After two months of wandering, I’m finally ready to get out of the woods. I’ve been working on my first iOS app in a while, and my whole motivation for the app comes from me wanting to finally do all the things I never could when I had a full-time job. And while I’m still looking for a full-time job, applying is just as awful as you hear about, I want to be sure I utilize the small amount of freedom I now have by completing the things I’ve always wanted to accomplish. One of the biggest things I wanted to accomplish after I left my previous job was to publish a new iOS app to help people stay focused on their hobbies.
To do that successfully, I want to start posting daily about my progress towards accomplishing that goal. Some days it is going to be very short since I maybe didn’t do a whole lot of work on my app. However, my hope is that by posting daily I will stay on top of the project and keep it moving towards the finish line.
A big inspiration for me to do daily logs is David Smith’s amazing Design Diary series he is writing as he works through redesigning his apps for iOS 26. The second inspiration was Brent Simmon’s Vesper Sync Diary from 2013/2014 which I had followed at the time religiously and loved every little update. I think it is important to share progress on large scale-projects publicly to not only record them for others to possibly learn from, but to keep a trail of the hard work you have put into your own projects.
The final big reason I want to do this is to get back to posting regularly to my Micro.blog site. Manton’s book and podcast Core Intuition were a huge inspiration for me to finally start to use Micro.blog and join in the community of bloggers trying to reclaim a small portion of the internet that the big social media companies have stolen. As I’ve started to post more on TikTok and other social media platforms, I just get the constant feeling that I’m missing out on contributing that same sort of content on more open and freely available avenues.
Today is day 1 of hopefully many more days!
A quick note: I’m hoping to give each day some sort of unique title, possibly Lord of the Rings inspired…but let’s see how long I manage to keep to this!
Was expecting to see more Tron Ares content at the theaters since it is coming out in October. It was cool to see this 3D glasses bin though last night!
While researching some Led Zeppelin Bootlegs, I came across an official page still available with the most 2000s era website design still intact! This design style is still so unique and fun! www.ledzeppelin.com/show/seat…
Tweaked the app I’m working on to use some sheets for basic interactions. Really surprised how nice SwiftUI handles sheets with various positions options!
Interesting article from Ars Technica explaining just how bad the hiring process has become. The insane number in the very first sentence, “Employers are drowning in AI-generated job applications, with LinkedIn now processing 11,000 submissions per minute—a 45 percent surge from last year, according to new data reported by The New York Times.”
Apple’s built-in writing tools for summarization are pretty great, which tracks seeing as Mac OS has always had a good summary tool built in even to earlier versions. However, web apps that take over the default right-click action, like Google Sheets/Docs, really put a stop to easily using Apple’s tools. It is a bit of a letdown, and I wish Apple had some way to still present the writing tool option in these cases.
Really itching to put Tahoe on my traveling MacBook Air so I can prep some updates for my Mac apps. But seeing as the only way to downgrade is to wipe that Mac completely makes me a little more hesitant.
Still pretty shocked at the on-device foundation models’ performance of the new OSs from Apple. Sure, they don’t have live internet connections to pull recent data, but for historic knowledge base questions and content generation, it is pretty good so far!
Nothing is more frustrating than the new splash screen animation for the Amazon app to promote Prime Day. I miss the days when apps focused more on launch speed than promoting a sale. Although, I doubt Amazon ever cared a ton about app launch speed.
Spent the whole day working with Google’s Cloud Run platform. Have to admit, Google’s API documentation and sample code are solid! Still can’t believe how easy it was to follow and get my Docker container up and running.
