robgough

Have you seen that they've added an `fm` tool? It was mentioned in the Platforms State of the Union.

Here's what you get when you run it... https://gist.github.com/robgough/7893602895e7580117475076198...

I'm fully expecting an updated foundation model of some kind, but I would bet money they don't utter the words "Google", "Gemini", or "Gemma" even once.

Mac only I'm afraid, but I already did [1]. Packaged it too as I figured it might be useful to others [2] (and I'd want to install it on machine's that I might not have Xcode on)

[1]: https://github.com/robgough/dictator [2]: https://dictator.robgough.net

I spent the best part of a couple weeks making improvements and tidying up the UI, but to actually get something working was essentially only a couple of prompts.

I've got a home-built dictation app that uses a local model to clear up the text and fix grammar. It was super easy to build. I’m extending it to capture meeting notes and summarise too. All on-device.

I saw a little app the other day, I think someone posted on here, that looks at your screenshot and renames the file based off the contents of the file.

There's tons of little examples like that. For a lot of use cases, you really don't need the frontier models.

I recently built a similar app, and so hit the same limitations – I wasn't too upset on Mac, happy to distribute without the App Store (though it's a shame).

Where I was more frustrated was how much this limited the potential usability of the iPhone app. Because of app store restrictions it is a far worse app ... though like in your example, still useful to a degree.

I can only hope they use the new CEO as an opportunity to seriously re-evaluate their entire approach to how they work with developers, though I'm not actually expecting them to. If anything, with the increase in apps being created via AI tools I worry they will go the other way.

It's not as powerful as Gemma 4, but I think they likened it to GPT-3. It's perfectly capable of looking at images and classifying them at the level you'll need for this app. And it runs everything on the Apple Neural engines, so decently quick. Of course, this assumes that your users are using Apple Silicon processors, I believe that's the limitation – and they must have enabled Apple Intelligence which downloads the model at that point.

As clever as this is, it seems like the names are fairly straightforward (as you'd want!) – did you try using the on-device Apple Foundation model at all? That's actually pretty powerful for a use case like this, and if you're happy to require the user has Apple Intelligence turned on already, your shipped app can end up being tiny. The biggest concern for an app like this is how much RAM you end up using trying to run it. Especially if we end up with lots of different apps all doing the same thing.

Being able to super-power apps with on-device models is a lot of fun. I recently did the same building my own dictation app using small local models, and I still can't believe how effective it is. The download is just 20mb, though it will download parakeet ~475mb for audio, but can use the on-device model as the second-pass LLM and works pretty well (though better models are available to download and use e.g. Llama 3.2 4bit and Qwen 2.5 7B 4bit)

I'm currently building a little tool for a professional photographer friend to go through and classify images in their photoshoots, so I can build a searchable db for them to quickly find very specific images in the future. I simply don't think it would have been possible for me to build a tool like that just a couple years ago at any price.

Review times have already spiked, apparently, although I've never found them particularly good. There used to be a third-party website that tracked this via user submissions, though that was shut down when they made genuine efforts to improve timings several years ago as it was deemed no longer neccesary.

I think it's a fair criticism that there will be a lot of people putting "lower-quality" apps on there. I do think Claude did a better job of this than I would have managed. It certainly seems to work well enough.

I do believe Apple will have to rethink exactly what they want to gatekeep and why. If nothing else, in the context of allowing people to get more out of their powerful devices. For example, I wish my iPad Pro could actually do more useful things with it's M4 processor. Hopefully that's something the new CEO has on his list.

I think that's a fair question. For this app I didn't see the harm in releasing it. You have to pay for the account etc. to get it onto TestFlight anyway, so I might as well just put it out there. And avoids me having to resubmit every 90 days. There also wasn't a lot of custom "me" stuff in this one, but I could see going that route for other apps in the future.

That looks great! It's so clearly going to be the dominant way of working with your computer. I was such a cynic, so I was completely shocked at how quickly it became my favourite way to interact with my devices.

