Hello from Gilbert

Hi, I'm Chris Reynolds. I write software in Gilbert, Arizona, and this is the place I've been meaning to build for a while: one site for the things I make, and a blog to talk about making them.

Who I am

By day I design and automate the systems businesses run on. It's the kind of work nobody notices when it's going well, which is the point. Data moves, APIs talk to each other, the 3 a.m. job finishes before anyone wakes up.

By night I build the things I wish existed. Most of them started as a personal annoyance that I decided to fix properly instead of complaining about. A few of them turned out to be useful to other people, so I polished them up, signed them, and put them here.

The kinds of apps I like to build

If you look at the products page you'll notice the range is deliberately wide. Swift on the Mac, an iOS game with its own server, web apps, glue code. What ties it together isn't a platform. It's that each one falls into one of three buckets.

Apps that solve a problem. Usually my problem, usually a small one, usually one I've been quietly tolerating for months. Jabronie is the purest example. The Jabra Speak2 75 is a great speakerphone, but over Bluetooth it has no HID channel, so Microsoft Teams never hears its mute button. You press mute, the red light comes on, and you keep broadcasting. Jabronie bridges the two in both directions from the menu bar, and it puts a luchador mask up there that changes colour with your call state. It fixes exactly one thing, and now I never think about it.

Hues is the same idea, smaller. I wanted to flip my whole Mac between Light and Dark with a keystroke from any app. That's it. The binary is 172 KB. It has been running in my menu bar every day since I built it.

Apps that are fun. Fourth & Drink is a card game you play while the game is on. Seven cards each, tap when the thing on your card happens on the field, somebody sips, you bank the points, and you can stake them on real lines in The Book. It runs on its own room server so the whole couch plays together. It's in beta on iOS right now, and it's been the most fun I've had writing software in years, because every design decision gets tested at a tailgate instead of in a spreadsheet.

Apps that try something new. Loqui is local dictation for the Mac. Hold a key, talk, let go, and the text lands wherever your cursor is. The interesting part is that it transcribes entirely on your machine with Apple's on-device speech engine, then fixes the words it usually gets wrong and strips the ums before pasting. No cloud, no account, nothing leaves the laptop. I wanted to find out how good a fully local pipeline could feel in daily use, and the answer turned out to be good enough that I use it to write things like this.

What they have in common

I like software that respects the person using it. In practice that means a few rules I try to stick to:

1. Ship small, ship often, ship signed.
2. Local first. The cloud is somebody else's computer.
3. One job per tool. Do it well, then get out of the way.
4. If it saves one click a day, it was worth building.

Everything on this site runs on your machine when it can and asks for the fewest permissions it can get away with. A standalone tool like Loqui or Hues just opens, with nothing to sign up for. The ones that need a server, like a game room the whole couch shares, ask for only what that takes. The Mac apps are free, signed and notarized with Apple, and they open like any other app.

What this blog is for

Build notes, mostly. How a feature came together, what went wrong, what I'd do differently. Occasionally something about the automation work, when there's a lesson that travels. I'd rather write one honest post about a hard bug than ten posts about nothing, so don't expect a schedule. There's an RSS feed if you want to know when something lands.

Thanks for stopping by. Go grab something from the products page, and if one of them saves you a click a day, that's all I was hoping for.

Chris