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.
October 21, 2026 · 6 min read
How long to rest between sets: what the studies found, lift by lift
Most of a strength session is rest. A set of eight takes about half a minute; the gap before the next one takes two or three. So the rest timer decides how long you are in the gym more than the program does. The old rule was one minute for size and three for strength. The research has moved since then, including a new American College of Sports Medicine review this year. Here is what it says now, by lift and by goal.
October 17, 2026 · 7 min read
When does Apple pay developers? The App Store fiscal calendar, payment dates and missing months
Apple pays App Store developers once per fiscal month, and its fiscal months don't line up with the calendar. That one fact explains most of the confusion: the month with two deposits, the month with none, and the financial report that seems to cover the wrong dates.
October 14, 2026 · 7 min read
When to deload: the signs, the common schemes, and how good the evidence really is
A deload is the week most lifters plan and few can explain. Everyone agrees you take one; the arguments are about when, what you cut, and whether it does anything at all. The evidence so far is a consensus of coaches, a large survey of athletes, and a small number of controlled trials. That is enough for practical answers, as long as you know which kind of answer you are getting.
October 9, 2026 · 7 min read
Designing a puzzle with no words: how Tare teaches its rules, and what accessibility took
Tare has 200 levels and not one word on the playing field: no tutorial screen, no arrows, no “drag here”. The puzzle had to teach itself, and with no text to label, accessibility had to reach the board itself. This post covers what the first levels teach and how, then what it took to make the same puzzle work with VoiceOver, high contrast and large type.
October 9, 2026 · 7 min read
No ads, no subscription: why Tare is free to start and $2.99 once
Tare is out today as a free download. Chapter I's 20 levels are free for good, and one $2.99 purchase opens the rest (60 levels at launch, 180 in the ten-chapter game). There are no ads or subscriptions and nothing else to buy. Below is the whole model in one table, the paid-app plan it replaced, and the story of a purchase so quiet that App Review couldn't find it.
October 9, 2026 · 9 min read
How to solve a balance puzzle, and how Tare proves every level has one answer
Tare's levels are hanging mobiles you balance with weights, and some of the weights are hidden. Every one was built by hand, and none ships until the test suite proves three things about it: it has exactly one answer, its cards alone name every hidden weight, and its decoys fit nowhere. This post shows how to solve one, then how the proof works.
October 7, 2026 · 7 min read
Xiangqi openings explained: the Central Cannon, its answers, and the quieter first moves
Xiangqi opening theory is narrower than chess theory. One first move is the most common, a handful of named answers meet it, and five quieter first moves make up the rest of the list. This post covers the ten openings worth knowing by name, the notation they are written in, and the main line of the Central Cannon against the Screen Horses, move by move.
October 4, 2026 · 7 min read
Xiangqi rules for chess players: what carries over, and what catches you out
If you play chess, you already know half of xiangqi. The chariot is a rook, the horse is almost a knight, and checkmate still ends the game. The other half is a short list of rules, and most of it reverses a chess habit. Here is the board, every piece next to its chess cousin, and the rules that cost chess players their first games.
October 3, 2026 · 6 min read
Puzzle games without ads or lives: how free games make money, and what Millrace sells instead
Free on the App Store covers very different deals. You pay for some free puzzle games with your attention, for others with your patience or a subscription. This post explains each model, how to spot it on a product page before you install, and lists everything Millrace sells: nine optional items, none of which a level needs.
October 1, 2026 · 9 min read
902 xiangqi mate problems, eight old books, and the problems I left out
Xiangqiful ships 902 consecutive-check mate problems. I composed 194 of them; the other 708 come from eight classical manuals, one of them from 1570. No book problem was edited to make it work, and the ones that didn't work aren't in the app. Below is the full count, by book and by depth, and how every line was checked.
September 27, 2026 · 8 min read
How to plan moves ahead in a tile puzzle: six checks, and Millrace's Level 1 move by move
Nothing in a Millrace level is random, so every level can be planned to the end before your first swipe. In practice, planning is a short list of checks you run before each move. This post gives the six that matter, why each follows from the rules, and Level 1 played move by move, including the two swipes that lose it on the spot.
