2026-08-09 03:00:00
Chapterize 2.1 is out today, and I know 2.0 just came out, but there are a couple things here I really wanted to get out.
iCloud sync is the headliner, in my opinion, and it's changed how I use my own app. I tend to load episodes into the app on my Mac, and before iCloud Sync, that's where I'd have to do the work. However, now I have the freedom to import the file on my Mac and then listen to the episode on my iPhone as I do a workout and add chapters where they need to go.
From there, when I get back to my Mac later, the chapters are already there, and all of this works in every direction with every feature in the app.
This one's kind of huge for me. Podcaster who records at exactly the right level and edits to exactly the right audio level. But not everybody does that, including myself.
And the Mac version of Chapterize now has a one-click enhance audio button that performs two actions. First, it normalizes the audio to the expected volume for podcasts, and it reduces noise. It's not doing anything crazy with AI here. It's just using traditional tooling to get this done. If your podcast already sounds perfect, you don't need this. But if you struggle a bit, this might be a one-click fix similar to previous tools like The Levelator.
The new shows tab in version 2.0 lets you follow your shows, and get information about them. Now you can also listen to them. This is absolutely not a full podcast app in the vein of Overcast or Apple Podcasts, but if you need to listen back to part of a previous episode, this will get the job done.
Once I had iCloud Sync working, it made me work a bit more from the iPhone, and this made me realize how tough the experience was there. One of the things I've tried to do with this app is have a consistent experience across all platforms, and I think the ideal layout for working on the desktop (including iPad) is not the same as the iPhone.
As such, I've given the editing view on the iPhone a bespoke layout that works a lot better. No features are removed, but they're all more well considered for the iPhone's relatively tiny screen.
If you make a podcast and you're not using Chapterize yet, this is a great time to start. It's free to try on Mac, iPad, and iPhone.
2026-08-08 22:00:00
Quick Reads for iPhone and iPad 1.0.4 is rolling out on the App Store now, and I didn't bump the version that much, but this is the biggest update yet for iPad users.
Truthfully, I don't use the app on an iPad that much myself, so the app was mostly optimized around the iPhone experience. However, I know lots of people use this sort of app primarily on an iPad, and it needed to get some love. So I forced myself to use the iPad every day for a week and use the app as much as possible. You won't be surprised to hear this revealed quite a few paper cuts that shouldn't have been there in the first place.
As such, the app now has a real split view layout, you can drag articles onto lists in the sidebar to move them around, and you can multi-select articles and archive, delete, or tag them in bulk. Mouse users get proper hover states, and if you have a keyboard attached, you can drive more of the app from it. Every keyboard shortcut now lives in the menu bar too.
Chris, this one's for you. 😉
Across both the iPhone and iPad, search got a big upgrade. The app previously just searched things cached locally, but now it performs real-time lookups to the server, so anything you've ever saved should be accessible. I'll talk about it in another post, but I recently shipped an update to how the server performs searches and radically improved performance and ranking of results. The iOS app benefits from these updates as well.
When I shipped the app, I expected users to generate an API key on the website and paste it into the app. That works fine, but it's not exactly the sort of thing you'd expect from a Premiere app, and I wanted to have a better onboarding experience. As such, I've implemented a sort of single sign-on solution in the web application that allows me to have a simple connect button in the app. You tap it, it opens your browser, and you can connect your account from the browser to the app. No copying API keys anymore.
There's a lot more in here too: a scrubbable audio bar for text-to-speech, an offline banner so you know when you're working locally, sharper favicons in your article list, delightful empty states, better reduce motion support, more and nicer haptics, and a bunch of dark mode fixes.
If you're a Quick Reads user, the update is live now. If you're not, now's a great time to give it a look.
2026-08-08 21:40:26
I've been shipping a steady stream of updates to Quick Reads over the past couple months, and while each one got a line in the changelog, I figured it was worth rounding up the highlights in one place.
Since launch, search was a simple text match sorted by date, which worked, but it had a couple flaws that became more apparent the most time went on. First, performance was fine, but would only get worse as more data was added. Quick Reads has over ten thousand articles saved with about 15 million words to search across them, and those numbers only go up, so performance would always slowly creep down. Additionally, there was no concept of relevance in the results, they would just return from newest to oldest.
I rebuilt it on Postgres full-text search, so results are now ranked by relevance, title matches float to the top, partial words match as you type, and quoted phrases work like you'd expect.
In my performance testing before and after the change, the results were striking. This new method isn't just quicker, it's ENORMOUSLY QUICKER. On a script that ran 600 queries against the production database, the median search time on the old system was 250ms, and the new one is 3.4ms. No big deal, just a 98% reduction in latency. For some context, a Mac with a ProMotion display refreshes its image once every 8.3ms, so it takes longer for your display to show the results than it takes to actually run it.
This back end upgrade applies to all searches via the API as well, so the iOS app and any third party integrations benefit here as well.
From day one, Quick Reads has had an industry-best API for people to build on top of the platform. The API is really powerful and the docs are written in a way to be helpful for those using LLMs to code, but MCP can allow even simpler automations for people using AI chatbots and coding agents.