I'm fully expecting to be completely sherlocked during Apple's WWDC event in the coming weeks. In fact, I'm hoping we will be. However, I fear that they might not be quite ready for that yet. This functionality really should sit at the top OS level, equal to Keyboard/Mouse/Trackpad etc.

Exactly this.

For example the iOS app failed first time as I accidentally used "Free" in the app name, and the app declared support for UIBackgroundModes but they were "unable to locate any features that require persistent audio". The dictation keyboard switched you to the app, then if you left would keep recording... fairly basic and obvious stuff. I could have either gone back and argued the case, or simply rip it out which I opted for.

It's now failed again because: The keyboard extension does not provide any functionality when the "Full Access" setting is toggled off.

Well no, hardly my fault you've locked down the usefulness of third-party keyboards, but now I've added a full keyboard in there so it's a bit more useful without that access. I don't expect any users to ever see this. Admittedly this was more frustrating when that would be a couple days work, not just a quick prompt, to fix.

Good luck with your app. Don't worry too much, you can generally work through their issues... but it can be a slow process. Make sure you leave plenty of time between your submission and when you want to launch!

I had a go at building both a Mac and iOS dictation app the other day (dictator.robgough.net) thinking that with Claude's input, this probably wouldn't work... but it was a real problem I had, and I wanted to see how far we could get. Best way to learn the tools, right? I'd already spent the day playing with alternative apps that didn't quite do what I wanted.

The app itself is fairly straightforward, but it included some intermediate complexity in terms of audio capture and calling local models. Both something I'd never done, and as not-a-mac dev something I probably wouldn't have attempted for a side-project while I'm meant to be bootstrapping my own thing.

I didn't touch a line of code, and I was blown away. I'm so impressed in fact that I'm predicting we'll see a resurgence in native apps in the near future. By far the worst (and slowest) part of the process is having to deal with the App Store, and the ridiculous hoops you have to jump through to get past review.

I do yeah, Tailscale is generous with the "device" counts so I'm not worried about using them up -- especially as I spin them up as ephemeral, so as soon as I shutdown the stack they're gone, but the "random" name persists across shutdowns as I store it in a file that stays out of git.

The subdomain routing then works by pointing to that ephemeral machines ip, and my site in dev mode populates the sidebar with active links for this so it's not like I have to keep updating bookmarks etc. Super convenient. It's probably the weakest part of the setup (no https) but works fine for my needs.

I do all my dev inside docker/orbstack environments. I've been using a Tailscale sidecar for each, which has let me easily spin up second (and third!) copy of each repo without having to worry about them interfering with each other (the same open ports etc.). I've not extended to using worktrees, as right now I prefer entirely separate clone's of a repo, but that may well change and I suspect this would work well for that too.

https://robgough.net/multiple-app-instances-with-tailscale

Also has the handy effect of making it super easy to share my dev environment with anyone else on my tailnet, though this could be locked down if needed.

The Reddit app is so very bad. So bad in fact that I nearly considered paying for Narwhal, but then realised I should probably be trying to use Reddit less so paying for a subscription to access it would be madness.

I do miss Apollo, which was lost when they started charging crazy money for their API. I do wonder how much that has affected their usage overall. But I don't think I've ever seen any long term reviews of the impact of those changes?

Looks like, yeah... there is now a warning on the status page https://status.claude.com/incidents/0dvq4gvy5f5f

Based on how much rubbish is in the App Store, it is shocking to me – but getting that first approval can be really brutal. Took me well over a month last October/November as it kept getting rejected for things that I considered very much outside the purview of App Store review†, and this was for a simple and straight forward client portal for our company. If I didn't know better, I'd think they don't want you building free apps.

†my favourite was that on one of our menu screens the bottom button was slightly obscured by the tab bar at the bottom, so of course that was a failure. I'm not sure when they started this sort of semi-QA type of service, but I suspect no one asked for it.

It seems like managed pg improvements aren’t high up on the priority list (there’s a mention of outsourcing it to a third-party like supabase[1]), so I’d just like to +1 this request — for personal projects the snapshots are fine, but I’m starting a new role where I wanted to use fly but without easier backup/restore it’s likely a non-starter.