September 24, 2026 · 4 min read
Sixty-four levels, none written by hand: how Millrace finds and proves its puzzles
I didn't write any of Millrace's 64 levels. A generator proposed them, a breadth-first solver measured each one, and a gate in the test suite decided which ones ship. This is how that works, and why the goal of every level is the one it is.
September 19, 2026 · 7 min read
Promotional text vs description: which App Store fields you can change without an update
Half the App Store product page is frozen until your next update, and the other half you can change on a Tuesday afternoon. Apple documents which is which, but across four or five different help pages. This is all of it in one table, checked against Apple's current pages, with the two places most people get it wrong.
September 12, 2026 · 7 min read
How to sleep on call: the waiting, the wake-up and the morning after
Being on call costs sleep even on nights when nobody calls. Studies of ships' engineers, doctors, firefighters and other on-call workers point at two separate problems: the waiting, which keeps sleep light before any call comes, and the wake-up, when grogginess is at its worst. This post sums up that research and what it means for naps, caffeine and the morning after.
September 5, 2026 · 9 min read
Double progression explained: add reps until the range runs out, then add weight
Linear progression asks the bar to get heavier every session, and on most lifts that stops working within months. What usually comes next is double progression: the weight stays put while the reps climb through a range, and only then does the load go up. It is simple to describe and easy to run badly. This post covers the rules, eight sessions worked through, what a small plate adds in percent, and the signs it has run its course.
August 29, 2026 · 8 min read
Shogi openings for beginners: Static Rook, Ranging Rook and the first lines to learn
A chess player can learn a few first moves and get by. Shogi asks a bigger question first: where is your rook going to live? Every shogi opening answers it one of two ways, and the answer decides your castle, your attack and the kind of game you will play. This post maps the openings, writes out two lines move by move, and suggests how to pick your first one.
August 22, 2026 · 7 min read
Puppy and kitten vaccination schedules: what's due when, and which dates to keep
Most puppies and kittens get their first vaccines at six to eight weeks. What comes after is where owners lose track: how many more doses, how far apart, why the last one has to wait until 16 weeks, and why the vet wants another visit at six months or a year. Three sets of veterinary guidelines answer those questions and mostly agree. Below they are side by side, along with the dates worth keeping from every certificate.
August 17, 2026 · 8 min read
RPE and RIR explained: the 1-10 effort scale for lifting and how to rate a set honestly
Two lifters can both do 3 sets of 5 at 100 kg and be having completely different workouts. One finished every set with three reps to spare; the other ground out the last rep of each. RPE and RIR are the two ways lifters write that difference down. They count the same thing from opposite ends, and the scale most people use comes from one specific study.
August 13, 2026 · 15 min read
The bill-splitting math nobody agrees on: tax, tip, shared plates, and the leftover cent
There is no single correct way to split a restaurant bill. There are about six defensible ways, they produce answers that differ by twenty dollars a head, and your table has never agreed on which one it uses. Below is every rule with the arithmetic worked all the way out: tax, tip, the shared bottle, and the cent that will not divide.
August 6, 2026 · 12 min read
PPL, Upper/Lower, 5/3/1: choosing a strength program you will still be running in twelve weeks
Run two competently written strength programs, same person, same twelve weeks, and the results barely differ. Finishing twelve weeks versus quitting in week five makes an enormous difference. So the useful comparison is which program survives your actual calendar, and that is what this post compares, with the progression rules spelled out.
August 1, 2026 · 7 min read
How to create an App Store Connect API key: team or individual, the right role, and a .p8 you only get once
Every tool that talks to App Store Connect on your behalf, from fastlane to a Mac client like mine, starts with the same three things: an Issuer ID, a Key ID, and a .p8 file. Creating them takes two minutes. Choosing the right kind of key and the right role is where people go wrong, and the .p8 download gives you exactly one chance.
July 29, 2026 · 13 min read
What an iPhone app can actually block, and what it structurally cannot
No third-party iPhone app blocks anything by itself. It asks iOS to do the blocking, through three Apple frameworks with sharp, published limits. Those limits are why your blocker cannot name the apps you blocked, why notifications still arrive, and why the honest answer to 'can this be bypassed' is always yes.
