Welcome to the Appstart blog
A new home for product updates, the thinking behind our native Mac apps, and the occasional deep dive.
Latest
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!
College grads are facing something we've never seen, literally
This is a very short segment, which I think is telling of the next several years. The point they make which drives the reality home is that for the first time in history, college grad unemployment is higher than general unemployment (6.6% vs 4.2%), which has never ever
Denver Fireworks 2025!
zoomed to the grand finale
Better App Icons for joy
The two tools I've been using quite a bit are Warp Terminal and Cursor. Most things about those are fantastic, but their icons are so indistinct I was starting to have real trouble finding them amongst my sea of typically about 17 icons when I would rapidly switch
FINALLY voice transcription that works
I've been completely dumbfounded that voice-to-text transcription seems to have not advanced at all in 15 years. Finally, I just randomly ran across this tool, which seems to be pretty good and much better than anything else I've seen. I'm using it more and
Vibe coding has arrived The train is starting to pull away from the station, but there is plenty of room!
I just created a video showing the app that I created through zero coding, working with an AI agent. It is complete science fiction and mind-boggling to me even now. I made this video with the hopes that it would convince my friends and colleagues who are both software developers
I'm back
I'm finally back. Ever since the beginning of February, after Tanya and I noticed the house next door to her was available to rent, I've been either moving or traveling or fixing up my old house to sell. Well, today, June 16th, 2025, the house closed.
How to use Qwen to drive a coding Agent
This is the video I wished I'd been able to watcha few days ago. It shows how to setup Cline in VSCode to use the latest most powerful coding model qwen-max (as of Jan 30th 2025) - so I made it.
o3 from OpenAI seems like it just dropped!
This is the model which scores high on some AGI benchmarks. 2025 is already waaay ahead of schedule between this, Deepseek and Qwen-Max 2.5 (from Alibaba). https://openai.com/index/openai-o3-mini/
VIC 20 Elite
Foiling in Maui
Love these videos Foiling in Maui
9 Boring But High Paying Remote Jobs (Always Hiring in 2025)
Just a YouTube vid which has a few interesting ideas but elements of clickbait. I can certainly see him being right about a few of these jobs both in that they are likely available and also because they are ultra-boring 🤣 9 Boring But High Paying Remote Jobs (Always Hiring in
Best MacOS Productivity Utility!?
The debate seems to be with Raycast and Alfred. Raycast has a lot of hype, but this Reddit thread seemed thoughtful and lean towards Alfred. I've used Alfred for at least seven years and always been impressed but there is sometime a better mouse trap. They're