Swiftjective-C: Swift, iOS, SwiftUI, and Indie Development

Ah, Spend Stack. I’m pleased to announce that everyone’s favorite finance app/running total list thingy/do-it-all-calculator-with-1000-use-cases-but-not-one-clearly-defined is coming back from the dead…again! The previous owners, who had let me open source it, have given me back full IP rights. She’s back home:

If you need a refresher, Spend Stack was my first indie darling. It was well received among press and had a few fans over at Apple, but I never could quite figure out what exactly it was (spoiler, I still haven’t) or how to monetize it. It was originally sold around the covid-era, with a blog post from me covering the details here:

And, so it is, nearly six years later, I guess Spend Stack has a new home, again. Which is back home! For now, I’m not going to change much about it, here’s my plan:

1. This thing is old. Most of it is in Objective-C. I have Codex on a loop modernizing it now. I’ll get it buiding in a Swift-first rewrite.
2. Then, I’ll integrate modern APIs such as GRDB and CKSyncEngine.
3. I’ll make the app free (it launched as a paid up front app), with an optional $9.99/yr sub for cloud sync.
4. And once it’s stable, I’ll open it up for TestFlight.

It warms my heart that, years and years later, I’ll still get a random, out-of-the-blue Spend Stack message from someone. I don’t know where it goes from here, but I can bring it back as it once was without too much hassle in the age of agents. And, if we’ve become internet friends post-Spend Stack era, here’s most of what I wrote about it if you’d like to catch up:

• Introducing Spend Stack
• A Best In Class App: Spend Stack Checkup
• Creating a Retail Demo for Apple
• The Big Update
• Spend Stack: Year One
• A New Home for Spend Stack
• Remembering My First App
• So Long, Old Friend
• Spend Stack is Now Open Source

Here’s to new, old beginnings!

Until next time ✌️

For a long time, the homies and I have joked about starting a podcast.

Spoiler: we will never actually start a podcast. But, it would be fun though.

The idea of a podcast is tantilizing. I love talking shop, writing about indie life, or chatting with anyone about the ongoings of our insane vocation. And while I’ve written on this blog for years now, I do love talkin’.

So, introducing…

Short form video essays/journals/episode/talk show??? from me over indie stuff. So, MRR, web to app, how to manage time as a parent with side projects, that kind of stuff. You can watch the first episode wherever is best for you:

1. X
2. Threads
3. Instagram
4. Episode Directory

And, as linked above, I’ll keep that evergreen page up to date here with each new episode. I hope you’ll follow along, and feel free to shoot over any questions or suggestions for topics.

Until next time ✌️

Skills are a paramount puzzle piece to my agent usage. The rub? They are too easily fragmented:

1. You could be using different agents. Claude, unlike other agents, looks at its own spot for skills. Everything else uses an open standard, ~/.agents/skills.
2. Then, there’s different machines you could be running. Symlinking is great, but run npx skills update on your MacBook at home and then your MacBook on the go is now stale.
3. Each harness seems to want to funnel you into different paths for installing skills.

Is there an open standard to solve? Surely, if there is, it would have to be cloud based. For example, at Superwall, we simply have GitHub repo for proprietary, shared skills. So, I’ve adopted that same pattern for two things:

1. The skills I’ve personally made, and just as important…
2. Skills I’ve installed via Vercel’s skills.sh.

The whole process hinges on three skills: push-my-skills, pull-my-skills, and sync-npx-skills. So, uhhh, naturally - I made a Windows XP recreation to show you how the process works. You got two computers, each needing to be current on 3rd party skills from skills.sh, and my own personal ones. Click on any of the skill buttons below to see how they operate:

Here’s the technical breakdown.

For the skills that I’ve made… …one GitHub repo is the source of truth; so everything inside ~/.agents/skills is merely an installed copy. On one Mac, push-my-skills refreshes those copies, commits my changes and pushes them to GitHub in one shot. On another, pull-my-skills pulls that repo and reinstalls the same skills for every agent. Now, my personal skills are source controlled and current across machines.

