Excited to finally release my new Mac app, Bookmark Manager! One easy app that lets you export all of your Safari bookmarks and Reading List items into CSV format. Great for archiving old bookmarks to cleanup your Safari usage! Available to download on my site!
Some really great finds yesterday! Hearing Tolkien read excerpts of The Hobbit and Fellowship is amazing!
Transcoding an Apple
Saturday, October 4, 2025
In 2009, The Beatles released their entire discography on a unique green apple with a removable USB-branded drive. This device has long been on my list of Beatles releases that I have wanted to pick up for years now. And, thanks to a recent eBay listing and no one else bidding, I was finally able to add the infamous green apple to my collection.
While the package was shipped across the country, I kept worrying about finally receiving the device, only to discover it was wiped by the previous owner. But thankfully, the previous owner didn’t mess with the drive, and it worked perfectly once I plugged it in for the first time. Well, other than the fact that the included Beatles application requires a previous version of Mac OS X that supports 32-bit applications since it is actually a wrapped Adobe Flash application.
Once I pulled the files off of the green stem USB drive, I figured I had two main problems.
Since the drive is over 16 years old, I didn’t want to worry about it failing and corrupting all the data on it. While I did pull the FLAC, more on these files later, and MP3 folders, I still like having as close to a 1:1 copy of the drive for archival purposes.
To solve this problem, I opened Disk Utility, right-clicked the drive, and created a new Disk Image from it. After waiting about 30 minutes, USB drives from 2009 weren’t the fastest, I had a perfectly working copy of the USB.
The second problem relates to the included files. This USB is unique as it is one of the few official FLAC releases of The Beatles discography. And while it is great to have the FLAC files for playing on more high-end equipment, they don’t natively sync with my music service of choice, the Music app. Instead, I need to convert them to something more compatible with the Apple ecosystem.
After a little bit of Googling, I came across the method I knew I would have to use…trusty FFMPEG. My goal was to transcode the FLAC files into both AAC and ALAC. ALAC being Apple’s lossless file format which they have used for decades. The added benefit of using ALAC is I can actually sync them to my iPods and play them on my Mac. Unfortunately, these ALAC files are not synced with my iPhone/iPad since the iTunes/Apple Music Match service only seems to sync AAC files.
Either way though, I want to be able to convert these FLAC files to something I can use on iPods at the very least. To do this, all I needed was a single Terminal command.
# For ALAC Conversion
for i in *.flac; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -acodec alac -vcodec copy "${i%.*}.m4a"; done;
# For AAC Conversion
for i in *.flac; do ffmpeg -i "$i" -acodec aac -b:a 256k -vcodec copy "${i%.*}.m4a"; done;
With that one line, I was able to transcode both ALAC and AAC for use wherever I want!
This was a fun little project and a reminder of how much I love owning and managing my own music library. The idea of owning my own music library has been something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and is something I’ll probably cover more on this site in the near future.
Finished reading: The Return Of The King by J.R.R. Tolkien 📚
Found one of the coolest relics of the dot-com bubble this past weekend!!
Wednesday, September 10, 2025 →
Even though I absolutely love Tron Legacy, I never watched the Disney show Tron Uprising. Figured I would give it a watch since Ares is coming out soon. Wow! I should have watched when it came out! The animation style is so cool, it has great action scenes, and really builds out the Tron Legacy world in unique ways!
This is such an awesome project! I loved the old iPod games so much and have long since lost the original files I purchased. Can’t wait to give this project a download! arstechnica.com/gaming/20…
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 →
Finished reading: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki 📚
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 →
As someone who absolutely loves e-ink devices, I was so excited for the reMarkable announcement today. However, the price point is a bummer at $449. Even as someone who really believes in the usefulness and joy of e-ink devices, it is a hard sell to say the Paper Pro Move is almost the exact same price as the entry iPad mini. If the price had come in around $250 to even $300, it would have been a much easier sell. Although, I do wonder how much of this cost is due to the recent horrible tariff policy of the US.
After a few days with the iPad 7th generation, I’m still shocked at how much of an improvement it is over the 6th generation. The amount of pages in Safari that constantly reload after I swap between apps has dropped dramatically. I’m honestly pretty surprised that the 6th generation is supported with iPad OS 26 since it struggled so much during the betas that it is almost unusable.