Quick Reads now has an MCP server, which means Claude, Codex, and basically any AI tool can search your library, read articles, save links, and organize things on your behalf. Ask Claude "what have I saved about Apple?" and it can actually answer from your own reading.
It works with the same API key you may already have, and the docs have copy-paste setup for the popular clients.
What you do with this is up to you, and I'm sure people will get creative.
In addition to saving links, you can also save whatever text you want to the app. Paste in your Markdown and get to reading.
This is good for auditing drafts of things you're writing and getting a way to generate text-to-speech (something I find myself doing with longer posts I write quite often).
When you add an RSS feed to the app, you can mark it as a podcast. If you do this, when new episodes come in, you'll get a new podcast view in the web app. You can listen to the episode inline, chapters and show notes are both present, and your playback position is saved so you can resume later if you want.
Oh, and if the podcast has a transcript, it will appear as well.
You can now attach a note to any highlight, so when you highlight something and think "this connects to that other thing," you have somewhere to put that thought. Notes travel with your highlights everywhere they go, including through the API.
Turn any highlight into a lovely image for social media. Three layouts (landscape, square, and vertical), four styles, and you can generate one from the highlights page or by tapping any highlight while you read or from the highlights page.
And because I'd like people to have proper alt text on these, I've added a simple button to copy alt text for these images, ensuring everyone can appreciate these when you post them.
There are more things in the app than there was at launch, and the sidebar has grown as a result. You may not need quick access to things like feeds, documentation, highlights, or tags, and now you can remove them.
On top of that, you can pin up to 3 tags to the sidebar as well.
That's the roundup! If you've been meaning to give Quick Reads a shot, now is a pretty good time.
2026-08-06 20:00:00
No One's Happy: Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible
Most native apps collect far more data than their website equivalents ever could. They request permissions to hardware, sensors, and background processes that browsers deliberately restrict. The third-party software embedded in these apps frequently transmits your location, device identifiers, and behavioral data to third parties before you even see a consent prompt.
This is your regular reminder that native apps have access to a hell of a lot more info about you and your device than websites. The Apple ecosystem seems to have it in their heads that native apps are where you go for privacy, but they've got it largely reversed. Remember the Loupe app released a few months ago that showed all the things an app can collect without even asking permission for anything? Yeah, almost none of that is possible on the web.
I'm not saying don't use native apps, but understand how this stuff works. Some people seem to have an impression that native apps are inherently more private, and that's simply not the case.
2026-08-06 00:00:00
Sean Goedecke: LLMs reward expertise
the idea here — that domain knowledge makes you better at using LLMs — is something I’ve also experienced in my own work. If you have a good theory of your codebase, you can push the LLM much harder than if you have no familiarity. Because you have your own sense of what a good solution might look like, you can say “no, I think it could be simpler here”, or “but don’t we already do X?”, or “can we express this problem in these familiar terms?“.
Sean is right on the money here. It's really cool what you can do with coding agents, and they allow less technical people to create code. However, interacting with these models when you have no idea how the code works and when you do know how the code works are completely different experiences.
As time goes on, I feel quite strongly that those who will benefit the most from coding agents are those who have a good combination of technical understanding, a good design eye, and excellent product intuition/research.
2026-08-05 21:32:34
I don't obsessively check the metrics on this blog, but I do every now and again just to see how things are generally going. I don't run ads anymore, so page views don't really equate to much more than a vanity metric. But hey, who amongst us isn't a little vain?
Anyway, I noticed there was a spike yesterday. This blog gets a couple thousand visits per day, so a spike to to 30k views in a day, half of which were this post from a week ago is pretty notable, to say the least. But like I said, I didn't even notice until now.
First, I continue to be happy with my decision to move hosting to Ghost Pro. I very rarely had issues when I was hosting this blog myself, but when something like this happened back then, those days turned into me monitoring my server load for hours to make sure everything was holding together. Now I don't even think about it, which for where I am in my life with priorities, is just right for me.
Second, this didn't trigger any alerts for me. I don't have any alerts set up for traffic spikes. Maybe I should, but as I said above, raw traffic doesn't really do much for me. In fact, the reason I didn't notice this is because the only sort of notification I get for activity on my site is when someone signs up for More Birchtree. Despite getting tens of thousands of people hitting the site yesterday, not a single one converted to a paid subscriber. I'm not at all surprised by this, of course. Subscribing to a blog is something people do after following it for a little bit, not something you do when you first come across someone you found on Hacker News.
Third, looking at where people come to my site from is interesting. Google Zero clearly hasn't hit me yet, but this report also shows something that I find quite frustrating about all analytics services, which is that a substantial number of items are marked as "direct". What the hell does that mean? My understanding is it's basically everything it's not able to categorize, including things like people opening pages from their RSS reader, coming to the site from a bookmark in their browser (shout out if you do that), or from users who have privacy tools installed that strip any referral information.
But besides the semi-mysterious direct category, I do think the other sources are kind of fascinating. For example, my Bluesky account is effectively an automated bot at this point. I don't really use the platform, but all of my posts are automatically syndicated there, and I got 3x more traffic from those automated bot posts than my human written posts I share to Mastodon where I'm actually engaged. Hey, in this window, ChatGPT drove nearly as much traffic to my site as Mastodon 😵.