Journal · Notes from a one-person Apple studio
Stories, shipping notes,
and design principles.
Rebrand stories, changelog entries, and occasional essays about building privacy-first iOS and macOS apps without advertisers, accounts, or VC pressure.
May 23, 2026 · 6 min read
The unlock cost has to live outside the app
Every screen-time blocker on the App Store has the same secret. If you tap hard enough, it folds. A short essay on why every app in this category eventually adds a tap-through escape — and what to build instead.
May 13, 2026 · 9 min read
Why Mac-native is the right architecture for App Store screenshots — and why it's so rare
Every credible App Store screenshot tool on the market today is web-based. You drop your pre-release screenshots into someone else's browser, they get uploaded to someone else's servers, they get rendered there, and you download the result. This is a strange architecture for a product whose entire input is content under NDA. Here's why Mac-native makes more sense — and the structural reasons almost nobody builds it that way.
May 13, 2026 · 8 min read
What 14 days of Apple Health data is enough to reveal — and what isn't
Apple Health is the largest passive health dataset most people will ever own — and almost nobody uses it for what it's actually good at. Here's a practical guide to which questions two weeks of data can answer, which ones need 60 days, and which ones it can't answer at all.
May 13, 2026 · 10 min read
How to ship a localised App Store screenshot set in 39 languages without losing your weekend
App Store Connect accepts screenshots in 39 locales. Most indie apps ship in one. The gap isn't ambition — it's that the manual workflow takes 10 to 30 hours per release, and any change to a single screenshot means redoing the localisation pass. This post walks through a reproducible workflow that takes 90 minutes for the first release and 15 minutes for each subsequent one.
May 13, 2026 · 6 min read
How Plan Mode builds a wedding (or trip, or pregnancy) checklist
Most countdown apps stop at the number of days. Soon.'s Plan Mode goes one step further — it builds a tailored checklist for the event type and schedules each task backward from the date, so you don't have to. Here's exactly how the template engine works, why it's anchored to T-minus rather than T-plus, and what's deliberately not in it.
May 13, 2026 · 9 min read
How Chessful turns a Stockfish evaluation into adaptive training
Most chess apps that claim 'adaptive training' don't actually adapt to your games — they adapt to a generic difficulty curve over a fixed puzzle pool. Chessful adapts to the specific mistake patterns in your real losses. This post is the design note for that engine: how raw centipawn output becomes a motif classification, how motifs become skill-bucket flags, and how skill-bucket flags become a spaced-repetition training queue. No marketing. No black box.
May 13, 2026 · 8 min read
Why engine depth at club level should be tuned down, not up
Every chess app boasts about engine depth. Chess.com's analysis runs to depth 22. Lichess Cloud reaches 28. Stockfish on a modern desktop will happily run depth 35 if you let it. This post is about why none of that helps an 800–1800 rated player improve, and why Chessful intentionally caps engine depth at the level where the mistakes that actually decide club games become visible — and not deeper.
May 13, 2026 · 8 min read
Countdown psychology — why anticipation beats reminders
There's a sleep researcher's joke that the best part of a holiday is the planning of it. It's funnier because it's defensible — the psychology of anticipation is one of the most reliably positive emotional states a person can be in, and it costs nothing. This post is about why countdown apps work, why anticipation outperforms reminders as a motivational tool, and what a well-designed countdown should actually do with that emotional surface.
May 13, 2026 · 7 min read
Why your Apple Watch HRV number means almost nothing without a baseline
A 42ms HRV reading on Apple Watch can be excellent, average, or alarming — and you can't tell which without context. The number on its own is one of the most-misread metrics in consumer health. Here's what HRV actually tells you, what it doesn't, and why a personal baseline is the only frame that makes the reading usable.
May 13, 2026 · 9 min read
The 6 Apple Health metrics worth interpreting (and the 12 worth ignoring)
Apple Health collects more than 80 distinct health metrics. Most of them are noise, vanity numbers, or sensor data you have no useful frame for. Here's the practical short list: the six that actually move with your habits and reward interpretation, the twelve that look meaningful but mostly aren't, and how to tell the difference.
May 13, 2026 · 8 min read
What every App Store Review Guidelines screenshot rule actually means (and which ones get apps rejected)
App Store Review Guidelines §2.3.3 looks like one short paragraph about screenshots. In practice it's the single most common reason indie apps get rejected during the screenshot pass. Here's what each clause actually means, the patterns that trigger rejection, and the ones reviewers wave through.
May 13, 2026 · 11 min read
The 30 chess mistake motifs Chessful detects (and why each one matters)
Most chess apps reduce 'why did I lose' to a centipawn graph. Chessful turns it into one of about thirty specific mistake categories — each with a name, a structural cause, and an explicit drill that fixes it. This post is the full catalogue. It doubles as a reference page for Chessful users and a short tour of the mistakes that actually decide club-level games.
May 9, 2026 · 6 min read
The Mac already shipped with every media tool — someone just had to wire them together
MediaKit is 133 local tools for video, audio, image, PDF, and archive work, behind a single drag-and-drop Mac interface. None of the operations ever leave your machine. This post is the case for that — and why "upload your file to a random website to convert it" remains one of the worst defaults on the open web in 2026.
May 2, 2026 · 5 min read
The day I plan on my phone is not the day I finish at my desk
Taskful Day shipped on the Mac this week. This is the small essay on why a calm daily planner had to be a native Mac app — not a stretched-iPhone Catalyst window — and why it's one Universal Purchase across iPhone, iPad, and Mac instead of three separate licenses.
