I wrote a retrospective on the first 7 years of MIDI Guide, my open-source synth database.

Me: "How do I normalize an image?"
ChatGPT: **i'm thinking about cooking with that Oil🧑‍🍳😋🤤**

I need a Popup Blocker, but for apps I use, so I can block all their stupid airbags and walkthroughs

Just realized you can cancel the 'copying shared cache symbols' dialog, and go back to working in Xcode, and it'll do whatever the heck it's doing in the background 🙏

Doing some user research!

Astrologers proclaim week of the Home Technology Support.

"Screen Time" Bug growth +15.
Wifi Strife growth +15.
That Fucking Printer growth +15.

All Minecraft clients increase in complexity.

Cynically I wonder if it's because the people using GitHub/Vercel aren't the ones buying it, so there's nothing lost by shuffling them along to the dashboard...

Of course the stuff behind the login and auth is way better than it was in 2007! The crazy part is that actually getting through the front door has gotten so shitty.

Who asked for this?!? I'll tell you who asked for this: the depraved gremlin whose comp is based on 'engagements' on that stupid fucking video.

(OTOH, consider Vercel or GitHub. If you're logged in, they take you to their dashboard, not their marketing page. It's such a relief. So humane. )

Look at Shopify. To manage your store, you go to Shopify.com, then tap Login. You're already authenticated! They could just redirect you!

BUT IF THEY DID, they couldn't force you to watch a full-screen video of some shrub using Shopify to dropship ocean plastic to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

2. Auth is now owned by psychopathic product managers.

Web 2.0 signup forms were made by whimsical hipsters who spent their off-hours rounding corners and inventing new ways to gatekeep coffee.

Now they're made by Gordon Gecko. Forms aren't for YOU to USE – they're for THEM, and their petty KPIs.

(NB: The 'stay logged in' option is a LIE put there by LIARS.)

It was STOLEN from us though:

1. Auth is ridiculously complex (passkey? 2fa? OAUTH?). It's SO complex that even the biggest companies in the world can't make it work.

Every service I use - CloudFlare, AWS, RevenueCat, App Store Connect - logs me out daily. Logging in is 3 or 4 SLOW screens.

The first product I saw like this was Campfire (37signals circa 2007), just as IE6 was dying (not a coincidence).

I signed up and realized until that moment, I had never truly seen a form. It was a golden age of auth UI!

A screenshot of a form that calculates export cost.

I was using a widget builder the other day to build an interactive calculator, and it really made me miss Web 2.0.

Remember the first really nice forms on the web? Dynamic validation, big text fields, nice typography on labels, placeholder text, FAST. It felt naughty!

Zelda is Souls-like

The event's called 'Blur' because the element lost focus! I just got it.

'Mercy of the Gods' by James S. A. Corey is a gritty reboot of Dungeon Crawler Carl.

Penbook recognizes your handwritten notes and generates stickers for you, all on device with Image Playground.

Tom Cruise encountering the iPad for the very first time

Recording a Penbook demo with Meta smart glasses

Penbook with a habit tracker

📝 Templates of note: No Cheat Days. A beautiful habit tracker, with space for two habits per page in this landscape configuration. Track your streaks and make notes in the margin. #stationery #productivity #planner #habits #streaks

Going on the defensive in a Reddit thread never works, but as an act of self care, I redid my privacy policy to be even more explicit penbook.app/privacy-policy

So I trimmed my label:

🪪 Identifiers: Clearly the UUID I generate to enable purchase restoration is not what users think of when they see this. DELETED
📊 Usage: My 'usage' falls under Diagnostics so → delete
🛍️ Purchases: Decided there's no way this can mean 'upgrade subscriptions'. Baleeted

NB: Some users referred to the nutrition labels as 'Permissions', like on Google Play app display pages.

If users think these labels are assigned by Apple, and that they're based on what your app does and not self-reported, it explains a lot!

Users interpreted these labels as...

🪪 Identifiers: automatic collection of their email, phone number...
📊 Usage: 'No privacy for notes' (i.e., I spy on their work)
🛍️ Purchase history: I track ALL their purchases (not just Penbook's IAPs)

(⚙️ Diagnostics got a pass)

My Self-Promo Sunday post for @penbook.app on r/Apple got some traction last week, and had lots of nice comments, but I was thrown by how hung up (and angry!) a few users were about Penbook's privacy nutrition label:

🪪 Identifiers
⚙️ Diagnostics
📊 Usage
🛍️ Purchase History

So I've edited it:

Further evidence of the excellent taste of Penbook users.

Midi Guide's definition format is guided by two principles:

1. Normies can use the raw definitions as a reference, and even contribute to them, without using git or any other special software

2. The definitions are machine-readable such that they can be used to generate a complete UI for the synth

MIDI CC and NRPN database The 'comprehensive' dataset of all MIDI CCs and NRPNs.

Our massive MIDI CC/NRPN repo is now on bsky too 🎹 If you're into synths follow @midi.guide, completely free, easier to use than looking through manuals, programmatic access, and you can contribute your fave device mappings 😍 midi.guide

I use my local UPS Store - they give a real-looking address (like "Suite 600, 1234 Main St.") so you can use services that specify "No PO Boxes", but it's around C$200 / yr. If you use a coworking space, sometimes you can use its address, or if you're incorporated, your lawyer's might also work.