Excelling 2.8 (12 year anniversary update)

Time to update the 12-year veteran, Excelling!

TV gif. Steve Buscemi as Lenny in 30 Rock walks down a school hallway wearing a backwards cap and skateboard over his shoulder. He smiles as he approaches someone in the hall. Text, "How do you do, fellow kids?"

Excelling is the first app I ever worked on, it launched way back in 2012 🤯 

That’s before the flat design aesthetic and large screens took over, here’s how the 1.0 version looked:

The icons had to have some depth, and I did not have money at the time, so I tough myself Cheetah3D and hand-crafted them. It was so much fun:

 

On the engineering side I wrote it all in Objective-C. 12 years later, I’m primarily coding in Swift, so opening the project is like seeing an old friend. I will always have a soft spot for Objective C.

Where was I going with this…? Oh yes – the update! Excelling 2.8 is a major update that improves compatibility with the latest devices, including:

  • Extensive improvements to dark mode support
  • Significantly increases database reliability 
  • Addresses a rare scrolling bug seen in iOS 18 devices
  • Several enhancements for iOS 18 devices

Even though its a niche app, I love that users still find Excelling helpful after 12 years. Here’s to another year 🍻!

Excelling 2.8 is now available from the App Store, check it out!

Marc

Starlight 1.2.0

What would you do if it was cold and rainy during your holiday?

6D9BEF24 07AE 4FEA 98D6 2D082972161A_1_201_a.

Well, assuming you have a problem like me, you’d code of course! To make things better we’ve discovered an amazing place nearby that makes incredible cakes –they are really good in Poland overall, but this place is next level– and coffee. So coding is an absolute delight. 

That, together with having grandparents to help with the toddler, opens a lot of time.

Where was I going? Oh yes, Starlight 1.2 is now available on the App Store. 

starlight logo image

For this release I focused on reliability and performance – highlights include:

     – After renaming a tag, selection is properly kept

     – Deleting a tag, will default selection to “All Cards” 

     – Improved performance for long cards by optimizing regex parsing

     – Improved behavior of new card selection, ensuring new cards are always selected

Hope you enjoy the new update! If you’ve not tried it yet and you care about productivity… What are you waiting for?!

Once you do, let me know your feedback on Mastodon, X, or Bsky. 

Marc

It’s been a year? What?!

My last post (literally a year ago) ended with: “Now that things are settling down, I expect bandwidth to increase – lots to come” 

The Office gif. John Krasinski as Jim sits in the passenger seat of a parked car, wearing a fake moustache and gray jumpsuit. He looks at us with discomfort as he reclines the chair out of sight behind the car door.

Well, suffice to say that did not pan out the way I thought it would 🤦‍♂️.

Turns out I would usually write during my evening downtime, but when you have a toddler, there’s no such thing anymore! Whoops – rookie mistake!

So… here we are, a year later.  The good news is, although I was not posting, I managed to progress a bit on the development side. Two updates to share:

Starlight 1.1 

Starlight, your secret weapon for getting stuff done, just got a major update: smoother animations, faster performance, and improved reliability. 1.1 also addresses several bugs and, thanks to Apple’s improved mac SwiftUI frameworks, leverages many new APIs – delivering an even smoother experience.

Grab it now! 

Power Voice (alpha)

The ultimate personal communication coach. Upload any meeting recording, interview or speech – and PowerVoice will provide a detailed assessment of how you did, including helpful insights on how to improve.

Still very much in Alpha – if you’d like to improve how you communicate, check it out – would love your feedback. 

Try it now!

—

This time around I won’t make any promises… But I sure do plan to resume more regular posting. I missed it. 

Comments / Feedback? Find me on Mastodon, X, or Bsky

Marc

Settling down in the Bay & Starlight 1.0.4 is now live!

Back in August I posted about moving back to the Bay Area, and how that would temporarily reduce my bandwidth. Being honest, it was even more disruptive than anticipated. 

There was the move itself, but also searching for (and buying) a house, fixing its rough edges, furnishing it… And all that while working full time and adding a little one into the family.

BTW – This is an accurate representation of my reality the first couple weeks after my son was born:

In The Club Crying Baby GIF by BBC First Australia

Long story short, could not spend as much time as I’d like developing. Now that things are settling down, I expect bandwidth to increase – lots to come. 

