Ivan Mir

Just remembered that long time ago our site had Google Analytics, then I switched to Plausible.

Nowadays we have *zero* tracking there and in our apps, aside from what the stores provide by default (installs, daily usage).

Not missing it – fewer stats to worry about.

One more huge similarity: no articles!

It’s such a pain learning their usage for a non-articled language speaker, and most popular Western European languages have them.

It seems that modern Slavic languages have stayed quite close to Proto-Indo-European after all

I’m diving into the Pali language (both to learn it and to build an app for it), and it’s surprising how close it is to Russian grammatically

Despite 25 centuries of separation, it has almost the same set of cases, a similarly reduced number of tenses (esp. compared to EN or ES), and three genders

App Store Connect device statistics for the past month: 86% iPhone, 7.5% desktop, 6.1% iPad

Woah! Honestly I forgot that you can install iPad apps on Mac.

Never even tested it there, the sheet modals are slow to appear but it works!

#iOSDev #MacDev

Depends on the free content because it works well if you offer some basic free tier for beginners, curious, etc.

On the other hand, nowadays there's a trend with hard paywalls that do not allow you anything after the onboarding. Those apps have like 3.5 ⭐️ on average but still earn money somehow

Originally, Chile received a lot of immigration from Andalusia, so maybe you can find some of it there! (The two accents are surely quite similar)

Probably, Chileans have *so* many sayings based in animals, like:

- hacer la vaca = gather money for something
- mal pelado el chancho = unfair outcome
- tener cuero de chancho = be thick-skinned

When you're a developer, your side skill trees options are woodworking or gardening

My build went into gardening 🌻

That feeling when somebody makes a post on the biggest Spanish-learning subreddit because your app just got an update 😍

But it's a big one: four months of non-stop work, including trying to write the best Spanish grammar guides ever. Now waiting for users' feedback to make them perfect!

Oh, thank you! I'm now working on adding much more grammar to it, also example sentences too.

Hopefully, it will get even more useful!

Thanks a lot for the rec, I'm ConjuGato's developer 👀

So, I added a form to report mistakes and instantly got a support request through it 😶

Removing it now and replacing it with the regular email contact, so I can reply to users.

An account-less app is such a rarity nowadays that people don’t realize we have 0 info about them.

#iOSDev #IndieDev

GitHub - QotoQot/Snappium: Screenshot automation for iOS and Android apps via Appium Screenshot automation for iOS and Android apps via Appium - QotoQot/Snappium

Got this vibecoded cross-platform screenshot automation working:
github.com/QotoQot/Snap...

But now I also need to automate Figma templates for the new App Store feature where you can have 35(!!) different Custom Product Pages

Three languages = up to 2,100 screenshots 😵‍💫

#AppDev #iOSDev

Finally beta-testing an update for ConjuGato, four months in the making

Pretty burnt out – The Last 20%™ got me this time 🫠

But I'm sure I now have one of the best Spanish grammar formalizations in the world

MVVM is basically a headless interface that the view binds to. Services are DI'd into view models which leads to a really clean separation of everything.

It seems that the problem of MVVM on iOS is that it's never designed platform-agnostic, and this leads to poor boundaries between the layers.

Four charts by Financial Times titled "Young adults' personalities are changing, with conscientiousness in freefall" Subtitle: relative change in strength of different personality traits by age group Charts: - Conscientiousness falling sharply in 16-39 group from 2015 to 2024, a bit more slowly in 40-59, just a bit in 60+ - Neuroticism growing a lot in 16-39, less so in 40-59, lowering in 60+ - Agreeableness flatlines for 60+ too, falling for 16-39 sharply and a bit for 40-59 - Extroversion has in decline *evenly* for all age groups, not just younger people

Good news for contrarians: cultivating heedfulness, equanimity, and goodwill toward others is more counter-cultural than ever

Rarely mentioned, but LLMs allow indies to quickly level up our infrastructure.

I’ve been diving into Appium for the next release and what an impressive software, especially Appium Inspector which beats Xcode’s clunky AX Inspector.

Never had time/energy to automate QA before.

This is not quite healthy of course and I have trouble finding time for doing anything else, but sometimes one just needs to lock in 😤

Productivity table from Qbserve app with 197 hours and the top-5 activities: JetBrains Rider (86h), iTerm2 (16h), ChatGPT (15h), Sublime Text (14h), and iOS Simulator (7h)

We're so back 💫

(in 2017 I wrote "How I got to 200 productive hours a month" which got over 150k reads, but I was almost 10 years younger lol)

Tracked, of course, with qotoqot.com/qbserve/

That feeling of wanting to share some abstract thoughts about life/tech/society, but knowing that there're so many nuances that I'll risk misinterpretation & explaining myself for hours

No no, I'm just a friendly techbro slapping together apps with the latest slop machine

Good, safe mask to wear 👹

GitHub - QotoQot/Octospace: Unfinished cross-platform personal wiki made with .NET Unfinished cross-platform personal wiki made with .NET - QotoQot/Octospace

There's a better option, just nobody uses it.

.NET 9 is cross-platform and has decade-old bindings to AppKit & UIKit. You can build native UIs in C# with almost-native performance and share the VM/Model code between platforms.

Here's an AppKit + WinUI app I prototyped:
github.com/QotoQot/Octo...

So, I tried fully declarative UIs for a day… it's a hot mess tbh

The staircase of everything looks bad and it's hard to parse, hard to debug and, more importantly, hard for LLM to write. Even o3 struggled, let alone Claude.

Surely there're benefits for lots of async code, but it's not my case.

A colorful website with game thumbnails in a square frame in the center. Around the frame there are a totem-like cat, owl, and another cat in a frog hat peeking from one side, a rainbow with a sun on the other, and an ox sitting on clouds beneath it.

I'm still love the website design we had around 2010, back when we were a small gamedev studio.

Then the adaptive minimalism era arrived, so QotoQot.cоm ended up nowhere near as pretty. But when we finally find time for a redesign, I’m totally bringing back that cheerful vibe.

#gamedev #indie

Opposite for me, LLMs unblock me because I can fire-and-forget annoying tasks and check on them later. I've never been so consistently productive because I do not need to accumulate energy anymore to start something.

One of my favorite Spanish idioms is "cacarear el huevo", which literally means "to cluck about the egg" 🐔

It's close to "tooting your own horn", but does not necessarily imply bragging and can also be used positively.

"Hay que cacarear el huevo" ≈ one should make sure their efforts are noticed 🥚

Finally set up text substitutions for:
-> to →
and
<- to ←

Earlier I already had ^^2 for ² and ^^3 for ³

Any other useful substitutions you have on #macos?

It reminds me of the misconceptions people have about Apple’s stack too. Yeah, I get it, Big Corporation Bad, but come on, even asking an LLM would be more reliable than just refusing to update your knowledge.

Wow, just saw a thread about C# with commenters still saying in 2025 that it's only for Windows, it's niche for MS stuff, etc. 🫠

I've been developing in C# exclusively on Mac since 2013, and .NET has been open-source for over a decade and deployed on Linux a lot!

#dotnet #csharp

Oops, double negation "I think there's no reason"