July 25, 2026 · 6 min read
How to compress a video for email: the size limits and the bitrate math
Every email provider caps what it will carry, and video reaches the cap fast. This post covers the limits Gmail, Outlook, and iCloud Mail publish, why a 25 MB limit does not take a 25 MB file, the arithmetic that turns a target size into a bitrate, and how MediaKit does that arithmetic on iPhone or Mac without uploading the clip.
July 20, 2026 · 7 min read
App Store proceeds vs sales: what each money column in App Store Connect means
Sales and Trends shows two money figures side by side, and only one of them is close to what reaches your bank. This is a reference to what each number in App Store Connect's sales reports counts, how Apple gets from the customer's price to your proceeds, and why neither will match the payment to the cent.
July 16, 2026 · 13 min read
The same Wikipedia article is a different article in another language
The languages sidebar on a Wikipedia article looks like a language switcher, but each language Wikipedia is an independent encyclopedia with its own editors, its own inclusion rules, and its own article set. Two editions can disagree about facts, framing, length, and whether a subject merits an article at all. This post covers what differs, how big each edition really is, and why reading a topic in two languages is a real research technique.
July 12, 2026 · 12 min read
Your vet paperwork is a household document, and it should never leave the phone
Nobody would upload a photo of their driving licence to a free web tool. Plenty of people photograph the dog's rabies certificate into a cloud pet app without a second thought, and those two documents carry roughly the same household. Here is what is actually printed on vet paperwork, what changes when the image leaves the device, and a four-test checklist you can run on any health app before you trust it with the drawer.
July 5, 2026 · 10 min read
Rotating shift schedules explained: DuPont, Pitman, 4-on-4-off, Continental and which are hardest on sleep
DuPont, Pitman, Panama, 4-on-4-off, Continental, Southern swing: most rotating rosters are one of a handful of named patterns, and the names get used loosely. This is a reference for what each one actually is, how it moves you between days and nights, and what the research says about which rotations cost the most sleep.
July 1, 2026 · 12 min read
Find every recurring charge you are paying, without linking a bank account
Most people audit their subscriptions by scrolling a bank statement, which almost always misses the expensive ones. Recurring charges are spread across eight lists, and the yearly ones are invisible eleven months out of twelve. This is the full checklist, in the order that finds the most money first.
June 27, 2026 · 8 min read
How to calculate MRR for App Store subscriptions from Apple's Subscription report
App Store Connect's Analytics dashboard now shows an MRR figure, but Apple doesn't publish how it gets there. The daily Subscription report has every input you need to work it out yourself. The arithmetic is one line. When two dashboards disagree, the cause is almost always one of four decisions around that line.
June 23, 2026 · 14 min read
How to read a shogi engine evaluation (and why it is not a chess centipawn)
A chess player opens a shogi analysis for the first time, sees +1800, and divides by a hundred out of habit. The arithmetic almost works, since a YaneuraOu pawn is 90 points against a centipawn's 100, and the conclusion is still wrong: the same nominal material edge buys far less in a game where captured pieces come back as drops. This post walks through the whole conversion, band by band.
June 20, 2026 · 8 min read
How many steps a day should you aim for? What the large studies found, and how to pick a goal you'll keep
Ten thousand steps started as a slogan. The large studies of step counts and health point lower, and they agree with each other more than the headlines suggest. This post covers what they measured and found, and how to turn that into a daily number you will still hit when an app you want is waiting behind it.
June 14, 2026 · 11 min read
What actually belongs in your pet's medical record (and who asks for what)
Your vet has a record. It is their record of their visits, and it stops at the door of their practice. The record that matters is the one you can produce yourself, at 11pm in an emergency clinic across town or at a kennel that will not take your dog without proof of a Bordetella shot. This post covers what belongs in it and who asks for which part.
June 11, 2026 · 9 min read
Shogi pieces in English: how to read the board without learning kanji
Every shogi piece is the same wooden wedge stamped with a kanji character, and that one design choice stops most chess players at the door long before the rules do. Below is every piece in plain English: its name, its character, how it moves, what it promotes to, and how to read a shogi move written down.
