Jon Soini

Sadly not a lot of time as of late to spend on it, the ‘day job’ has kept me busy 😢 I’m hoping to get some time in August to look at this and any iOS 26 updates for it

Got two wonderful notes today from folks who bought RIFT Notes and let me tell you, getting positive feedback like that is rocket fuel.

If you have an app you like from an indie dev drop them a line, you’ll make their day.

Thank you to everyone who’s dropped a kind word over the last few months!

New theme is ready for RIFT Notes, if you need to do some macrodata processing on the go! #severance #indiedev #swift

RIFT is my nerdy retro iOS notes app with a few unique twists, free to use! (1-time purchase unlocks adv features, separate purchase for this theme).

apps.apple.com/us/app/rift-...

An image of an iphone with the app RIFT Notes, the app's current theme is set to 'Scary Numbers', a theme based on Severance.

Any fans of #MDR here? Should I release this theme for my notes app (riftnotes.com)? #severance #indiedev #swiftUI

This isn't a mockup, this is a finished theme for RIFT, I'm quite happy with how it turned out, it's got a few fun features, and uses one of the typefaces from the show.

If you'd like to try out this latest version before it's live in the App Store here's an open TestFlight!

testflight.apple.com/join/hA4bBnBe

@johnvoorhees.macstories.net @viticci.macstories.net @gruber.foo @macsparky.bsky.social if ya wanna kick the tires on a new / 'different' notes app

Screen showing various features of RIFT Notes, the main list of notes, a map view of notes, a focus view with toolbars hidden, a notes color feature where one can pick a color for a note, and the overall editing experience. It also calls out that RIFT Notes can capture thoughts instantly, like writing a text, organize by #hashtag, map location, or color, and that it has a privacy focus with no trackers, ads, or any other BS. It sycns with iPad and exports markdown to your iCloud drive and there's a macOS version coming soon.

Three screens showing RIFT Notes and the iOS Shortcuts App, with the last screen being a note created by this shortcuts feature and showing that it's nearby.

Latest beta for RIFT Notes is available! This one adds a few nice things:
- Expanding input editor
- Quick Bar, for pinning and accessing notes everywhere
- Links for URLs, Emails, Addresses and Phone #s work
- Initial Shortcuts support
- Show nearby notes
- Onboarding carousel

Finally had some time to update RIFT Notes, next beta coming with:
- Quick Access Bar (pin notes and navigate to them from anywhere)
- "X marks the spot" (shows notes within 500m, quickly filter for them)
- Expanding editor returns!
- Tappable links for web URLs, addresses, emails, phone numbers

Raycast's clipboard history feature is so great. Not sure I'd want to use a computer without it, it's become so ingrained into my daily work.

Just started mapping my most-used Raycast commands to the hyper key (caps lock in my case), so now hyper-V brings it up.

Can confirm, one-shotted a feature the first time with 3.7, then took on a more complex feature I haven’t been smart enough to make work yet and had that done in about an hour.

To be clear, the prompt was very specific, 'update this ABC thing, refer to this other thing, update views X,Y,Z, reference this existing design' etc., you have to know what you're doing, it's not a free lunch not to understand your app or other best practices.

This wasn't the most complex feature, but it is dealing with userprefs, my app's data model, updating notes, and navigating across multiple screens, menus and overlays.

Most of the time I fight with some errors from the models with SwiftUI, this is just one try, but feels like a clear step forward.

Cursor + Claude created the class to handle the feature and preferences management, the view to be re-used throughout the app, updated existing views and inserted it in the right places, and then even added missing functionality that I hadn't specified, but was needed for full functionality.

Claude 3.7 feels like the real deal.

Gave it a (smallish) new feature in my SwiftUI notes app to build, the prompt was ~12 lines:

~30s of prompt-writing

~2 mins of agentic time, it wrote ~300 lines of #SwiftUI across 6 files

Then it built/worked without error, perfectly the first time. #iosdev

I know I'm late to the game, I was recently looking to revamp/fix my research/capture/notes/reading system and started testing out #Zotero and wow is it great. Ticks all the boxes:
- Capture from anywhere
- Great cross-platform apps
- You 'own' your data
- Works on my e-ink boox tablet + ipad

RIFT Notes mobile app next to a screenshot of Obsidian showing the notes that have synced, along with a smaller window showing iCloud Drive and the RIFT NOtes folder. Subheadline is 'Dynamic icloud export to your favorite second brain, with location, front matter tags'

Any #Obsidian #ObsidianMD fans out there? RIFT Notes instantly syncs .md to your iCloud drive with front matter, tags and date-based filenames! Great for quickly capturing on-the-go. 1-way sync for now, 2-way sync soon.

