Blog

Welcome to the Appstart blog

A new home for product updates, the thinking behind our native Mac apps, and the occasional deep dive.

CiderPress: Turn your voice memos into living knowledge

Finally finished+released CiderPress alpha, tested, documented (mostly), and made the key videos for this passion project. The app is free and open. ciderpress/README.md at main · appstart-one/ciderpressCiderPress lets you copy Apple Voice Memos into your own space. You can transcribe, view, and export them—one at a time or in batches. With a single click, you can upload them to Google’s NotebookL…GitHubappstart-one On to the next one!

CiderPress Claymation Explainer

CiderPress (alpha) version 0.1 is live!

This (quickly made) video shows what it is and what it does: CiderPress is an app to make audio journal entries interactive using ai https://share.descript.com/view/kJEUejW4cRU https://github.com/appstart-one/ciderpress

CiderPress - the app I'm working on is almost ready for alpha

Cider Press update Jan 2026

Video update!

Predictions on the stock market, economy and for new college grads : 2026 and the next few years

AI could double the US economy's growth rate over the next decade https://www.zdnet.com/article/ai-could-double-the-us-economys-growth-rate-over-the-next-decade-says-anthropic/#ftag=CAD-03-10abf5f This is a likely scenario I believe will play out - “AI could double the US economy's growth rate over the next decade” Till this article I’ve not actually seen any real data on this scenario studied or spelled out this way, at least not explicitly. The next few years are going to get wild and super

expert discussions

One of the very best features of ChatGPT I rarely hear about is the ability to have a discussion with advanced voice mode, which looks like the above picture.In my case, I'm working on a few vibe-coded apps where I understand some of the technology stack, but there are a lot of details I either never learned or have been lost to time.The ability to rapidly discuss (literally any) technology or tool, how to apply it, and an update on all the best options is really amazing.For instance, I'm trying

Keep your brain sharp in the GPT-5 era

As I begin to reflexively reach for AI when I want some knowledge or to understand a concept, I know I'm not struggling as much to figure things out, and that struggle can obviously be very helpful.The periods in which I've learned the most about technology are those when I've been stuck on an incredibly difficult problem that takes me hours or days to solve. I end up learning about everything in the periphery, what is tangential and what is perpendicular and orthogonal. I commented to my son D

Rovo Dev Agent: NEW AI Coding Agent with FREE 20M Tokens/Day of Claude 4 Sonnet!

https://www.atlassian.com/solutions/devops/ai-innovation crazy , looks like Rovo Dev agent might actually be really good Dev Agent: NEW AI Coding Agent with FREE 20M Tokens/Day of Claude 4 Sonnet! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvXWxGR6o4

2 Things that are incredible at helping me focus

1) I stumbled across this a few months ago and it definitely helps me lock into a flow state much more quickly than I otherwise usually can: brain.fm 2) I've been using the Pomodoro method for a while , but often forget to fire up an app timer which also kind of feels like extra effort. For whatever reason having a physical timer on my desk dedicated to the task of timing a 'block of work' has been very effective for me. I picked up this timer and am really enjoying it

Vibe coding Reddit fun

For anyone interested in VibeCoding, my friend and famous Atlassian developer Don Brown created this Reddit thread which is reasonably active and I think super valuable for anyone trying to track the rapid changes in this ecosystem. Vibe coding for large applications in production Join us there!

College grads are facing something we've never seen, literally

This is a very short segment, which I think is telling of the next several years. The point they make which drives the reality home is that for the first time in history, college grad unemployment is higher than general unemployment (6.6% vs 4.2%), which has never ever happened. I’m thinking about this more and more for all our kids going into college. I'm guessing many of us will have kids living back at home, or in some cases we already do as new white-collar jobs are going to be harder to

Denver Fireworks 2025!

zoomed to the grand finale

Better App Icons for joy

The two tools I've been using quite a bit are Warp Terminal and Cursor. Most things about those are fantastic, but their icons are so indistinct I was starting to have real trouble finding them amongst my sea of typically about 17 icons when I would rapidly switch between apps. Using Cmd+Tab on Mac.  It was starting to feel like the hardest thing about vibe coding 😆 So up updated them to these and now it couldn’t be easier. Small simple wins like this somehow feel outsized for the effort. Ne

FINALLY voice transcription that works

I've been completely dumbfounded that voice-to-text transcription seems to have not advanced at all in 15 years. Finally, I just randomly ran across this tool, which seems to be pretty good and much better than anything else I've seen. I'm using it more and more, of course to write this post. It's not exactly real-time transcription but super easy to access and super fast once you're done talking. It works on phones and computer desktop places. I'm not a paid spokesperson, but maybe I should l

Vibe coding has arrived The train is starting to pull away from the station, but there is plenty of room!

