alin23

We don’t have static IPs at home in Romania. A restart of the router will just give that person another public IP and they won’t notice any repercussions.

Dev here, thanks!

Although it's a pretty well known source in the macOS apps community (lowtechguys.com) with source code available right on the front page (https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/MusicDecoy) and the code does basically nothing. There's not much to be afraid of.

Wait, so.. how are we supposed to test Intel builds of our macOS apps from now on?

I get it that macOS has to evolve, but that doesn't mean all apps have to drop Intel support at the same time.

On hardware-level apps like my Lunar app I have plenty #if arch(arm64) because some features like reading the brightness nits or reading ambient light is different or completely missing based on the architecture. I need to test the UI differences based on what features are available.

I don't see it viable to stay on macOS 26 for this, especially if we're going to see breaking changes again with the display and window server subsystem like we did with Tahoe. M5 support for Gamma table changes is still broken after so many months [0]

[0] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/819331#819331021

Hook this to a lid angle below 30° trigger in https://lowtechguys.com/crank and you can easily make it run on a simple lowering of the lid

Not sure if it's exactly the same, but I had to add a When notification arrives with <message>, do <action> event trigger in my Crank macOS app (https://lowtechguys.com/crank) so I can show you how to do it on macOS:

      HOURS=6
      EPOCH_DIFF=978307200
      SINCE=$(echo "$(date +%s) - $EPOCH_DIFF - $HOURS * 3600" | bc)

      sqlite3 ~/Library/Group\ Containers/group.com.apple.usernoted/db2/db \
        "SELECT r.delivered_date, COALESCE(a.identifier, 'unknown'), hex(r.data)
        FROM record r
        LEFT JOIN app a ON r.app_id = a.app_id
        WHERE r.delivered_date > $SINCE
        ORDER BY r.delivered_date ASC;" \
      | while IFS='|' read -r cfdate bundle hexdata; do
          date -r $(echo "$cfdate + $EPOCH_DIFF" | bc | cut -d. -f1) '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'
          echo "  app: $bundle"
          echo "$hexdata" | xxd -r -p > /tmp/notif.plist
          plutil -p /tmp/notif.plist 2>/dev/null \
            | grep -E '"(titl|title|subt|subtitle|body|message)"' \
            | sed 's/^  */  /'
          echo "---"
      done

In recent years, filesystem paths for system services have started to converge for both macOS and iOS so I'm thinking with jailbreak you could get read access to that database and get the same data out of it.

Right, it’s not worth $30/month all year for me because I don’t use it past demo videos for when I publish a new app or large update. Which happens rarely.

But if I was that kind of user who did demos monthly, the time saved on one or two videos that month is worth $30.

A lot of the time it is, I agree. I would love the ability to do more highlighting and less panning. But in a small 700px wide video, zooming is kind of necessary to make it clear where the action is coming from. Because the app window is so large and packed.

And these recording editors don’t have arrows and callouts, not even a freeze frame. I have to plan the recording to the letter and after 10 frustrating takes I just say fk it and try to polish the least confusing take

Maybe I should start contributing to openscreen to get the ideal recording editor people are looking for instead of paying and complaining.

For me it would make more sense to have something like “unlock for a week” if the dev wants to keep the ongoing revenue model. Of course a lifetime purchase is even better, not sure why that’s not an option.

I would be happy to pay $100 for unlimited access and be locked into the current version of the app, maybe only have minor version updates free so you don’t get locked into a buggy version.

But that’s a more complicated licensing model to implement I guess.

Am I in the minority for thinking ScreenStudio is actually worth the money?

The recent video I did for Cling for example (https://lowtechguys.com/cling) I’ve had many people ask about how I did it because it has just the right amount of motion and highlighting. I did it in a few minutes of editing in the ScreenStudio UI.

I’m not saying it’s a great video, but people say it conveys the info well enough and that’s what matters. It would have taken me days to do the same with DaVinci Resolve because of my inexperience with complex editors.

A $30/month subscription is indeed too much, but I see it as a one time payment for that month when I release something, then I pause the subscription. I need it rarely, very few videos need zooming and motion.

Anyway I love to see alternatives like OpenScreen! What I would miss the most would be presets, not sure if it’s already there, but it’s a nice quality of life feature to have a consistent look to the motion effects between videos.

They even have a scrolling 5-star reviews section, clearly generated: https://oneuptime.com/#reviews-title

https://github.com/OneUptime/oneuptime/commit/538e40c4ae724e...

https://github.com/OneUptime/oneuptime/commit/2bc585df20e6bb...

You can fabricate a professional business image in a few days with AI now. It's going to be hard to build an honest brand when everyone is going to point and say "vibe coded slop" because of examples like this website.

I'm already seeing such comments whenever someone posts an app on /r/macapps and it's really discouraging for beginners. If I would have met that resistance and amount of mean comments when I launched Lunar, I would have probably never put in that amount of effort.

