Hey Reader,This week, I started a manager agent before bed, and it worked all night. When I woke up, it had broken a working feature, added weird workarounds for a problem that wasn't real, and dropped the feature. The feature? Distinguishing between a PiP video close vs. pause in my timer app on iPhone. We had a random 250ms delay to differentiate the two, and removing it broke some behavior. Except the delay wasn't necessary, and the feature was fine before the agents touched it. This kept...
1 day ago • 3 min read
Hey Reader,You can now use Super Easy Timer on iPhone. I had my agents use the Mac app as a reference and extracted a shared library of code using the Swift Package Manager (SPM). This is the brains of my timer app, and it's shared across iOS and macOS. The MVP worked last week, but it wasn't reliable until I added AlarmKit. That allows timers to persist even if the app is force-quit or the iPhone is locked (just like Apple's system alarms). That was my biggest blocker, and now that it's in,...
17 days ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader,My Mac app made $7,900+ over 8 years as a paid app. It made $0 in the three months I gave it away for free. Learn why I made it free, what happened, and what I'm charging next. Read the entire article here. I overhauled the UI this year, localized the App Store Page to 46 languages, and then Apple began featuring it on the front page. Super Easy Timer on the front page (Best New Apps and Updates) Did you know? You can nominate your app to Apple for feature consideration. The Free...
23 days ago • 3 min read
Hey Reader, Apple featured Super Easy Timer on the front page of the Mac App Store. 3,158 downloads. $0 revenue. That's on purpose. What got me here? Fixing all the papercuts in the original timer app and creating a better onboarding experience caught Apple's attention. That made them feature my app on the front Discover page and on the Work tab in the Mac App Store. Over the past two months, I made huge improvements to the UI and unlocked the ability to use a timer on top of every single...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader, I didn't sleep much last night. I was up pushing Sol to fix things that GPT-5.5 couldn't. I got early access to GPT-5.6 yesterday, and I had agents working on both macOS and iOS apps (and QA tooling). These models are super capable, but they have different strengths and weaknesses. I had them work on SwiftUI for an iPhone app today. Watch: GPT-5.6 vs Fable 5: 4 UIs, Judged Blind, 1 Winner Can you tell which model made each UI? Hint: one is not like the others. Now, we have access...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader,Three things: 1. My new Mac app update was just approved.It adds clock, stopwatch, pomodoro, and tabata.Check it out on Mac! 2. Apple featured my Mac app on the App Store so I've had a massive boost in downloads, impressions, and ratings. 4 Million impressions 1,690 downloads Massive downloads and impressions from an App Store feature I'm now ranking for a ton of keywords because I localized with AscBuddy (Chrome extension). That was a big win for about 5 minutes of work. 3. OpenAI...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader, This week, I woke up to 8 new features moving toward release in Super Easy Timer, including stopwatch, clock, pomodoro, and autocomplete. One Codex thread ran for 12 hours and 19 minutes. Part of that happened while I slept. Super Easy Timer can run pomodoros Apple recently featured my app on the homepage, so downloads are spiking (270+ downloads/day). If you show up and make something useful, Apple might feature your app. Back to my new Codex workflow: The setup is one Codex...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader, I rebuilt the onboarding flow for Super Easy Timer, and my downloads started climbing. Three small changes around onboarding, localization, and reviews. Here’s exactly what I did so you can copy it. Downloads trending up with my big 2.0 Update Onboarding My old onboarding showed five videos and didn't give users a chance to try the app. The new flow does one job: show someone how the timer works. One short video, then an interactive timer that they tap through themselves. No...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader, Apple just approved Super Easy Timer 2.0 n the Mac App Store! 🎉 If you haven’t been following along, this app has made $7k over it’s lifetime (8 years, but was dying), so I spent the last two months fixing up deprecated code and revamping the UI. There is a lot of work that goes into everything around the launch. A new marketing website, the localizations, the screenshots, the preview video, and onboarding flow. Here’s everything that went into my latest launch (and how I avoided...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader,My new TestFlight beta was just approved.Check it out on Mac. -Paul P.S. The new design is part of my app marketing plan to push this app higher in the charts. It's going to be a fun experiment.
2 months ago • 1 min read