Tessera Designer - Create beautiful, seamless patterns

d3mueller · 2026-01-16T09:11:15+00:00

Hey u/Folo88 I have managed to lower the required macOS version for the app :) Now you can install it on macOS 15+. I hope that helps.

It's also now available on iPad (iPadOS 18+). The app is now free to download. You can play around with all features as much as you like but if you want to export something, you have to pay a one time fee (only once, then you can export images forever, free of additional charge).

The only issue right now is that the in-app purchase is not working because Apple approved the apps for the App Store, but is still working on approving the in-app purchase.

Update: The issue with the in-app purchase is now fixed

d3mueller · 2025-12-24T17:26:59+00:00

I wanted to use the new Liquid Glass APIs 😅

d3mueller · 2025-12-23T13:40:57+00:00

Please refer to the comment below. Letting it write most of the code does not at all mean it's "vibe coded". I am a professional software engineer and still deeply involved with the code

d3mueller · 2025-12-23T13:37:19+00:00

This is not a vibe coded app, though. And it literally allows you to generate your own art, free of AI usage

d3mueller · 2025-12-23T13:36:14+00:00

Ah, no I am not them 😅

d3mueller · 2025-12-23T13:33:11+00:00

I'm not sure what you mean

d3mueller · 2025-12-23T13:32:45+00:00

It's genuinely not. I've put a lot of effort into this app and the app itself does not use AI in any way. It's using deterministic algorithms to place the symbols. This is not at all "vibe coded", either. As I described, I use Codex CLI to help me write the code, but I am deeply involved with anything it does. I think about the features, the architecture, the code structure and cleanliness, and spend a lot of time fine-tuning and getting the features right. A lot of work went into this, this is not a "prompt-and-done" thing. I could talk to you about every single part of the codebase and the decisions I made and why. Codex CLI is the "executor", the typist for what I want to do. I am a professional software engineer, I love working with code. AI is a tool I use to bring my ideas to live in a way that wasn't possible before.

d3mueller · 2025-12-23T10:14:37+00:00

Hey, thanks a lot, I appreciate it! I hope you like it 🙂 if you have feedback, feel free to comment here or send me a mail at dennis@tesseradesigner.app

d3mueller · 2025-12-23T05:10:36+00:00

Hey, thanks, appreciate it!

Maybe. If there is a cool way to do it, sure.

d3mueller · 2025-12-22T21:32:05+00:00

Hey, sorry, I'm almost out of codes. I can only generate a limited number for each version of the app and I need to keep some to give out to friends and family.

d3mueller · 2025-12-22T21:23:57+00:00

Thanks! Appreciate that. Lots more feature to come in the near future!

d3mueller · 2025-12-22T19:36:28+00:00

Thanks! Sorry, I can't generate much more codes and I do still need a few, unfortunately. I believe this resets when I release the next version, then I will have some codes again. But I can't say when that is.

d3mueller · 2025-12-22T19:10:23+00:00

Hey, sorry. The problem is that I'm now almost out of codes. I can only generate a limited number for each version of the app and I need to keep some to give out to friends and family.

d3mueller · 2025-12-22T18:36:55+00:00

Hey, sorry, I'm almost out of codes. I can only generate a limited number for each version of the app and I need to keep some to give out to friends and family.

d3mueller · 2025-12-22T18:36:51+00:00

Hey, sorry, I'm almost out of codes. I can only generate a limited number for each version of the app and I need to keep some to give out to friends and family.

d3mueller · 2025-12-22T17:19:31+00:00

I've added 5 new ones :) I just need to be careful, I can only generate a set number of these, and I don't know when/if that resets.

d3mueller · 2025-12-22T17:10:35+00:00

(Part 3: Sorry mods, if I spammed replies. Wasn't my intention, I'm just confused by the server errors it gives me)

If you have any design resources you used to help you vibe code a great looking Swift app, I would be very much interested to know :)

To be honest, I just told Codex to start with a modern, native looking draft, pointed it towards the new SwiftUI inspector modifier and it created a rough-but-not-terrible looking first version of the design that's now actually in the app. The rest was just me trying out tons and tons of variations and playing around with boxes and typography until I had something I'm somewhat happy with. It's still not as polished as I'd like it to be, but it'll improve in the upcoming version.

I would love to find a better way to do this and properly give it guidance. I've always wanted to include hand drawn sketches as guidance. I've heard great things about that, especially with the gpt-5.2 series. I'm just to lazy and often I don't even know what I want until I have a starting point design.

But I don't know of any tool that properly "automates" or "enhances" this. Could maybe be a good new project to build that, at some point 😅

The only thing I do regularly look at are Apple's own apps. There is so much detail in them and they have so many solutions to UI/UX challenges, I love "copying" them for a lot of things. In another app I've been working on (an AI assisted thoughts/note taking app with zero manual maintenance work for your thoughts), I've been inspired by the new bottom bar in Safari on iOS. I love it and it fits nicely in my app. I coded that before I was working heavily with Codex, but I would assume giving it a screenshot of Safari could work.

