I’ve always wished Strava’s image sharing feature was more customizable. Would never have taken the time to build a solution by hand. Got this in one shot - ugly but it works! (Claude just had to sneak some purple gradient in there 😄)
iCloud Family Sharing. Seems like a simple/obvious feature to add to a home inventory app like @movingbox.ai. SwiftData's lack of Family Sharing support has been a bummer. sqlite-data from PointfreeCo has been a lifesaver: great DX and functionality all around. Highly recommend.
Launching my first iOS app, MovingBox, was a big step in getting over my fear of failure. I wouldn’t call the first 6 months a success, but my goal was to learn as much as possible, and in that I’ve been successful.
Still lots to learn and improve, but >$0 MRR feels like a win.
Hard truths about SwiftData I’m currently facing:
- No shared containers (no collaboration features)
- No easy MVVM (at least not without building your own querying logic)
I knew these going in, but growing pains are hitting sooner than expected. Anyone switch back to CoreData?
While on parental leave, I’m spending a fairly significant amount of time sitting around while baby sleeps on me.
I might as well make myself useful and keep my QA skills sharp: send me your TestFlight link and I’ll put your app through the wringer! #ios #indiedev
Bugs are always a bummer, but it was nice to take a break from some of the feature work I was starting to spin my wheels on. Trying not to work too much during my parental leave, but also hoping to get these killer new features wrapped up soon.
5. A customer reported that the new button to add additional photos to an existing record wasn’t working. The code that this calls has been commented out by me at some point during testing and was left in that state for release. Damn. At least it was an easy fix:
I’m sure my prompt and context were totally different, and it may have helped that I removed the safe area at the top as part of this change. But perhaps Sonnet is getting a bit better at SwiftUI?
4. Getting the stretchy photo header in this detail view to “stick” to the top of the view was giving me hell. Claude was no use, so I left it in for 2.0. Tried again with Sonnet 4.5 and it was fixed in one shot.
3. Part of this view is a custom re-build of a standard SwiftUI form, to facilitate the stretchy photo header and custom scroll view. Took a little trial and error to get the section header text style right, but I settled on this which seems close enough.
2. Totally missed adding the capsule shape and glass effect to one of the most prominent buttons. Caught it when building my App Store screenshots, but couldn’t prioritize fixing it before the iOS 26 drop.
1. Liquid Glass did some interesting things to this toolbar... Seemed to be caused by an unnecessary toolbar spacer I was applying to all versions of iOS. Moved the spacer into the conditional to exclude iOS 26 and above and it went away.
First a huge shoutout to Jordan and the team at Superwall for giving us SwiftUI Backports. Glad I came across it before getting deep into my Liquid Glass implementation.
Grateful I’m able to take a little time off from the day job to spend some time with baby. She had a solid nap the other day, which gave me a chance to clean up some Liquid Glass bugs I shipped with MovingBox 2.0 last month. A few highlights:
Time to take the “Am I addicted?” test (also known as the “Can I even code anymore?” test in this case). No coding agents for the next 7 days.
Haven’t been too public about my work on MovingBox, but hoping to share a bit more soon on everything that went into the first major update. Submitted over the weekend, not going to get Liquid Glass in on day one but I’m just glad it’s in Apple’s hands now. Before and after:
I’m always amazed at how become a parent has improved my productivity 5-10x. We might not get much sleep, but we make up for it in focus and execution. There’s just too much on the line.
I’m a little biased, but do yourself a favor and hire a parent.
I’m staying optimistic that this is an incredible time to be alive. I don’t think there has been a better time be a builder. I’m not naive to the risks of misalignment, etc, but I’ll choose to worry about what’s in my control.
People have problems, and they’ll pay someone to solve them in the most efficient manner possible. Sure, they could ask AI to build the solution for them, but it won’t approach the problem with the same perspective as a human who has lived with that pain.
I picked a weird time to go all-in on software development. After years of false starts, at the end of 2022 I finally had the resolve to dive in for real. ChatGPT had just landed but was still mostly useless. Lots of change since then, but one thing’s still true:
Every so often I’ll see a question in iOS indie dev circles about automated testing, and the majority of responses indicate that it’s a pretty rare occurrence.
Not only do client apps deserve the same rigor in testing as web, your time as an indie dev is too valuable. #indiedev
As someone who typically ends up writing more real app code in side projects than at the day job, coding time is limited. Balancing the speed of #AI (when it works) with the fight against skill atrophy is a constant struggle. What’s your approach? #indiedev
Feeling very grateful to *not* have unlimited PTO, such that I’m encouraged to use it up throughout the year and not put the team in a bind come December.
Baby’s still a little young to travel but I’m looking forward to some time off to catch up on the side projects next week.
The summer’s been busy with a newborn, but I finally built my app with Xcode 26 a couple weeks ago and was pleased to see most everything looked fine with Liquid Glass. Really pays to use the standard components where possible. Just need to tweak some ToolbarItem grouping.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that automated testing is still going to be essential in the era of fast fashion SaaS. Spend the few extra tokens to write some tests and keep your customers.
Yeah they are different goals for sure. More of a social or financial pursuit rather than creative. But it definitely lowers the barrier to getting out and playing live if that’s what a person is after.
16 year old me wouldn’t have been caught dead playing #guitar in a #coverband (had to be original hardcore or nothing).
But joining a cover band in my 30s after years of not playing was one of the best decisions I’ve made. Can’t go wrong playing music with friends.
One of the strangest sensations of being a parent to young kids is the fog of sleep deprivation set against the clarity of mission (stakes are too high to fuck this up). Thankfully the former is temporary, while the latter will always be there to inspire improvement.
After reading Pragmatic Programmer years ago, today I finally forced myself to keep my hands on the keyboard for an entire coding session in Xcode. I was so slow. But after 30 minutes of fumbling I felt the muscle memory click and I started to fly. Definitely worth a try.
If you’re trying to make sense of what work and #AI looks like in the coming years, the stuff that Dan Koe and @80000hours.bsky.social have been putting out recently has helped me reframe the dread into optimism.
It’s going to get rocky but there will always be problems that need solving.
