2026-08-01 21:20:55
It turns out that I have a lot of software ideas in my head. Given my penchant over the years to have more side projects than most people can imagine keeping up with, I guess it shouldn't be a surprise.
I've got 8 apps on the App Store, several web apps, and over 20 micro-apps. It turns out that giving me the tools to create fast means I will create a lot. I'm really proud of what I've built this year, but I also want to take a moment to pause. I don't want to chase new ideas for a bit, I want to level up and sand off the rough edges of what I've already built. I've got a few major updates planned for Quick Reads, Quick Reviews, and Quick Subtitles that I want to get out the door, and there are some tweaks I think the other apps deserve.
Basically, I have more than enough on my plate, and I want to slow down, because left to its own devices, my brain will keep coming up with new things to build.
All that said, I will be making a new thing available to More Birchtree subscribers shortly, but that's truly it…until September, that is.
2026-07-31 06:43:03
Good lord, play with this thing.
2026-07-29 06:33:51
We probably all know Catppuccin at this point, but have you heard the good news about Rosé Pine? neither better nor worse, but a very fun change of pace if you're looking for one.
2026-07-28 23:00:00
For Apple's entire existence, there's been a sort of "debate" over what sort of company Apple is. Are they a hardware company, or are they a software company? The truth, of course, is that they're both, and their ability to deliver at the highest level on both fronts is what has made their products so compelling.
However, in 2026, I think there's a third contender. In addition to being a hardware company and a software company, Apple is very much a rent-seeking company. Based on how lots of people talk about Apple these days, that rent-seeking characteristic seems to be the only absolute hard requirement for them. Basically, unless the winds really change in the future, Apple will never make another computer where they don't always collect 15-30% of all commerce that happens on that device.
Quinn Nelson recently raised the possibility of Apple making a portable gaming device. Based on what we know about Apple, it seems like they could make a really nice competitor to the Nintendo Switch, the Steam Deck, and other gaming PCs. They even have the Game Porting Toolkit for macOS, which they could use to make it possible for people to play Windows games they purchased on something like Steam, the Epic Games Store, or Xbox on the device. Quinn was on The Talk Show last week, and the conversation honestly depressed me a bit. The primary reason both John and Quinn seem to think this will never happen is that Apple would never make a new product where they don't control what you can buy while taking their chunk of the profits.
Whether that's actually true or not, I find it a bit depressing that that's where we are in the Apple punditry, where we won't even entertain the idea of Apple making something, not because the hardware would be bad, not because the software couldn't work, and not because it isn't the sort of thing the company does, but because they wouldn't be able to collect their commission on everything sold for it.
2026-07-28 18:44:11
Ghosthunter is a new CLI that lets you browse and search your Ghost site. It’s free and works with any Ghost blog. You can install it via homebrew with:
brew install mattbirchler/tap/ghosthunter
After installed, you run ghosthunter init to add your site URL and admin key. This will run an initial sync so you have a local cache of your posts. From then on, you just run ghosthunter (or ght) and you get a super quick interface to see your whole history. From here, you have quick access to every post ever, complete with search. The use case I was trying to solve was for when I need to remind myself of when I wrote something, so I just need a link to something I wrote recently. I currently do it by opening my browser, coming here, hit Command+K to bring up search, and find what I need. It's okay, but it's a hell of a lot quicker to do this in the CLI on a local database (don't worry about storage either, my 4873 posts amount to 21MB storage with this tool).
Oh, and because it's a CLI, your agents can use it as well. Here's an example of using an open-ended search that gets results in a way a normal search from the Ghost UI would not find results on its own. This won't be the main use case for me, but hey, if it's useful sometimes, that's lovely.
That's really all there is to it. If you have a Ghost blog and work from the command line, I think you'll like having this tool in your toolbelt.