But, that’s just half of it. Third-party skills actually use a shared manifest instead…

…so sync-npx-skills compares that manifest against the Mac’s last sync and its current npx lock file, determining whether a difference was made here, or on another machine. Local additions and removals are published; which means remote changes are applied so each Mac eventually converges on the same set of skills without manually copying folders around.

At this point, I have to ask: Did I solve the problem? Absolutely. Did I engineer myself into a small pyrrhic victory along the way? Also absolutely maybe yes! My hope is that an open standard arrives tomorrow, and makes all of this gloriously obsolete. Until then, at least both Macs agree on what skills they have.

Until next time ✌️

It’s hard not to have tragic copywriting as a programmer. As we stepped into this indie scene, it was (and is) all too common to ship something like this:

Even nearly 15 years (!!!) into this business, I can still fall into this trap. Left to my own devices, I’ll happily ship some gormless button label like “Initiate Sequence”, its copy that reads like it was written for someone who should be code reviewing a recursive function. But instead, most people who use my apps are the everyman, who isn’t serially online chatting about AI agents. Writing for them doesn’t come as naturally. Other than experience and being aware of it, is there a way to audit your interface controls for terrible copywriting?

Turns out, Apple has the answer. And, if you power it up with an agent, it can audit your entire app for you. It all starts with this banger session:

In it, Heej walks through how to craft copy that feels human. That really helps someone understand the impact of a button press, or simply set an expectation of what will happen. This kind of thing is absolutely gold. It is the number one thing I think people like me struggle with. Here’s how I hooked up an agent to learn about that session, and then apply it to one of my apps:

1. Install Sosumi MCP or install the WWDC.ai skill.

   For Sosumi MCP:

   claude mcp add --transport http sosumi https://sosumi.ai/mcp
   

   Or, for the WWDC.ai skill:

   npx skills add https://github.com/superwall/skills --skill wwdc --global --yes --agent claude-code universal
   

2. Have an agent watch that session via whatever you installed on step 1.
3. Then, point it your app and give it context on who your target market is, what your app does, and using its new copywriting knowledge - propose updates to strings throughout.

When I did this, I had fantastic results:

Some of them were so obvious, it hurt. But, this is just a blindspot I have. I’m not great at interface label naming, or naming in general. There’s a lot of talk about where the line should be with creativity and AI, and it’s a necessary discourse. In this case? This is one area where I’m happy to have its help.

Until next time ✌️

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of a user interface. Like, weirdo, existential stuff. Why did we even make them in the first place?

Remember the good old days of Microsoft DOS? Just a welcoming, plain and greenish terminal. Alawys complete with a blinking green cursor inviting you to press enter, and a list of options:

I guess the idea of a user interface is to help people get something done, perform a certain task, accomplish whatever it is they have in mind. And the easiest way to do that, is…well, visually.

Though recently, I’ve started to have a weird realization that maybe the best UI in this world of agents is sometimes… not having one at all. In fact, I dictated this post all in Codex’s mac app (yes, I know — which is a UI! Hang with me though):

Here are few things I would’ve made an admin dashboard, custom interface, or any interface at all for about a year ago:

1. Customizing a server driven “Event” in a bespoke upcoming app.
2. Reviewing feature requests for Elite Hoops.
3. Managing blog posts for the company blog at Superwall.

Of course, in all three instances, I realized each of these things are agent driven processes. So why bother? I just tell the agent what I need. The only UI, at any stage, is the harness running the agent.

So I’m curious — is this a prominent direction the world is headed? I don’t think it’ll go so far to where we get to a place of “An ad-hoc agent and your prompt is the app for the given task”, as some people tend to think. I am, naturally, using an agent, without an extra UI in the target “thing” I’m working on, to produce some sort of output for an existing app.

Buuuuuut, it is also a little bit more in that direction than I would’ve thought. For me, a prompt can have the verisimilitude of an app: it’s a place to express intent, then I make revisions, and finally end up with the thing I wanted. Or maybe DOS had it right all along?

Until next time ✌️