I just created a video showing the app that I created through zero coding, working with an AI agent. It is complete science fiction and mind-boggling to me even now. I made this video with the hopes that it would convince my friends and colleagues who are both software developers and AI skeptics that it's a good idea to jump on this train today.

I'm back

I'm finally back. Ever since the beginning of February, after Tanya and I noticed the house next door to her was available to rent, I've been either moving or traveling or fixing up my old house to sell. Well, today, June 16th, 2025, the house closed. All of that only took about four and a half months. It was all a lot more work than either Tanya or I anticipated. We may not have even pulled the trigger if we knew how much work it was going to be. But I'm glad we did. And it's fun to have a hous

How to use Qwen to drive a coding Agent

This is the video I wished I'd been able to watcha few days ago. It shows how to setup Cline in VSCode to use the latest most powerful coding model qwen-max (as of Jan 30th 2025) - so I made it.

o3 from OpenAI seems like it just dropped!

This is the model which scores high on some AGI benchmarks. 2025 is already waaay ahead of schedule between this, Deepseek and Qwen-Max 2.5 (from Alibaba). https://openai.com/index/openai-o3-mini/

VIC 20 Elite

Foiling in Maui

Love these videos Foiling in Maui

9 Boring But High Paying Remote Jobs (Always Hiring in 2025)

Just a YouTube vid which has a few interesting ideas but elements of clickbait. I can certainly see him being right about a few of these jobs both in that they are likely available and also because they are ultra-boring 🤣 9 Boring But High Paying Remote Jobs (Always Hiring in 2025)

Best MacOS Productivity Utility!?

The debate seems to be with Raycast and Alfred. Raycast has a lot of hype, but this Reddit thread seemed thoughtful and lean towards Alfred. I've used Alfred for at least seven years and always been impressed but there is sometime a better mouse trap. They're both about the same really aside from the built in ai features of Raycast which are interesting, but also makes it expensive. Along the way discovered the free option I never knew about which also looks quite nice Script Kit and if you lik

Frankenhooker

For some reason the YouTube algorithm is feeding me clips from a movie I've never heard of: "Frankenhooker" . Sadly the algorithm probably knows me better than I know myself.......<click>. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Frankenhooker is a 1990 American black comedy horror film co-written and directed by Frank Henenlotter. Loosely inspired by Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, the film stars James Lorinz as medical school dropout Jeffrey Franken and former Penthouse Pet Patty Mullen a

Sabbatical ideas in 2024

You don't control Javascript it controls you

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFGgruLg-44

The 3 Biggest Weeks in AI Jan 2025

5 great cli tools

TLDR: https://tldr.sh/ Bat: https://github.com/sharkdp/bat Fuzzy Finder (fzf): https://github.com/junegunn/fzf zoxide: https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide Disk Usage/Free: https://github.com/muesli/duf I think I'd only seen Fuzzy Finder, but they're all pretty amazing. Most likely most interesting to developers and CLI folks.

for the flow state

https://brain.fm I used this for the first time yesterday. It is generated music that helps focus, targeted at folks with ADHD? It could be the placebo effect but I achieved unusually high focus for a couple of hours. It was surprisingly deep and effective. Here is hoping it continues to be so helpful 🤞 brain.fm 30 days free trial (I get no referral anything)

Found the UI Mockup Tool I was looking for

tl;dr Perfect open source mockup tool Creating software without first creating a mockup is literal insanity. I like Balsamiq Mockups (and it is a good value) - straight forward, intuitive, clever, and easy to use. However restarting on my own means saving my pennies for coffee and the few I have to now spend using Deepseek. I checked out Figma and of course its the do-it-all tool, but for simple fast mockups it is primitive, hard to use and lacks features. For instance you cannot just create

Why am I starting this?

After nearly 30 years of working, I pseudo-semi-sorta retired on Friday, January 17, 2025. I sold my company (which had some cool apps), wrapped up a bit more work, and now… it's passion project time! Still trying to come up with a better name for this phase of life—"freetirement," maybe? Suggestions welcome. ¯\(ツ)/¯ I’m eager to be diving headfirst into building more things: apps, ideas, experiments. With AI in the mix, the creative process is supercharged— making things 4x faster, sometimes 5