2026-01-12 09:35:51
I've drafts 2 versions of a post this weekend that I've ended up trashing. The second one had the fun title, "Big Government That Provides a Public Safety Net? Evil. Big Government That Shoots You in the Face? Conservative dream." Fun, I know.
I got into the irony of 2nd Amendment fanatics saying they needed gun for if the government sent masked men into their streets yelling, "papers please", only to then cheer for those masked men when they did take to the streets.
But honestly, all I want to say is that we're lost if we can look at shocking video of a woman whose last words were "I’m not mad at you", who tried to drive around a federal masked man, and was shot in the face for doing that…only to have millions of Americans go, "yeah, she's the bad guy, it's just that she was murdered."
Anyway, I'm not a fan of the federal government killing people, I think the US government has flown straight into 1984 "don't believe what you see" ground, and more than enough people have happy to go along with it because it.
2026-01-12 00:30:51
This is the first in a series of posts about micro-apps I've built this year. I figured I'd start with this one, as it's the app that sparked the whole idea. It's called Yearly Run Tracker (a very catchy name, I know).
The app does precisely what I want it to do: track my progress toward running 365 miles in 2026. I wanted a simple way to visualize my progress throughout the year, so I created a graph showing the days of the year and tracking my progress against a target line. If I'm above the line, I'm on track. If I'm below the line, I need to catch up.
That's the core idea, and the initial version took only about five minutes to build. I spent another 55 minutes improving the UI and adding features before I was happy enough to just keep it on my phone and move on.
When I launch the app, I see the graph I described. A dotted gray line shows the progress I need to maintain to hit my goal for the year, and a green line shows my actual progress. Below the graph is a simple calendar view, with each day colored green if I went for a run. The calendar also shows the total distance I ran on each day. From this view, I can also log a new run.
The logging interface is also simple. It uses the same calendar view, with HealthKit integration to pull my running workouts and add them with a single tap. I added a little flourish to this, so the logging UI kind of slams down into place, which I thought was fun. I can also manually enter a workout if I didn't track it through my fitness app for some reason.
The only other feature is an insights page, which shows metrics like distance by month, distance by day of the week, longest streak, longest run, average run, and so on. There's also a settings page where I can set the units between miles and kilometers and set my goal for the year.
What would it take to turn this into an actual product, and not just something that works for me?
First, I'd need to implement some sort of onboarding that walks users through setting up their goals and preferences. I'd also want a data export option, as well as a plan for what happens at the end of 2026. Right now, the app just starts over, which isn't ideal.
I also haven't tested it on any devices besides my iPhone, so compatibility could be an issue. And of course, I'd need to create a website and a privacy policy, which take a surprising amount of time.
Finally, I don't have a roadmap for it. I don't have any ideas for what else it could do. Widgets would be a nice addition, and the ability to automatically add workouts, without requiring me to manually add the HealthKit workout, would be convenient. Personally, I like the ritual of manually indicating that I've done a run, and seeing my progress in real-time, so I don't necessarily need that feature, but I can see how others would want it.
There are probably other things I'm not thinking of, but those are the main things that would need to happen before releasing this to the world. Maybe this post will get a ton of attention, and it turns out this is something lots of people want. If so, I might carry on and make it widely available, but that's not the plan right now. And that's fine. I'm very happy with where it is. I'm enjoying using it myself, and I'm glad I was able to make it.
So that's Yearly Run Tracker. I'm using it for myself, and I'll use it for the duration of 2026, and hopefully beyond.
2026-01-10 22:00:00
I'm calling it now: if 2025 was the year of "vibe coding," 2026 is going to be the year of "micro apps." It's the year a meaningful number of people begin to solve their own problems by building custom software tailored specifically to their needs. These apps might not be ready for the mass market, but that's okay because they'll be perfect for the individual who created them.
It seems like the world really caught onto how good Claude Code was in December 2025, but I've been on board since day one (early 2025). I've been using it constantly, and it's led me to build more and more of these little bespoke apps for myself.
In the interest of showing what's possible, I'll be sharing quick write-ups on the micro apps I'm building for myself. I'm planning on doing this for at least the next few weeks, or maybe I'll keep it up all year, we'll see how it goes.
I think this is exciting, and I think it might be a big part of the future of software, so I'm diving in headfirst to see what happens.
2026-01-10 10:22:15
Elizabeth Lopatto writing for The Verge: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards
You know what’s “offensive and sexualized,” you worthless fucking cowards? Nonconsensual AI-generated images of women in bikinis spreading their legs, and of children with so-called “donut glaze” on their faces — which, by the way, were being generated at a rate of one per minute. I’d also call that “offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste” and especially “just plain creepy”! Do you need a back brace to stand up straight, buddy? Because at this point, I am certain you haven’t got a single vertebra.
