Welcome to the Appstart blog
A new home for product updates, the thinking behind our native Mac apps, and the occasional deep dive.
CiderPress: Turn your voice memos into living knowledge
Finally finished+released CiderPress alpha, tested, documented (mostly), and made the key videos for this passion project. The app is free and open. ciderpress/README.md at main · appstart-one/ciderpressCiderPress lets you copy Apple Voice Memos into your own space. You can transcribe, view, and export them—one at a
CiderPress Claymation Explainer
CiderPress (alpha) version 0.1 is live!
This (quickly made) video shows what it is and what it does: CiderPress is an app to make audio journal entries interactive using ai https://share.descript.com/view/kJEUejW4cRU https://github.com/appstart-one/ciderpress
CiderPress - the app I'm working on is almost ready for alpha
Cider Press update Jan 2026
Video update!
Predictions on the stock market, economy and for new college grads : 2026 and the next few years
AI could double the US economy's growth rate over the next decade https://www.zdnet.com/article/ai-could-double-the-us-economys-growth-rate-over-the-next-decade-says-anthropic/#ftag=CAD-03-10abf5f This is a likely scenario I believe will play out - “AI could double the US economy's growth rate over the next decade” Till this article
expert discussions
One of the very best features of ChatGPT I rarely hear about is the ability to have a discussion with advanced voice mode, which looks like the above picture.In my case, I'm working on a few vibe-coded apps where I understand some of the technology stack, but
Keep your brain sharp in the GPT-5 era
As I begin to reflexively reach for AI when I want some knowledge or to understand a concept, I know I'm not struggling as much to figure things out, and that struggle can obviously be very helpful.The periods in which I've learned the most about
Rovo Dev Agent: NEW AI Coding Agent with FREE 20M Tokens/Day of Claude 4 Sonnet!
https://www.atlassian.com/solutions/devops/ai-innovation crazy , looks like Rovo Dev agent might actually be really good Dev Agent: NEW AI Coding Agent with FREE 20M Tokens/Day of Claude 4 Sonnet! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvXWxGR6o4
2 Things that are incredible at helping me focus
1) I stumbled across this a few months ago and it definitely helps me lock into a flow state much more quickly than I otherwise usually can: brain.fm 2) I've been using the Pomodoro method for a while , but often forget to fire up an app timer
Vibe coding Reddit fun
For anyone interested in VibeCoding, my friend and famous Atlassian developer Don Brown created this Reddit thread which is reasonably active and I think super valuable for anyone trying to track the rapid changes in this ecosystem. Vibe coding for large applications in production Join us there!