Build notes from the lab and the day job — what I tried, what broke, what I learned.
Create and refine Mermaid diagrams with on-device Apple Intelligence, then edit them on a native Mac canvas. A walkthrough of prompts, large pasted specifications, context handling, and the Swift implementation behind MermaidViewer, updated for 1.10 with CLI and AppleScript support.
I wanted a better way to practice my English pronunciation. So I built an iPhone app with local speech recognition, Core ML sound analysis, and Apple Intelligence practice passages.
How a Star Trek–inspired SwiftUI dashboard grew from a Mac window into a wall console: a Core Animation render path that idles at zero CPU, a native tvOS receiver synced over Bonjour instead of a laggy video stream, fit-to-screen scaling, a holographic HUD theme, and three new telemetry categories for developers — git, containers, ports, latency, weather.
How I built sqliteui.netlify.app — a browser-only SQLite viewer with a hand-rolled Sugiyama ERD layout engine, Peter Coad domain color classification, relationship inference for Core Data stores, and a UI view that turns foreign keys into a navigable application. No backend, no upload; the file never leaves your machine.
How I built haveiread.app on Convex — a minimalist reading tracker for people with libraries scattered across Kindle, Kobo, Libby, and paper. Bookmarklets that read your Kindle library in place, parsing the Kobo's SQLite database directly in the browser, and a dedupe key that unifies it all.
How I ported the SwiftUI Capvera real-estate portfolio app to a web application on Convex — multi-provider AI extraction, batch management with workpools, dynamic schema-driven UIs, web-grounded market intelligence, and a Resend inbox per user.
MermaidViewer 1.7 introduces a visual diagram editor for building flowcharts and sequence diagrams by clicking, macOS Quick Look integration, and in-place markdown file editing.
MermaidViewer grows from a scrappy flowchart experiment into a full-fledged native diagramming app — with 17 diagram types, a theme studio, hand-drawn rendering, QuickLook, and an AI-powered visual comparison pipeline.
An early look at SendToAI—a SwiftUI app that lets you run AI-powered actions across Apple Intelligence, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude with a single tap. Still a proof of concept, but the architecture is taking shape.
How I built a native macOS Git analytics dashboard with DuckDB, star schemas, and parallel indexing — entirely using OpenAI Codex for Mac in just four days
How I built a SwiftUI app that turns the mundane task of DMG creation into a delightful visual experience with drag-and-drop simplicity, AI-powered backgrounds, and pixel-perfect previews.
A technical deep dive into building DocIQ, a macOS document intelligence engine that extracts structured data from PDFs across multiple industries—evolved from Capvera and built entirely with Claude Opus 4.5
A technical deep dive into building Capvera, an iPad-native real estate portfolio management app created with Claude Opus 4.5 in Cursor IDE—from SwiftData modeling to macOS demo deployment
Building a native macOS Mermaid diagram viewer by rewriting the entire MermaidJS rendering engine in Swift. Early preview of an ambitious project that brings native performance to diagram creation.
A deep dive into building SQLite ERD Viewer, a native macOS app that transforms SQLite database files into interactive, color-coded Entity-Relationship Diagrams using Swift and SwiftUI
A deep dive into building Folder Analyzer, a native macOS app that scans millions of files and visualizes disk usage with interactive treemaps, all powered by Swift concurrency
How I built WebStage—an Electron app that transforms your Mac into a powerful backstage controller for managing multiple web views across displays, complete with Chrome TV and iOS remote apps
Watch the full development journey of MarkView.app—a terminal-styled Markdown presentation tool—built using Bolt.new with 108 AI prompts
Can you build a native macOS app without being a Swift expert and without coding? The story of creating AI Rename using AI assistance
How I built a complete markdown presentation viewer using Bolt.new, from initial prompt to production-ready app in just 90 minutes
Exploring how Surge.sh is used for deploying static websites, with real examples from n-so.com
A journey from complex Next.js setups to a streamlined React application
My first blog post