June 6, 2026 · 7 min read
How to estimate your one-rep max: Epley, Brzycki and five other formulas, worked through
You rarely need to grind out a true single to know roughly what it would be. A hard set of five already contains most of the answer, and there are half a dozen published formulas for pulling it out. They agree closely in the middle of the rep range and fall apart at the edges. Below is each formula, what it says about the same set, and where to stop trusting it.
May 30, 2026 · 6 min read
How much to tip in the US: every common situation, with the arithmetic
American tipping is a dozen small rules, and most of the confusion comes from not knowing which one applies. Below are a table by situation, the arithmetic for the awkward cases (pre-tax or post-tax, the bar tab, the bill that already includes a gratuity), and the source for every number.
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 in its place.
May 16, 2026 · 7 min read
How the App Store keyword field works: 100 characters, commas, and the words Apple already indexes
Customers never see the keyword field, yet it decides a lot about who finds your app. Apple's rules for it would fit on an index card, and most of the advice around it is folklore. This post covers what Apple documents, what it leaves out, and how to spend 100 characters without wasting a third of them.
May 13, 2026 · 8 min read
Why Mac-native is the right architecture for App Store screenshots, and why it's so rare
Most App Store screenshot tools on the market today are web-based. You drop your pre-release screenshots into someone else's browser, they get uploaded to someone else's servers and rendered there, and you download the result. That is a strange architecture for a product whose entire input is content that hasn't been announced. This post explains why Mac-native makes more sense, and why so few tools are built 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 does well. This is 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 · 8 min read
How to ship a localised App Store screenshot set in 39 languages without losing your weekend
App Store Connect takes screenshots in dozens of languages, and Mockly lists 50 of them. Most indie apps ship in one, because the manual workflow can eat a weekend on the first release, and any change to a single screenshot means redoing the localisation pass. This post walks through a workflow that keeps the text editable, so adding languages becomes mostly mechanical work.
May 13, 2026 · 5 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 also suggests a checklist and a timeline of milestones for the kind of event you picked. This is how those suggestions work, why they are written in advance instead of generated, and what we left out on purpose.
May 13, 2026 · 7 min read
How Chessful turns a Stockfish evaluation into adaptive training
Most chess apps that claim 'adaptive training' adapt to a generic difficulty curve over a fixed puzzle pool, not to your games. Chessful adapts to the mistakes in your real games. This post is the design note for how that works: how an on-device Stockfish review becomes a set of explained mistakes, how those mistakes feed your skill profile, and how they come back as daily training and spaced review.
May 13, 2026 · 8 min read
Why engine depth at club level should be tuned down, not up
Every chess app advertises its 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 explains why none of that helps an 800 to 1800 rated player improve, and why Chessful's Game Review runs Stockfish at depth 16: just past the level where the mistakes that decide club games become visible, and no 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: looking forward to something is one of the most reliably positive emotional states a person can be in, and it costs nothing. This post covers why countdown apps work, why anticipation motivates better than reminders do, and what a countdown should do with the space it takes up on your phone.
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. On its own, the number is one of the most misread metrics in consumer health. This post covers what HRV 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. This is the short list: the six that move with your habits and reward interpretation, the twelve that look meaningful but mostly aren't, and how to tell the two apart.
May 13, 2026 · 10 min read
App Store screenshot guidelines (2026): sizes, requirements, and what gets rejected
Two sets of App Store screenshot rules get apps rejected or sent back for a re-upload: the technical specs (which sizes, how many, what format) and Review Guideline §2.3.3 (what the screen is allowed to show). This post covers both: the current 2026 specifications, and what each content clause means in practice.
May 13, 2026 · 10 min read
The 30 chess mistake motifs Chessful detects (and why each one matters)
Most chess apps reduce 'why did I lose' to an evaluation graph. A name for the mistake helps more: something you can remember, drill, and recognize in the next game. This post is a reference of thirty common mistake motifs at club level, grouped under five skill areas, each with its cause and the drill that fixes it, and it shows how they line up with the 10 mistake types Chessful puts on every mistake it finds.
