable co-worker. At my agency reinegger.net we do everything that is interactive. From concepts, to design, to development, to marketing. We do webdesign, content management sytems, e-commerce solutions, mobile-app development, e-learning applications, search engine optimization, search engine marketing and everything that is interactive.

We work for many clients, for example for: startups, small companies, global players like Philips, Deutsche Post, Volkswagen or Nestle. Often other agencies needs our support in online business. Sometimes they don't have experience, no special online-division, no resources, or it happend that they ruined a project and we have to fix it.

Besides my own agency I am working for Adobe, as a software expert for the creative web-tools. I am a book author at O'Reilly, I write for some magazines (online and print), I do german video-trainings for video2brain (lynda.com) and I do speeches in the webdesign section. That's is also a way to grow my network.

I have a lot of ideas for own online projects, but I wish to have more time to realize them.

My favorite slogan: "Choose a job you love and you will never have to work another day!".

My favorite hobby is diving. I allways go for diving at my holidays. Diving is like meditation. I love to be inside a different world, flying without gravity through all new colors and the awesome animals underwater. Hardware

I work on a MacBook Pro (15", 16 GB-RAM, 1TG SSD), which I carry always with me, because I travel a lot. It is very compfortable to have it all in my pocket. The train is my second office, where I don't get interrupted that much while I am tethering with iPhone to get connected. When I am at my office I plug it to the 27" Apple Thunderbold Display and use the extern Magic Trackpad. I am addicted to Apple, so I got almost every Apple product and always need the newest edition.

Software

When it comes to software I am using Adobe products form my creative work. My favorite tool since 1999 is still Fireworks and on top of the list of my most used software. Even if it was not updated to CC, thanks to extensions Fireworks supports actual trends like SVG, Edge Animate and Reflow export, responsive webdesign, - (http://bit.ly/1bm2Llp).

Dreamweaver is my favorite HTML & CSS editor, Edge Animate is the best tool for animations based on HTML5, CSS3 & JS and also often in use. For testing and optimizing of responsive webdesign I use Edge Inspect a lot. Since 14 years I used Flash a lot, but in the last 2 years it is getting less and less. I prefer to use Flash CS5.5, because since CS6 there is a leak in the support of Fireworks and since CC more then 30 features are gone which are badly needed for animators. Nowadays I use Flash more when it comes to e-Learning stuff and less for animating for the web. Before InDesign was not really in use at my agency, but since InDesign supports the Digital Publishing Suite to create magazines for the iPad, it becomes more attention by us, because now InDesign fit's into our portfolio of creating interactive solutions.

For my office work and communication I use Microsoft Office over the Apples office products. Even if I am a huge Apple fan, I need to use standards in my communication with clients. That is why I choose Outlook over Mail, Word over Pages, ...

I also prefer Microsoft Exchange over iCloud, because Microsoft takes it very professional here and has much more experiance with syncing stuff, while Apple has had it's problems from time to time. Staying in Sync with mails, contacts, calendar and so far is very important to me, specially when I am traveling.

When I am presenting an App or a responsive website to the client which we developed for the iPhone or iPad I use Reflector, a software that wirelessly mirrors the iPad or iPhone screen to the Mac and to the projector.

To record my video-trainings for video2brain (lynda.com) I use iShowU HD for screen-capturing. We have tested different software, but on the Mac iShowU makes the best results in that sector.

To share files with all my employee (while I am traveling) we use Dropbox and for communicating the to-do's and the actual status, we use Wunderlist.

Last but not least my favorite browser of course is Google Chrome with many extensions like Feedly for my RSS feed abo's, Adobe Inspect and special extensions for SEO. I allways have min. 50 tabs open simulatiously in Google Chrome.

Dream setup

I am perfectly fine with all my hardware and software. Sure when there is something new at Apple, I am forced to buy it, because I am addicetd I would love to see the MacBook Pro Retina with an anti-glare display. Even if the actual one reflects not that much, but when I am traveling I would allways prefer an anti-glare version.

Inspiration

My inspiration comes from the internet. Every day I read or scan through lot of articles out of the design scene.

The best ideas come to me when I talk about it. While I tell someone about a project the ideas come to me while I still tell.

Another place to found ideas is my bathtube.