I build apps and write about them. Sometimes funny. Good at helping manage engineers, better with engineering managers.
I started on Android in 2014, moved to iOS, and now make apps on my own under Alcor, a studio of apps from fintech to music and sports. Before that: delivery apps for a Gold Coast startup, a crop-inspection camera, and editing Better Programming from 2021 to 2023.
I was a reluctant engineer. I wanted to make films and play cricket, and my first app earned $2. I'm still here.
- Breakline: see how your body moves in your own clips. Measurements, not scores, and the clips stay on your phone. Being tested next: a 3D robot that replays your pose.
- Screen Room: talk about a film without spoilers. The ending stays hidden until you ask.
- Orbits: plan a trip or a meetup around what two people have in common.
- Rifflet: turn a music idea into a lesson you can play.
- First Contact Duet: two phones, one friendly visitor you greet with hand signs and chords.
- Wearover: styles your wardrobe around your own choices and looks, and tries hair or a furniture finish too, while your face stays as it is. 3.0 is waiting on App Review.
The rest are on getalcor.com.
- MacItWork: hand approved work from one Mac to another and get a signed receipt back. Early.
- Glint, part of TradeShot: a trading desk that shows where each number came from. It can draft a trade; it can't place one without my approval.
- MeAmi Stays: a booking assistant I built for my landlord, so they have more control and flexibility over bookings for their homes. iOS, Android and the web.
- Machiss: a private, local Mac companion for thinking through conversations. On Product Hunt.
Where these apps use Apple Intelligence, the model only phrases answers; the numbers come from the app, and Swift checks the reply before you see it.
- Scout: Claude helped me revisit a tool I built to scout Medium stories and authors for outreach and newsletter marketing. It now uses public RSS feeds and a bit of on-device AI.
- Trayce: an iOS 27 app that keeps the latest copy of your trip documents and plans your security trays.
- Contour Lab: counts coins, leaves and odd shapes with Vision, measures a surfboard from one photo, and lays the count out in RealityKit.
- Screen Room Remote: a Mac prototype that drives a Fire TV.
- Pastport: answers from your own Safari history, on the Mac.
- Deckloom: a SwiftUI card stack you can swipe, fan and open full screen.
- iowncode: older iOS, Core ML, Vision and AR experiments. More drawer of sparks than museum.
Merged contributions: spec linking (each issue points to its spec) and a rules audit in Beads; Xcode session search and Amp thread filing in deja-vu; Grok usage in CodexBar; precise location in Callstack's agent-device; research mode in birdclaw; and a CLI fix in superpowers-chrome. The Beads and deja-vu ones are both about helping people find things: why a piece of work exists, and what you did before.
These days I work with AI coding agents the way I ran editors: written briefs, one writes, another reviews.
Essays on building with agents (Good code isn't dying), years of iOS tutorials, and satire (If Programming Languages Had Honest Slogans).
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