May 9, 2026 · 6 min read
The Mac already shipped with every media tool, and someone just had to wire them together
MediaKit is more than 150 local tools for video, audio, image, PDF, archive, and ebook work, behind a single drag-and-drop interface on Mac and iPhone. Every operation runs on your machine. This post makes the case for that, and for 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 short essay explains why a daily planner has to run on the Mac where the work happens, what it took to make an iPad-born app behave like a Mac app you keep open all day, and why it is one app across iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
April 25, 2026 · 6 min read
LiftLog ships. You pick the price.
LiftLog, a strength training log for iPhone, is on the App Store today. It has 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, paid once. This post explains why.
April 18, 2026 · 5 min read
A glanceable dashboard for App Store revenue, on the iPhone
Your accountant doesn't need write access to App Store Connect, and neither does your designer, your spouse, or your co-founder. Nobody in your weekly bookkeeping needs to be able to change your app's metadata to know how it's selling. AppMeta Pulse started as my answer to that. It turned out narrower: a quick revenue check for the account owner, on their own devices.
April 13, 2026 · 4 min read
TheWait is now Soon. Why we rebuilt and rebranded
After a year of slow growth, the countdown app was fully rebuilt and relaunched as Soon. This post covers why the old name had to go, what the rebuild added, and what stayed the same.
April 11, 2026 · 6 min read
How to find a random Wikipedia article that is worth reading
Wikipedia's Random article link draws from more than seven million articles, and only about one in a thousand of them is a featured article. Here is every route the site itself provides to something worth reading, how random each one really is, and the address that makes Random land only on reviewed articles.
April 4, 2026 · 8 min read
How to organise your bills each month: a bill calendar that matches your paydays
A list of bills tells you what you owe. It does not tell you which paycheck pays for what, and that is the question behind every short week. This post walks through the bill-calendar method the CFPB recommends, a worked example on a real 2026 pay schedule, and the formula that evens out biweekly pay.
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. That is convenient, and it has real privacy costs. MediaKit is the studio's argument that more than 150 of those tools should run on your Mac or iPhone instead.
March 21, 2026 · 8 min read
How to sleep after a night shift: the drive home, the dark room, the nap and the days off
Sleeping in daylight after a night shift is hard for reasons that have little to do with discipline. Your body clock says it is morning, the street is awake and the sun is up. Some of the most specific public advice on what to do about it sits in a free NIOSH training course written for nurses. Below it is in the order you will need it: the end of the shift, the drive home, the bedroom, the nap and the days off.
March 14, 2026 · 6 min read
The case for a native App Store screenshot tool
App Store screenshots do more marketing work for an indie app than anything else, and most indie developers, past versions of me included, treat them as the worst chore of every release. Mockly is the studio's case that this workflow belongs in a native Mac app, and that a YAML-driven CI script is the wrong home for it.
March 7, 2026 · 5 min read
Why I shipped a Strong-style logger that nobody asked for
Strong, Hevy, and Fitbod already exist, and the market for strength-training loggers is well served. I shipped GymLogger X anyway, because I wanted workouts to be logged on the wrist instead of on the phone screen.
February 28, 2026 · 4 min read
Forty chess opponents, and none of them are me
Of all the decisions in Chessful's design, including the engine, the analysis, and the spaced-repetition trainer, the hardest was making the app feel like forty different people. The usual approach is one engine and a strength slider.
February 21, 2026 · 6 min read
On building a native Mac client for App Store Connect
For most indie developers, App Store Connect is the web app that matters most, and it has been the same web app for ten years. AppMeta is the studio's least visible app and possibly its most useful one: a native Mac client for the ASC API, made 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 is the app we made for that 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 was rebuilding a habit of reading something, anything, in the small windows I used to fill by scrolling. I built WanderWiki mostly 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 deliberately skips the bank connection.
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, airports, and emergency rooms running don't live that way. 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 interpreting health data matters more than tracking it.
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. This is the structural one: streak counters are a debt instrument. The app issues them, the user owes them, and the app collects on the missed day. Here is why Taskful Day keeps the streak off the Today screen and lets a missed task simply move on.
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 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, and all over the internet people are listing what they will build, ship, optimize, and grow. This is 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 on why Lagerland Apps now has a journal, and what you can expect to find here.