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16 posts on product.

Shipping a native iOS app as a web studio

Four of my apps are on the App Store, and every one of them compiled long before it shipped. SwiftUI is familiar for about a day, then six things stop working the way CSS taught you. The pipeline that gets a signed build onto somebody else's phone is the part nobody warns you about, including the rejection I could not fix in code.

The tool bench a one-person studio builds for itself

A private bench of ten apps, no accounts, no servers, nobody to support. Here is what is on it, how the slide proofer works out where a platform will crop before the file leaves my hands, and what happened when I ran a slide I had already posted through my own guides.

A booking engine inside the CMS: slots, guards, clocks

Two visitors reach for the same half past ten on a Friday, a second apart. No lock and no unique index can settle it, because the appointment does not live in my database at all. Here is what settles it instead, and the window that stays open behind the answer.

A native investing app in Rust that vetoes its own orders

For the first week of this project's life, an account that came back empty read as approved. Every percentage rule in the risk engine was guarded against dividing by zero, and a guard like that carries a second meaning nobody intends. The trading terminal I open-sourced in June is one long argument that a check which cannot run has to answer no.

Custom mental health web apps whose answers never leave the device

What a practice gets when it buys one of these is a tool that holds nothing. No row, no account, no export, and therefore no retention schedule to write, no breach plan to rehearse and no deletion request to route through a person three years from now. That is a storage decision, made before any screen is designed, and it decides most of what comes after it. It also has a limit worth being precise about, because the page a tool sits on is a separate question from the tool.

StayEugene: when one house is five bookable listings

StayEugene sells five short-term rentals direct, and four of them are the same building cut at different sizes. That makes availability a question about a set of listings rather than a row in a table, and it is the part of a booking site that a marketplace was quietly doing for you all along.

A counselor directory on iOS: what moved to the phone

The boundary between a web directory and its iPhone app is a decision about what deserves to travel. Mine let 589 verified providers cross, in four public JSON files, with the crisis numbers compiled into the binary so they survive with no signal. It left behind the unclaimed license records, the ranking, the accounts, the analytics, and any reason to ask where you are.

One button, no reading, no login: designing panic.btn

There is no account to make, no menu to open and no paragraph to read. Press the one shape on the screen and it becomes a breathing pacer, vibrating on each phase change so the pace can be followed with your eyes shut. This is what that press does, where a counselor's vocabulary shows up in the interface, and where the app stops.

iLovable: a box of therapy tools that stays on the phone

A parts map, a CBT chain, a mood check-in and a day count, in an app that downloads at 13.5 MB and sends nothing to me. The exercises came off paper I handed people in a counseling room for ten years. Most of the design work was deciding what the screen would refuse to do.

What on-device AI costs: a voice journal at 813.4 MB

Mutterly runs on an iPhone XS, a phone from 2018, because its language model rides inside the download. Apple's own on-device model ships almost nothing extra and starts at the iPhone 15 Pro. Five model years of phones sit between those two floors, and that gap is the whole reason for the size.

Finding a counselor in Oregon

A person looking for a therapist has one word for the problem, the name of a town, and about a minute of patience. Here is what ORCounselors.com does with that: one search box, a five-minute wizard, four access filters, and a ranking that sorts by verification first and locality second, until somebody asks to be seen in person.

IDX by Ulric: what the three tiers actually include

The product page prints three prices, $299, $599 and $999 a month, and the sentences around them were the slow part. Here is what each tier includes, what the three pinned scroll stages are demonstrating, and how a license agreement ends up writing your marketing copy for you.

What $99 a month buys a clinical practice

Two tiers on a page nobody has to call about: Foundation at $99 a month, Foundation plus Local at $199, setup $500 once. What each one includes, why the Stripe hand-off happens after the intake instead of from a buy button, and the three rules that decide how a therapy practice site gets built.

A social composer that exports in the browser

The Ulric Composer designs Instagram posts and reels and renders the finished file in the page: a real PNG off a 2D canvas, a reel recorded frame by frame, no server round trip. How the export works, what WebKit refuses to paint, and the one number the browser and ffmpeg both have to agree on.

Three small iOS apps, and what each of them taught me

Three small iOS apps, one of them 340 times the size of the smallest, and all three declare the same thing on the store: data not collected. The spread between those numbers is the price of keeping a promise on the device, and it is the most useful thing I took out of building them.

Building trust with thousands of providers in Oregon

A directory is easy. Sixteen thousand indexed providers is a spreadsheet. The hard part, and the real product, is trust, and it gets built one conversation at a time.

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