Nudge Nudge v1.1 Release
Monday, September 1, 2025
An all-new version of my app Nudge Nudge is available now! I’ve worked hard over the past few weeks to improve the UI and make some improvements that I had wanted to make pre-launch but pushed off to focus on more critical fixes. Now, though, I can finally say I’m pretty happy with the notes feature of the app. And most importantly, the notifications are now properly triggering with a vibration depending on your notification settings. While this isn’t a huge update, it is a great step I’ve wanted to make since I first released the app. I’m still waiting to do any big marketing pushes, but I’m hoping to start those soon now that the app has a few updates released.
Day 20: Flying with the Great Eagles
Tuesday, August 19, 2025
My latest app, Nudge Nudge, is finally released! It has been a challenge to get here, working off and on for over 20 days, plus a ton of days long before I started this log. With some more time, I plan to do a bit more of a recap of what I’ve experienced publishing an app in the current, rather crazy, software market.
What has been the most interesting for me though is how much I’m still motivated to keep working on the app, but even starting to think about my next big app project. While this app hasn’t taken off, and who knows might never take off, it has felt like me releasing it was a catalyst for my own motivation. Over the years, like most software developers, I feel like I’ve ebbed and flowed on motivation when it comes to releasing products. I would start a lot of projects, but very, very rarely release them. Now though, it feels different and I feel more motivated to keep releasing products and seeing if any will stick in any semi-large way financially.
Day 19: The slopes of Mount Doom
Monday, August 11, 2025
I finally made it. I’ve sent the last TestFlight out to my beta testers, and everything seems to be working properly. The paywall had some last-minute tweaks it required to support dark mode. And everything on the App Store side of things is all squared away. I’m submitting the final initial release build to App Review tonight with the hopes of launching the app in the next day or two after approval.
During this time, though, I’m going to be working on all the marketing material I plan to send out to a handful of online news outlets to promote the app. I’m going to hold off on doing this until I know the paywall and everything works in production once the app is on the App Store. However, I feel like the hard work, and the work that usually is the most important initial, is getting these marketing materials all squared away and professional-looking.
Day 18: Approval!
Friday, August 8, 2025
After fixing a handful of in-app purchase issues, I was able to get my app approved by App Review! I’m still curious how much actual testing they do of the app functions and the purchase flow. Although I would have to assume very little. Which means I’m going to spend a little more time to testing it and making sure everything still works. The last thing I want is for a new customer to try and subscribe to the app and for some reason it doesn’t work.
Day 17: Rejection #1
Tuesday, August 5, 2025
As expected, my first submission to App Review was rejected. And of course, it mainly had to do with the privacy and terms links you have to put in so many different places to meet the requirements of the App Store. While I know this policy is in place to cover either Apple’s or my own rear, it just feels like a game of whack a mole of where you need to be putting everything.
I’m going to take tomorrow to make the changes. Thankfully, yesterday I got a few hours of work in and was able to quickly throw together an About screen with some basic information about myself, NSMug, and the App. Getting very close to submitting the app for the final time before its initial release.
Day 16: Returning to the path
Sunday, August 3, 2025
It has been a little while. The last week has been very enjoyable on a personal level, but I put aside a lot of my work to make it enjoyable. While I have taken breaks since I started this effort, this was one of the longest. Every day I tried to fit in a little bit of work, but usually life got in the way in the best way possible.
Now though I’m back on the road forward. Thankfully, just before I had to pause on all of my work I had sent out a beta to a few friends who really helped me polish what I had at the time. And to help stay on top of the little things that usually catch people up on their first submission of a subscription to the App Store, I submitted a test build to App Review this afternoon to make sure nothing on that end will prevent me from launching. I still have a few minor things to get ironed out, all of which I plan to do this upcoming week.
While being away from the project I did miss it a lot. Which is something I have experienced in the past. Even after the breaks and setbacks, every time I sit down to work on this project I still believe in it. My biggest fear is that I’m going to miss something on the subscription side of things, breaking it, and having a bad first impression for some people. My hope is that throughout this week I can finish testing the app, write a few little things, and then submit it for release.
