Disclaimer: I apologize in advance for the lack of narrative coherence, I just had a bunch of cool things I wanted to share. I'll be improving and trying out this format going forward.

January. January. January. Always an odd month for me. While most people are working towards their New Year Resolutions, I kinda use it as a “buffering” month. I slow down my productivity and try to not have plans. So…

Finally got to try Balatro over the holidays… Man… I’m in awe that such a polished and well designed game can be made by one person. I won’t lie, I’m inspired but also very jealous of localthunk’s artistic vision.

The real surprise gaming-wise though was Dragonsweeper. I had never played minesweeper seriously before, but as soon as I tried this modern take I was pretty hooked. It’s a very simple game but it blends the idea of exploring a dungeon and using your power of deduction seamlessly, and it's thoroughly rewarding.

Whether I wanted to admit or not, I am still very new to my native development journey. SwiftUI is a great technology for someone who wants to develop universal Apple-platform apps. But it can feel very constraining due to it being very "high level", considering the reason why I went to native development is to get closer to the metal and to craft the best possible user experience.

As such, I’ve decided to learn AppKit (the more robust way of building macOS apps) not by my favorite method of learning (fuck around and find out) but instead by following good old tutorials by Paul Hudson (our not-so-local native hero.) I found the process rewarding. So rewarding that I went ahead and asked ChatGPT to write me a tutorial to manually code a text editor using TextKit 2 in the style of Paul Hudson. Paul, if you're reading this, you should make one for realz.

Okay I lied, I still tried to stay productive by forcing myself to balance between fun exploratory coding and making legitimate progress on Bleep. So my favorite update is the fact that I've reached profitability for 2025 in one week! Bleep costs $99 a year to run, and I made $150 in sales (before Apple tax) -- how neat is that?

I don't yet have a consistent marketing strategy, but this particular win came from posting 3 posts on Threads (of all places) with updates on the macOS app with what I consider "flashy" stuff. Good videos recording my favorite interactions and a screenshot of how I use Bleep.

I'm not yet advertising the use cases — I've been lucky enough to find that Bleep resonates with other designers and engineers viscerally at the conceptual level, but I do plan to talk a bit more about the "why?" in an upcoming video on my Youtube channel.

✌️

PS: I do not run a newsletter, but if you happened to enjoy this feel free to drop your email below for more updates. I swear, it's not a newsletter. I may not even post in like another 3 months. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, right?