April 25, 2026 · 6 min read
LiftLog ships. You pick the price.
LiftLog — a design-led strength training log for iPhone — is on the App Store today. There is no subscription. After seven days free with no card on file, you decide what it's worth to you: $9.99, $19.99, $29.99, or $39.99. Once. Here's why.
April 18, 2026 · 5 min read
A read-only dashboard for App Store revenue, on the iPhone
Your accountant doesn't need write-access to App Store Connect. Your designer doesn't either. Your spouse, your co-founder, your weekly bookkeeping flow — none of them need to be able to change your app's metadata in order to know how it's selling. AppMeta Pulse is the small iPhone app I built when I got tired of explaining that distinction.
April 13, 2026 · 5 min read
TheWait is now Soon. — why we rebuilt and rebranded
After a year of quietly growing, TheWait has been fully rebuilt and relaunched as Soon. Here's why the old name had to go, what changed under the hood, and what stays the same for existing users.
April 4, 2026 · 3 min read
A small game for an attentional cease-fire
It's the long weekend before Easter, the kind of weekend that's structurally a pause. This is a small post about Calm 2048 — a no-ads, no-lives, no-dark-patterns version of a twelve-year-old puzzle — and why a small calm thing on the App Store still has a place in 2026.
March 28, 2026 · 5 min read
Your photos shouldn't ride the elevator to a stranger's data centre
Almost every online image converter you've used in the last decade uploaded your file to a server you don't control, processed it there, and gave you back a download. The convenience is real. The privacy implication is not small. MediaKit is the studio's argument that 133 of those tools should run on your Mac instead.
March 21, 2026 · 4 min read
Literary software, in the spring
It's the day after the spring equinox. The northern hemisphere is officially leaning into the light. This is a small post about Driftlines — a deliberately anti-engagement piece of software — and why I think the category of literary apps deserves to exist.
March 14, 2026 · 5 min read
The case for a native App Store screenshot tool
App Store screenshots are the highest-leverage assets in the indie marketing stack and most indie developers, including past versions of me, treat them as the worst chore of every release. Mockly is the studio's argument that the workflow should be a native Mac app, not a YAML-driven CI script.
March 7, 2026 · 5 min read
Why I shipped a Strong-style logger that nobody asked for
Strong, Hevy, and Fitbod already exist. The strength-training logger market is well-served. I shipped GymLogger X anyway, and the reason isn't features — it's that nobody else seems to think Apple Watch deserves to be the actual workout log.
February 28, 2026 · 5 min read
Forty chess opponents, and none of them are me
The single hardest decision in Chessful's design wasn't the engine, the analysis, or the spaced-repetition trainer. It was that the app needed to feel like you were playing forty different people, not the same engine forty times wearing different hats.
February 21, 2026 · 6 min read
On building a native Mac client for App Store Connect
App Store Connect is the most consequential web app most indie developers use, and it has been the same web app for ten years. AppMeta is the studio's quietest app and arguably the most useful — a native Mac client for the ASC API, built for the day you're shipping in fourteen locales and need to stop scrolling.
February 14, 2026 · 4 min read
How to split a Valentine's dinner without making it weird
It's the 14th. Somewhere right now, a group of four friends is staring at a $312 dinner bill, three of them ordered the steak, one ordered the salad, and someone is doing math on a napkin. RightSplit was built for that exact moment.
February 7, 2026 · 5 min read
Reading without a feed: a quiet year with Wikipedia
I deleted my last social-feed app in late 2024. The hardest part wasn't withdrawal. It was rebuilding a habit of reading something, anything, in the small windows that used to be filled by scrolling. WanderWiki was, more than anything else, the tool I built to give that habit somewhere to live.
January 31, 2026 · 5 min read
I will not ask for your bank login
It's the last day of January and the bank-aggregator apps are advertising themselves into every podcast in America. The pitch is convenience. The price is your read access to your own checking account. AllPaid takes the other path on purpose.
January 24, 2026 · 6 min read
Building a sleep app for nurses, pilots, and the people who don't have a 9-to-5
Most sleep apps assume an 11pm bedtime and a 7am alarm. The people who keep hospitals, planes, and emergency rooms running don't live that life. AfterShift is the app I built after hearing the same complaint from too many friends in scrubs.
January 17, 2026 · 6 min read
Your Apple Health data isn't telling you what you think it's telling you
Three years of HRV charts, ten thousand data points, and a feeling that none of it added up to anything. The story behind Observa, and why interpretation matters more than tracking.
January 10, 2026 · 5 min read
A streak counter is a debt the user owes the app
Last week's post was the polite version. Here's the structural one: streak counters are a debt instrument. The app issues them; the user owes them; the app collects on the missed day. Why Taskful Day was built without one.
January 3, 2026 · 4 min read
If your fitness app is making you feel guilty in week one, that's the design — not you
Forty-eight hours into the new year, the fitness apps are already doing what they were built to do: rewarding you for one good day, then twisting the knife on the day after. A short note on why most of them are designed wrong, and what to look for in the ones that aren't.
January 1, 2026 · 3 min read
What I'm not doing in 2026
It's the first day of the year. Everywhere on the internet, people are listing what they will build, ship, optimize, and grow. Here's a shorter list — what this studio is choosing not to do.
December 27, 2025 · 2 min read
What this journal is, and what it is not
A short note about why Lagerland Apps now has a journal — and what you can expect to find here.