Would love feedback for this!

Grab it for iPhone/iPad at riftnotes.com

Two phones showing screenshots of RIFT Notes, with color highlights of notes in the list, a search bar showing search by color, and the right screen showing the color picker for applying colors to a note.

Latest beta for riftnotes.com is up on TestFlight, and about to submit to the App Store. Lots of under-the-hood improvements to syncing and editing, but it also adds tagging a note by color (for free and powerpack customers), as well as filtering by that color. #indiedev #swiftUI #productivity

How about some light themes in the next release? The dark themes were a bit over-represented. #iosdev #indiedev #productivity #swiftui

You should download RIFT and give it a spin, and in a couple days you'll get these themes (if ya grab the powerpack upgrade). apps.apple.com/us/app/rift-...

What I did, I made a ___Manager.swift and then I interact with my records and SwiftData through functions in that, it's an @EnvironmentObject in views so they update when the manager updates records. That's what I did for my notes app. But I'm also somewhat new to this... but I like it so far.

RIFT Notes is here! It's my highly-opinionated notes & markdown app, meant for quick message-like capture with a few unique features (& more to come!)

Available for iPhone & iPad, single one-time purchase for sync, mapping and the full theme engine. No subscriptions.

apps.apple.com/us/app/rift-...

Latest TestFlight beta is out for riftnotes.com! Mostly under the hood changes to overhaul and enhance the theme engine and make reliability improvements. We're getting closer to App Store readiness.

Working on RIFT Notes' improved theme engine this weekend, hoping to launch 1.0 of the app this week to the app store if all goes well.

First theme to take advantage of the newly improved theme capability... it has a nice subtle scanline animation too.

The focus feature is in the TestFlight build now along with other smaller improvements! Grab TestFlight and then use this link to install it on your iPhone or iPad! (120 spots open):

testflight.apple.com/join/EdnsnP9F

screenshot of an iPhone app, RIFT Notes, showing a focus mode where all the toolbars are hidden.

How about a focus mode for riftnotes.com? Coming to the next beta. #iosdev

And I forgot to post the iPad screenshots a few days ago, been using it across all my devices.

Window can go pretty small, think I'll add a 'focus' view where it strips away all the buttons and toolbars so you can write in peace, or for screenshotting text.

And I wonder how much work it is to get multi-window going so you could leave a few notes open on the desktop...

Screenshot of the mac app RIFT Notes, shows a two pane notes app with a markdown test document open on the right detail pane, app has a retro font, app is shown in a light white theme here

Screenshot of the mac app RIFT Notes, shows a two pane notes app with a markdown test document open on the right detail pane, app has a retro font, app is shown in a dark grey/lavender OneDark theme here

Screenshot of the mac app RIFT Notes, shows a two pane notes app with theme picker screen open, app has a retro font, app is shown in a brown 'GruvBox' theme here

Screenshot of the mac app RIFT Notes, shows a two pane notes app with a map view showing where notes were taken, app has a retro font, app is shown in a dark theme here

RIFT Notes is almost ready for its Mac public TestFlight, just a few more things to polish up and then test iCloud syncing, hide the titlebar, tweak map and theme settings views.

iOS, iPad & Mac versions all have markdown syntax highlighting thanks to @simonbs.dev 's Runestone library!

Didn't feel great all weekend, full of nyquil and sat in my chair with a blanket and my macbook and worked on a feature for riftnotes.com, added tagging, and I think it turned out well. Super quick and easy to view your notes by any tag and the search and map views also filter by the tag. #iosdev

Fun learning with my SwiftUI hobby app, drag ‘n drop on iPad just works without me doing anything, neat.

I was just learning this same thing last week or two with SwiftSata and iCloud, agreed great to see it working, fun to see my notes appear on my Mac as I created on my phone.

Learned the same things about schema, and promoting schema to prod. Still figuring out a good iCloud error rate.

oh Hazel's a great idea, I have always heard good things about it but just never pulled the trigger, maybe it's time