The notch hiding menubar icons is such a stupid problem to have. I waste hours every week trying to help people who send me frustrated emails because they bought one of my apps and they say: "it doesn't launch" or "why doesn't it have any interface??"

No amount of FAQ will help these people. And this also results in hasty refund requests and even worse, chargebacks that take 2x the amount the users paid out of my pocket.

I recently helped my brother launch a simple app for making any window a PiP window (https://lowtechguys.com/pipiri) and in the first two days, half of the sales turned into refunds exactly because of this issue. People had so many menubar icons that they thought the app just doesn't work. Not an encouraging launch for his first app.

Not to mention the fact that the best solution that helped alleviate this, the Bartender app, was completely broken by Apple's internal API changes in macOS Tahoe.

This could have been handled better.

Thank you for the kind words! Love to hear from people that were helped by my work!

That was also my pain point with Lunar, working on a small balcony in a small apartment where the light from the window was constantly changing and the monitor always being way too bright or way too dim.

I broke one of those LG monitor joystick OSD buttons before I got to building Lunar.

There are some things that are only available in Shortcuts because Apple gave the app entitlements to communicate with parts of the system that an AppleScript or other apps can't. Things like setting/getting the Focus Mode, changing some system settings like Airdrop Receiving, Color Filters, Background Sounds etc.

Also some apps export Shortcut actions that can run in-app code: for example my Lunar app has an action that can help fixing arrangement when monitors flip around [1]

It's much easier to implement a struct for a Shortcut, than exporting AppleScript sdef files or creating IPC command-line tools, so a lot of apps take this route for code that needs access to the memory of the running app.

[1] https://lunar.fyi/shortcuts#fix-monitor-arrangement

You can definitely have Claude work with cherri files.

Jelly was a confusing experience for me, with JellyCuts becoming closed source and focusing on advertising, then Open-Jellycore branching out but not actually keeping up with the latest shortcut actions.

Cherri has almost every action you can find in the Shortcuts app, easy to use, and easy to create Shortcuts that can accept input and output so that they can be automated or scripted further.

I've just used this extensively to build 200 Shortcuts for my event-based automation app on macOS [0], because some actions you simply can't do without Shortcuts: changing Focus Mode, toggling Accessibility functions like Color Filters, accessing the Private Cloud Compute model etc.

I also wrote about how Claude was able to basically learn the language from scratch and write those fully compilable Shortcuts for me [1] because it was mind boggling to me that an LLM can do that. Curiously, this is becoming more and more normal in my mind.

[0] https://lowtechguys.com/crank

[1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/how-good-is-claude-really/#che...

It could, but there's no possibility to apply a LUT to a realtime framebuffer on macOS. But it would have been a clever solution if it was possible.

It's still possible with the older forced HDR + Gamma tone-mapping logic, but it has its limitations. The native unlocking was miles better.

Does everything need to be snark on HN now? What is happening with this place?

Those are valid problems affecting real people. For some are just missing conveniences, for others they are full on accessibility issues.

macOS 26 has to be the most breaking version so far, its problems and intended breaking changes making my app dev life so hard this year. Just to name a few:

- Reference Presets no longer allow setting arbitrary SDR nits, making it impossible to natively unlock 1600nits of brightness on MacBook Pros or 2000nits on Studio Display XDR which breaks my Lunar app [0] (this seems to be intended, no idea what hurt Apple that they had to block this under SIP)

- The orange microphone dot indicator and its very colored friends can no longer have their brightness changed for dimming them, which made my YellowDot app useless [1] (I guess this is for privacy, I still think this could have a setting guarded under TouchID like Accessibility Permissions works)

- Floating non-titled windows don't accept mouse events (thankfully this got fixed) [2]

- Gamma table changes don't work on MacBook Neo and M5 Pro/Max which breaks Sub-zero Dimming and dimming external monitors that don't support DDC (thankfully, Apple is looking into it) [3]

- The resizing area thing on very rounded windows which drives everyone nuts, I had to add custom resize handlers to some of my windows

- The `com.apple.SwiftUI.Drag-` temporary file paths that get generated for any file that gets dragged from a drag&drop handler which makes it impossible to get to the original file when dragging images from Clop [4] or file shelf apps like Yoink, Dropover etc.

- NSImage returning different pixel count for .size than what the image actually has, breaking workflows that depended on that to determine the image DPI

[0] https://lunar.fyi/#xdr

[1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/YellowDot/issues/18

[2] https://developer.apple.com/forums//thread/814798

[3] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/819331

[4] https://lowtechguys.com/clop

I love Kino! I film all my wood carving videos with it for my Instagram profile [1]. I'm so glad to hear it's getting updates this year. If you're open to feedback: I like playing with white balance a lot, and it takes just a little too many steps in the current interface. I think Kino would benefit from having a "remember/preserve white balance" setting, and a gesture for changing it without tapping.