On Starlight development – I’m pleased to announce that 1.0.4 is now live on the App Store. This release addresses several bugs, adds the optional Premium upgrade and improves user experience. More to come soon, you can grab Starlight for free @ https://getstarlight.app

Comments / Feedback? Find me at @MarcMasVi

Marc

Starting to code again :) on in app purchases :(

Although still very busy with the move from San Diego to Palo Alto I’m slowly but surely finding time here and there to code.

Edm Coding GIF by Monstercat

Right now, working on finishing the in app purchase view for Starlight. I know, I know… Not the most exciting part, but still necessary. Here’s the latest screenshot, fresh off the press:

Screenshot 2023 08 08 at 9 28 02 PM

As for subscriptions: once the user has reached the free tier limit I’m planning to offer either -most likely- yearly or both yearly and monthly. Price-wise, not sure, I’m trending towards yearly at 34.99 and monthly at 4.99…?

If all goes well (and that’s saying a lot) I’ll ship the next major update in September, delivering all planned 1.0 features, improvements and lots of bug fixes. 

In the meantime, you can already try Starlight https://getstarlight.app for free (bugs and all!)

Comments / feedback? Find me at mastodon.social/@MarcMasVi

Marc

Moving back to the Bay Area

Some personal news to share. My wife & I are relocating from San Diego back to the Bay Area.

california GIF

Although its a positive move, it was not planned, so I will post less frequently in the next couple of months as we’re getting all the move complexities solved. 

Schitts Creek Comedy GIF by CBC

And if you’re in the bay and want to connect, ping me @ mastodon.social/@MarcMasVi or @MarcMasVi

Marc

Starlight – Soft launch, week 1 update

Soft-launch of Starlight going great – thank you for all the positive feedback and improvement suggestions! 

StarlightIntro

The app will remain free until I add final touches based on feedback. If you ran into any issues please let me know via the “Contact us” option in the Help menu bar, and if you love the app – ratings appreciated! 

https://getstarlight.app

On another note, I’m in Barcelona for two weeks – one of them on vacation! If you’re a fellow macOS or iOS developer & want to go for some “canyas” (how locals call small glasses of beer), do reach out. 

Find me at mastodon.social/@MarcMasVi or @MarcMasVi

Marc

Starlight has gone gold!

After over a year in the making – I’m excited to announce another signficant milestone: Starlight has gone gold!

AppStoreImageBookmark

Its effectively ready to ship, what’s more, it’s also approved for sale by Apple — feels… pretty good

Feeling Season 9 GIF by Curb Your Enthusiasm

With the app gone gold, I’m now switching to getting ready to ship! Among other things, that includes working on:

   – Finalizing website

   – Preparing press kits

   – Preparing relevant posts

   – Contacting reviewers 

   – Setting launch date

On the website side, although for past apps I used RapidWeaver, I decided to go for something more focused & clear and decided to do it myself. Let me know what you think: https://getstarlight.app

Looking forward to share more with you shortly, comments / feedback? Find me at mastodon.social/@MarcMasVi or @MarcMasVi

Marc

PS. The website clean look is inspired by Marco’s Overcast – (Podcast app, 100% recommend)

Building GPT from scratch

With all the talk & articles about GPT, a few weeks ago I decided to spend a couple days coding one from scratch.

Baaaam

The training size can’t be the same (for $$$ reasons), but the model can follow a very similar architecture to the one used by GPT-3. As long as we narrow the training data, we can get amazing results – in my case I used US legal corpus data, which is widely available online. 

I found this experience very valuable to better understand how this new models can improve & be used in the future. If you want to follow along I do recommend reading the paper GPT is based upon, and also the great implementation from Andrej.

If you have interest in this area, and know the basics of AI / Python, def. recommend the experience. Personally, I think the impact to society will be very significant – although probably not in the obvious ways we’re imagining.

It’s amazing to think all of this is based on math, we’ve come a long way…

Giphy

Here’s the code I wrote for reference, I optimized it for M Macs to take advantage of their GPUs so it trains a lot faster. Note the faster your GPU the faster it will train, also time will depend on the amount of the training data. I used an M1 Max w. 32 GPU cores and 64 GB RAM, and it took me a about two hours to train. 

Comments / Feedback? Find me at mastodon.social/@MarcMasVi or @MarcMasVi

Happy coding, 

Marc