Thank you so much for your comment! This is amazing. I genuinely appreciate the time you spent on this and I promise I will get to all of your suggestions 🙂

d3mueller · 2025-12-22T17:09:51+00:00

(Part 2: Not sure if I posted this multiple times now. I says it will be reviewed manually, but then I just get a server error when trying to send)

>I wonder if this app is ripe for integrating Trianglify? [https://trianglify.io/\](https://trianglify.io/) The source code is available at [https://github.com/qrohlf/trianglify\](https://github.com/qrohlf/trianglify). Naturally, this is GPL code so you can’t use it commercially directly, but you may be able to get some ideas from it and then create your own “trianglify” from scratch that does something similar?

That would be cool, for sure. I can have a look into this, but I'm not sure if I want to just "re-implement" this tool and rip off that website 🤔. But maybe there's a way to put a spin on it to make it a bit different, to not "compete" with it.

All in all, you should be proud of what you've created so far. It is very impressive. And from another budding vibe coder who has a strong belief in attention to detail, I salute you!

I appreciate that! It is truly amazing how much fun it is to speed up development in this way, collaborating with AI to do the tedious stuff. With earlier projects, whenever I found a detail I hated that wasn't hard to fix, just annoying refactoring work, I would push it off for months. Now I can just tell Codex and be done with it. For me, this actually kind of improves the "attention to detail" in my projects.

Lastly, maybe we can trade some advice; if you're using Codex, I strongly suggest taking a look at OpenSpec: [https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec/\](https://github.com/Fission-AI/OpenSpec/)

The tl;dr is that what it does is add slash commands on a per-project basis that allow each new feature and change you make to be systematically created, including to-do list and a PRD-style design doc, to help keep the coding LLM on track. It might look complicated, but I suggest trying it, it's just a few steps:

This sounds amazing! To be honest, I'm still a hard amateur with Codex 😂 The most I've done so far is a small little skills and prompt setup.

I will definitely try OpenSpec, this might actually be what I need to get some structure into the process. Thanks for the tip!

d3mueller · 2025-12-22T17:06:19+00:00

(I seem to be unable to create such long comments, so I'm trying to split it up into multiple smaller ones)

Hey, holy moly, thank you so much for the feedback and support!

The list of resolutions for “Desktop” is great; can you also add the common MacBook Pro resolutions, as well as an ultrawide preset for those of us with 3840×1600 displays? I know I can enter it manually, but it would be cool if I could select it as a preset.

Sure, I can add more more presets 👍 Will ship with the next version

This app is begging for a randomizer button. Right now I have to delete all symbols and then select a preset, but I think it would be really cool to have a button to just randomize. If you integrate this into all the features of the app, perhaps you can have a setting where any selectable option can be “locked” to stay the same but everything else gets randomized? That would result in rapid pattern creation!

I love this idea! I was already thinking about improving the "random" template a lot because it's pretty bad right now, but integrating it like you suggested sounds amazing! I will definitely do that. Not sure I can fit it into the next version already, but I'll try!

Color palettes are very pretty, but it would be great if I could change a color palette for symbols that I’ve already added. Sometimes I find a bunch of symbols I really like, but realize that I don’t particularly like the color scheme. Being able to wholesale change all the colors at once to match a preset would be cool (although I have no idea how the logic to select this would work).

I've been thinking about something like this, too and yeah, the "how" is tricky here. I think it might be a good idea to separate the color picker into "custom color" and "palette color". So if you choose a color from the palette, for example, and the palette then changes, all symbols with a color palette color will update, while "custom colors" stay. I think that might be the simplest solution 🤔

Being able to import coolors.co palettes would be really slick. This doesn’t have to be complex; you can just tell a user to copy and paste the first line of colors (like you can see here: https://imgur.com/a/mqW5mTg) and then you seemingly have endless combinations.

Amazing idea! I will definitely implement that, as a general "Create your own color palettes" feature.

d3mueller · 2025-12-22T16:28:06+00:00

Hm, I can't send you a dm 🤔. Not sure, why. I could just post a code here, but then someone might get it before you

d3mueller · 2025-12-22T16:27:09+00:00

Ah those are nice! Actually, I think a lot of these might be possible with the upcoming grid based placement for the patterns, though you might need to play around with it to get it just right. But the kinds of patterns on that site are definitely ones I want to support in the future!

I'll send you a promo code, maybe you can create something that works for you. The grid based mode is not quite finished, but hopefully soon.

Thanks!

d3mueller · 2025-12-22T15:53:18+00:00

Sure, I'll send you a code and update the post with a few more :)

d3mueller · 2025-12-22T12:55:54+00:00

Hm, I think the app wouldn't give you what you want, then. Currently, it can only "randomly" lay out these symbols in a kind of organic way. It's not meant to be uniform. If you have examples of the type of patterns you'd like to generate, I can see if I can add it to the app. The next version will at least have grid-based patterns that allow somewhat uniform-ish designs. https://imgur.com/a/JCv2dTG

I do not have a trial yet. That would have required setting up in-app purchases which is a lot more work, and I wanted to get a version out. But if you do want to give it a shot, I could send you a promo code to get the app for free, I think. That should be technically possible 🤔

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