Day 15: A day of fun and celebration
Monday, July 28, 2025
No work today on the app or really any projects. 100% focused on myself and family for a much needed day of rest, fun, and celebration. That being said, I’m excited to get back into it tomorrow and make some more steady progress through the final stages.
Late yesterday I was able to send out the very first TestFlight beta to a couple of close friends who helped track down a handful of important issues with the in-app purchase support of the app. Most of it I fixed late last night, but tomorrow I’m going to sit down and try and make that whole workflow as bulletproof as possible.
Day 12/13/14: Onward
Sunday, July 27, 2025
Skipped a day of actual coding recently, but I’ve been constantly thinking about the last big item I have before I can share the Beta. But thankfully, that added time sort of let me refocus my efforts and trim down what I was trying to do. This really helped me make big progress directly towards the finish line all within about a days worth of work. Which means thankfully I can start to share a TestFlight build to my close friends first before posting one to some of my socials to collect feedback.
I also made a small change to swap back to my MacBook Air as my primary developer machine. I was using my 16in Pro since it has so much more RAM than my Air that it usually runs Xcode much quicker without burning through my battery. The only problem is that the Pro is so heavy and so awkward to balance on my lap that it caused me not to reach for it when I had a spare moment or two over the past few days. Swapping has really helped me stay back on task and squeeze in as much development as I can.
Since I’m getting closer to submitting, I finally took most of the afternoon to build the marketing site for the app. I host my main site on Micro.blog’s premium plan, which lets me host an unlimited amount of single-page style websites on my main account. This is great since I can quickly build a mostly static site and not have to pay anything extra, and get to have it under its own domain.
Today was a lot of work, more so than most days, and I’m honestly surprised how much progress I was able to make across the board. Mount Doom is well within view at this point.
Day 11: The Orange Glow
Thursday, July 24, 2025
It’s clear that while I may not have long stretches of hours to work and focus on a single coding milestone, small progress spread over multiple days adds up and is as beneficial as single long sessions. The last week of travel has presented a challenge to this experiment I’m running to finish my app on time. And today was the first day that I was able to squeeze in my experiment through multiple small sessions of real progress. One way I was able to accomplish this progress was by splitting the research and implementation into separate efforts.
A good chunk of my productivity time is dedicated to research. Researching new coding techniques, frameworks, or watching WWDC videos are usually my go-to when I’m sitting down in front of my computer. While I have been busy with travel and personal events, I’m taking a serious effort to use the small amount of time I have when I’m not in front of my computer to conduct this research. This, of course, is made possible by swapping out the time I spend endlessly scrolling on Instagram with dedicated time to watching a WWDC video or reading about a new coding technique that could help me. It takes a bit more effort than mindlessly scrolling social, and sometimes I still do set aside small chunks of time around 5-10 minutes to scroll without worry, but the rest of the time I’m focusing on fitting in the lengthy research part of my day.
Fitting in implementation time behind my computer, in Xcode, writing code is a bit trickier. It is something I’m still working on, but as of right now, my go-to is to just sit down whenever possible and write even a single function. Something small is usually enough to trigger my brain to get into a coding mindset, even if it is for 5 or 10 minutes. If time permits, that 5 or 10 minutes will grow to 30 or an hour in the best case. But even if it just is long enough to write a function or fix a small bug, it is progress no matter what.
These two small changes have helped me stay on track and finally start to see the end of this journey. For the first time in a long time, I’m finally close enough to start to see the orange glow of Mount Doom.
Day 10: How much further?
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
As I get back into a rhythm of working on my next app, I’m starting to realize just how little work I have left on the core functionality of the first version. I still have a good amount of testing, including a fair amount of testing for the in-app purchase flow. However, at this point, all I really have left is two big milestones that will take a while to implement and not be the easiest thing.
This hurdle, of course, makes me feel less excited about finishing the app since it is going to be a slightly less enjoyable challenge than the other parts of the app. My hope is to stay consistent and slowly start to break up the last two milestones to finally finish the app. Fingers crossed that I can get it done in the next few days so I can work on finalizing the in-app purchase and graphics of the app.