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I don’t have anything to say about Apple’s new guidelines for external purchase links on the App Store that smarter people than me aren’t already saying. It’s exactly what we all knew Apple would do.

What I do want to comment on is the juxtaposition of the two most recent posts on Daring Fireball tonight.

A macOS Shortcut that makes sure any meeting notes I prepare in advance are one-click away when I need them.

If your mouse were a tyrannosaurus rex, it would eat your face off before you could find it across multiple monitors.

Last year when I rebooted my little software company, one change I made was “Do Good. Get Apps” – which means, instead of buying my products, you can make a donation to one of nine nonprofit organizations, and I’ll send you a free license for the app of your choice. Starting today, I’m choosing a … Read more

This post is way off-topic, but I hope you won’t mind a quick story about 90s boy bands and eighteen-year-old websites. In high school, my little sister was a rabid *NSYNC fan. Posters covering every square inch of her bedroom – my mom driving her from one end of the state to the other for … Read more

This post started as an email to Riccardo – a quick response to his iPod memoriam post. But I’ll share it here instead. Many people have written tributes (laments?) about iPod since Apple formally announced they’d discontinued the product line. No need for me to add to that chorus. Instead… Today, a coworker came into … Read more

I never know when it’s better blogging etiquette to update a published post with new information or to publish a followup post instead. But given the chance to use “Half-assed” in two consecutive article titles, I think the prudent choice is to seize that opportunity. After I posted “Half-assed Mac Apps” a few days ago … Read more

This week, Riccardo Mori published a piece about the recent perceived decline in Mac software titled “A brief reflection on Mac software stagnation”.

I was going to reply with a quick tweet-sized comment. But those 280 characters turned into a few tweets, then a full-on Twitter thread, and then – ah, shit – I really should write about this properly.

So here we are this evening. I want to present my short thesis answering Riccardo’s question of why so many Mac Catalyst apps are, at best, Half-assed Mac Apps.

As much as it is a job and source of income, for me, building software is also a way to relax, a form of self-expression, play, and in the best moments – joy.

Today, I want to show off a project so far along the joy side of that spectrum that it blows past being silly and borders on pure ridiculousness.

Let’s reskin Notification Center on macOS.

And make it look like Winamp.

Back in June, I posted a completely un-serious post that described a ridiculous Rube Goldberg approach to grabbing two-factor authentication codes from your text messages on macOS using Keyboard Maestro (for those of use who don’t use Safari).

How dumb was it? Let’s just say that it relied on taking a screenshot of Notifcation Center and parsing the code out of the image.

A joke, yes, but also a fun distraction one evening.

To my surprise, very nice reader azorpheunt provided a real solution in the comment section earlier today.