What’s happening on X and Grok is sick, and clearly breaks Apple’s terms. But kicking either off the store would enrage both Musk and Trump. God only knows how many gold offerings and ass kisses it would take to avoid company-and-customer-devastating tariffs after that. Better just let the CSAM flow, it’s not worth the headaches, I guess.
2026-01-10 04:15:41
I was out for a run today and I had an idea for an app. I busted out my own app, Quick Notes, and dictated what I wanted this app to do in detail. When I got home, I created a new project in Xcode, I committed it to GitHub, and then I gave Claude Code on the web those dictated notes and asked it to build that app.
About two minutes later, it was done…and it had a build error. 😅
But it was a simple fix, I fixed it, and the app was running on my phone. And you know what? It worked. The UI wasn't perfect, but it was damn close. And I already had a product that achieved the goal I set out to achieve. All in all, I'd say it was about 10 minutes from idea to functioning MVP (and half of that was finishing my run).
Now, of course, I've already spent another 30 minutes iterating on this initial design, fixing some weird issues I came across and thinking of other logical features to add. But still, we're well less than one hour away from even having the idea, and I have something that I could genuinely use for this purpose on my phone.
There's more work to do, and I don't plan on making this a public app. It's more something that's extremely specific to my needs, but I can't help but start to wonder what the ramifications are in a world where generating software like this is so trivial. Yes, I'm an experienced product and design person with some development skills, and obviously, software development has gotten easier over the years, and I would bet that even before ChatGPT released in 2022, there were more people developing software than there ever had been in the world. But it really feels like this lowers the barrier to entry by an order of magnitude that simply must have ramifications.
As a simple example, it's possible the app that I thought of could already be achieved in some piece of software someone's released on the App Store. Truth be told, I didn't even look, I just knew exactly what I wanted, and I made it happen. This is a quite niche thing to do in 2026, but what if Apple builds something that replicates this workflow and ships it on the iPhone in a couple of years? What if instead of going to the App Store, they tell you to just ask Siri to make you the app that you need? It feels a bit like when Shortcuts came out and tiny utility apps that just did one thing suddenly became less useful because shortcuts could just do that and people could construct their own. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it certainly makes me think about how we're well past the gold rush era of the App Store. I'm also not saying you can't make money with software anymore, but I do think that it's going to take more to stand out from the crowd.
I'm also thinking about the rise of personalized software in general. With the example above, I bet I could find an app that did what I wanted, but I doubt I could find an app that did exactly what I wanted. In general, software developers for the longest time have tried to make software that is flexible enough to satisfy the needs of as wide an audience as possible. If you didn't like a little detail of how an app worked, well, you would just learn to live with it and get used to it. But in a world where you're the one creating the software, you can just change it. You can make exactly what you want. Does this lead to a world where instead of 100,000 people using Things 3 for their task management, there are 100,000 people all with their own task manager that works exactly how they want? Is there a world where Cultured Code releases things to the App Store and everyone gets the same base functionality, but you can use a large language model to modify the app to your needs? It sounds a little crazy, but I don't think it's impossible in the long run.
I'll leave it there, and I don't have some definitive statement on exactly what I think will happen in the future. I genuinely think this is all up in the air, and nobody really knows what's going to happen. I know it's a cliche and you've probably heard it a thousand times, but one of my favorite quotes is, "we are cursed to live in interesting times." I find myself thinking that a lot lately.
2026-01-09 06:00:23
On a recent Vergecast episode, David Pierce, Allison Johnson, and Victoria Song ranked nine of Apple's product categories. The episode is entertaining, although I discovered that while I really like Victoria Song generally, I disagreed with her on almost every single point in this episode. 😅
Specifying the rules for a list's rankings is super important, and here's how they describe the criteria we should be considering:
“best” is defined quite broadly: it includes a product’s inherent quality, the quality of its competition, its cultural and economic relevance, the size of its target market, and many other things. Best is not an exact science.
So basically vibes, and I'm okay with that. My primary consideration will be around how easily I can recommend the product to somebody else and whether I think Apple makes the best version of that product that you can buy. Here's the list of categories:
Respect to the Vision Pro fans out there, but how could it be anything else, right? I do own one myself, but it is the only product category on this list where I would actively warn people not to purchase for themselves. Based on my criteria above, I do think that in some ways it is technically the best product in its category on the market, but I don't think the value it gives most people remotely aligns with the price tag. And if I'm being honest, even if it was one-third the price, I still wouldn't recommend it to most people.