A small request: it would also be useful if `fly volumes snapshots list vol_123…` included the time they were taken, not just “n days ago”. If I’m having to rollback, it would be good to tell my team & users exactly when I’m rolling back to!

[1] https://community.fly.io/t/postgresql-database-backup-restor...

I'm really interested in fly.io after their Postgres post the other day, but I've not seen anywhere what their recommended solution is for ActiveStorage – is it still writing to S3 (or equivalent), or would it be somehow using their volumes? Are there any published examples (blog posts etc)?

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Your question reminded me of this[1] horrifying story, which deals with that exact issue

[1]: https://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/

I opened an account with a UK challenger bank while sat in a bar, and within 5 minutes had paid for a round with Apple Pay (which could be set up before the card arrived). It was pretty damn impressive. It might seem of limited utility, but I did similar when I set up my business account (though admittedly I was buying software licenses rather than beer) and that was genuinely useful. Not that I couldn't have waited, but it was nice to not have to.

As an Apple fan and Xbox game pass subscriber, I'm annoyed and genuinely surprised that Microsoft aren't more on the attack here. I'm sure there's some behind the scenes manoeuvring going on, but it doesn't seem like that's going anywhere, and presumably the public would be on MS's side... is there something I'm missing?

In response to your final question, this[1] document from the UK's ICO has some interesting info. Essentially you're either a Data Controller (that would be your site in this example) or a Data Processor (Fathom, in this case -- probably?!).

"64. The ICO cannot even take action directly against a processor who is entirely responsible for a data breach, for example by failing to deliver the security standards the controller has required it to put into place. However, in these cases the ICO may decide not to take any enforcement action against the controller if it believes it has done all it can to protect the personal data it is responsible for and to ensure the reliability of its processor, for example through a written contract. However, whilst the ICO cannot take action against the processor, the data controller could take its own civil action against its data processor, for example for breach of contract."

Though it goes on to say that in some circumstances, the processor can _become_ a controller, in which case the ICO can go after it.

[1]: https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1546/da...

FWIW My bank here in the UK does this (Monzo) and I worked at a startup where we also implemented "magic link" to log in. It also seemed to fit nicely with a pre-account workflow idea that I'd had for one of my projects.

But... ignoring the potential security issue of trusting your email, which (like your post points out) most forgot-password routes do anyway, you then get onto usability.

Turns out some of our users really hated it, and couldn't get their heads around it. Including some key members of our snr. management team. Slack IIRC was originally magic-link only, but then reversed course later, and tbh -- even I find it frustrating when using it with my banking app. It's way slower than just having 1Password fill in the user/pwd details for me – as has been pointed out, it adds a cumbersome second step.

That said, I think it still has a place for places where the user won't necessarily need/want to create a "full account" but you can use it to at least do some email validation. Then if they want an account later, you can simply turn this "shadow" account into a full one by letting the user set a password, as that's really the only difference.

or anything to do with Service Fabric.

I'm not sure if your "almost ten years ago" is meant to be hyperbolic, or genuine... I can't even remember why, but I know the project I was on 6 years ago definitely needed visual studio to have admin access, and it was all standard C# app stuff (maybe WPF?)

Feedbin.com has been wonderful for me since the demise of google reader, and frankly it's far better. It's not free, but it's very cheap and as far as I'm concerned that's a feature -- means it's less likely to just disappear or shut down one day, and AFAIK all the source code is open source.

Is there not a problem that in the US it would encourage people who otherwise couldn't afford the operation to opt for the "riskier" trial, even if they'd really prefer not to. Whereas in the UK, they would have received the operation free in or out of the trial, therefore the patients financial situation wouldn't factor in to their decision to join. Which feels significantly more ethical to me.

That's quite a statement, do you have any references to back it up?

Apparently it's going to be called bitwriter (see the bottom of this post http://brettterpstra.com/2016/02/12/marked-2-dot-5-4-updates...) but there's not much information out there yet.