For example, I like how we can swipe down to show the exposure slider, then swipe left/right to adjust exposure. Maybe it would make sense to have these hidden sliders on all 4 sides: right side could show a focus slider, left side could be white balance etc.

In any case, even without that, it's my most used new app of the year. Thanks for giving us such a simple way to get good looking color grading out of the iPhone!

[1] https://www.instagram.com/alin.panaitiu

Damn, so this is the thing that caused all the floating windows to become unclickable and impossible to interact with... I'm the creator of the apps from https://lowtechguys.com/ and I was replying to 10-15 support emails per day, all week, because of this.

It's a bit scary to see that the software we rely on every day is such a complex behemoth that even a seemingly small change can have so large repercussions.

The problem is that AI only helps add even more complexity since it's so simple to just add more code now that we don't have to write it.

Notarization is mostly a glorified malware scan. There's no Apple engineer auditing what's being sent for notarization. Even clever malware can evade notarization scans and be distributed as a notarized binary, it has happened in the past [0]

There's no better way for auditing such an app than having the code easily available and looking through it, and compiling it yourself. Which is already the case here.

[0] https://thehackernews.com/2025/12/new-macsync-macos-stealer-...

This is the hardest thing about selling wooden spoons and especially cups. Like you, most people think about the rough texture they felt when using cheap or disposable wooden utensils.

My spoons and cups feel more like warm textured ceramic. They are sanded to a high 600 grit, water popped multiple times to make sure the grain doesn't raise and the texture stays smooth, and finished with drying oils as you see in the article to keep the surface highly hydrophobic.

I really can't describe it in words, but everyone I know who tried eating with my wooden spoons and drank from my coffee cups, was pleasantly surprised of the feeling.

That's why most of my sales happen in person at local craft markets, because there, people can take the cup into their hand, they can feel the smoothness, and they can ask about the same things you are worried about.

All I can recommend is find a spoon carver in your area, or one that ships there, and try a hand carved eating spoon. I'm not saying it's better than metal, ceramic or plastic, it's just a different experience that some people enjoy.

Some people react very badly, some are immune. But to be honest I just don't like my spoons and cups to look lacquered and I don't prefer the process of application.

Nothing wrong with that though, I like reading and watching people do the process and seeing them enjoy the calmness in doing dozens of layers over multiple days. Some end up with very beautiful shimmery brown wooden pieces [0] and I would love to own some of them. It's just not my style.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/j1YHhsHZOGk

The problem with jojoba oil is that it doesn't polymerize or cure. It stays wet in the fibers. Nothing bad with that on wood that doesn't contact hot food and beverages.

But if you put wood treated with non-polymerized oil in a hot soup or if you pour hot tea into a cup finished with jojoba oil, the oil will get out of the fibers and into your hot liquid, the fiber will raise and the wood will start to feel rough after a few uses and start to get stained from your food and beverage.

Author here! Since the article publishing, I have found a widely available finish that's very similar to what I'm doing called Walrus Oil Furniture Butter: https://walrusoil.com/products/furniture-butter

It's still a combination of polymerizing oils, hard waxes and resin, it's just different plants (linseed instead of tung, pine resin instead of damar etc.) Again, no solvents, people say it smells good.

I still have way too much tung oil, wax and resin around because I could only buy high quantities, so I guess I'll keep using my own finish for a long while. But I'd love to hear from others how the Furniture Butter fares for wooden spoons and cups.

Osmo Polyx is what I already had around from other wooden furniture projects, that's all. I try to not store too many cans of unused finishes around my house so I try to use what I already have first.

Top Oil indeed seems very similar to what I did (hardwax, drying oils, driers) but half of it is still white spirit solvent, which I'm guessing will give it the same smell as Polyx.

The closest thing I found to what I want is Walrus Oil Furniture Butter (https://walrusoil.com/products/furniture-butter) but I didn't know about it at the time.

Author here, it's not that it's not possible, it's just annoying to do. Indeed, two-component hardwax oils are close to perfect (although the resulting polymer is not ideal), but having to do the precise pouring and mixing, and trying to smear that thick blend onto the wood, hundreds and hundreds of times, is not something I want to do.

I want to enjoy the process of making the wooden utensil as much as I want to see the end result, hence my excuse to play with random metallic driers and resins.

Author here, I also bought a dehydrator to keep my finished spoons at 70C (158F) for 10 hours to speed up the curing of the tung oil. It really works wonders!

I prefer to keep the original color of the wood I sell, so lower temperatures are better for me, but I like the look of toasted wood as well.

My problem with just oil is that the finish is very matte, hence the wax and resin complication I'm going through in the article. But matte is also a look that people look for so there's no problem in that, it's just my personal preference and style that's different.

Nothing, I'm just not a metal worker.