In journalism, the standard is to share the whole name of a subject. If you don’t share the whole name, it’s appropriate to explain why.

Obsidian

Blue Iris is open source

UniFi Protect is closed source but self hosted

I think you’re vastly underestimating the amount of research and work that goes into making Google products so easy to use.

UI isn’t just a front end development mashing their keyboard with HTML, CSS and JS. It’s hours and hours of observation, research, prototyping, pattern identification, prioritization of information, experimentation and then you create a simple white screen with one input box that does a million things.

We tended to have very expensive engineers and very cheap designers. That was emblematic of where customers placed their value and, thus, where management placed their priority in hiring.

That said, of the four designers… one went to NASA, one went to Amazon, one went to McDonald’s (leading global service design research) and then to Lyft.

They were very talented folks

“Make it look like google.”

Sure. Do you have a billion dollars for this project? No? Okay. You get one half resource junior UI designer.