I think the HomePod is a relatively niche product, and the HomePod Mini is probably a bit more mainstream, but I find them to be the least essential of the eight Apple products remaining. If you want a good voice assistant, I don't see why you would get a HomePod outside of being really invested in Apple's ecosystem. If you want a good speaker, it's a better sell, but also only works with Apple's own products, and is hard to recommend over some other options out there.
I was debating whether this or the HomePod should go higher, and I leaned a little more towards the Apple TV hardware because I do find it easier to recommend to people who are thinking about getting one. All of the services you want to use are going to be here, and in general, they're going to have the best experience that you can get from any product. Yes, your TV likely has all of these apps available as well, but except in very rare cases, the experience in the native TV apps is just awful. And no matter which Apple TV you buy, you're at least going to get a fluid experience.
AirTags are the sort of product you buy and, best case scenario, never have to use. That's kind of the opposite of every other product on this list, which makes them a little hard to judge, but I think they have real utility, are quite reliable, and in the rare instances I've relied on them, they've done great.
By the criteria of this list, I think there's an argument to be made that the Apple Watch should be one position higher, but I just can't put it any higher than this. I think the Apple Watch is fantastic, and while it's not as exciting as it used to be, it's a product that is exceptionally popular among a wide swath of people. Some people buy it for the fitness tracking. Some people buy it for the notifications. Others buy it just because that's just what a watch is in 2025.
This is lower on the list than you expected, huh?
I've got the iPhone 17 Pro in my pocket now, and it's my daily driver. I'm in the envious position of being able to choose between this, an iPhone Air, a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, and a Pixel 10, and for me, the best phone is the iPhone 17 Pro.
That said, I don't think it's as clean a sweep as it once was. The rest of the market has really caught up, and I'm a big fan of the Galaxy S25 Ultra myself, but other phones from Google, OnePlus, and a few Chinese manufacturers are pushing further than Apple in ways that I think real people actually like. I do think that Apple makes the best all-around phone, and they sweat the details on several things that other companies don't, but I would not feel bad at all about recommending someone buy a Galaxy or Pixel phone either. In fact, if they're already using an Android phone and are happy with it, those might be better options for them.
To be clear, the iPhone is still great, and I still think it is the best phone for most people, but the gap is not what it once was.
I think if you're looking for a laptop computer, then the Mac is unquestionably the best product on the market today. When you look at the combination of build quality, performance, and even price, I simply don't think anything else can match it. Even if you're someone who's used Windows your entire life, I would still suggest you look at a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro before committing to another Windows computer.
Oh, and if you just like macOS more than Windows, there's never been a better time to be a Mac fan. We're eating good in the Apple silicon era.
That said, I can't ignore desktop computers, which, while I think Apple satisfies most people's needs with the Mac Mini and Mac Studio, there are higher-end needs as well as the entire gaming market that are underserved or completely unserved by Apple's offerings. The Mac is still outrageously good, but I do think if you're looking for a desktop computer, or a convertible computer for that matter, I do have a few questions to ask you before wholeheartedly endorsing a Mac.
AirPods, on the other hand, are for everyone, as long as they want wireless earbuds. They're the default choice for iPhone users, and I know numerous Android phone users who buy AirPods because they're, "obviously the best." There's not much more to say. The AirPods Pro especially are beloved, and I know that if you, dear reader, had your AirPods fall into the garbage disposal and get shredded into a million little pieces, within five minutes you'd be putting in a pickup order to get a new pair today.
Well, well, well, what do we have here? The guy who is frustrated by the iPad puts the iPad at number one!
Well, if we look at the criteria, which is mainly on whether Apple makes the best product in a category, I don't think there's a single product on this list that Apple leads more comprehensively in than the iPad. The product simply dominates the tablet market, a market that many companies have tried to compete in and simply haven't come close. Whether it being developer support or user adoption, the iPad is leaving the competition completely in the dust.
No, it's not a good full-time computer for most adults, but it serves so many use cases nicely. Whether you have a Mac, a Windows computer, an iPhone, or an Android phone, it doesn't matter. Having an iPad around is nice, and if given the choice between an iPad and any other tablet on the market, there's absolutely no question you're getting the iPad.
In a way, I think this is both a compliment and an insult to the iPad. It's obviously a compliment if I think it's number one on this list because it absolutely demolishes the competition. However, the only reason it does that is because I'm considering the competition to be cheap Amazon Fire tablets and whatever Samsung and Google are trying these days to make work with software that simply was never meant to run in a tablet form factor. I'm not considering this in the same category as a Mac or a Windows computer or even a Microsoft Surface.
So that's that! I'd love to hear if you agree or disagree with me. If you disagree, the best way to respond would be with a blog post of your own! Tell me what I got wrong!