Clop VS ui

It’s done in a similar way on macOS: a dylib is added to the bundle and an LC_LOAD command is added to the app binary. The dylib is the first thing that runs because of using the constructor attribute, like this: https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/Injecting%20a%20DYLIB%20into%...

The nice thing is that a signed app will refuse to load a dylib that does not have the same signature. So crackers will be forced to change the whole app signature which can be easily detected in app code.

I have that kind of protection in Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/) and Clop (https://lowtechguys.com/clop) and it seems to be good enough as they have no recent cracks.

I also use it to make optimal sized and padded screenshots for Twitter and other platforms.

To do that without Cleanshot, I would have to go through an image editing software like Pixelmator, which I use sometimes for more complex tasks, but it's many times slower than select region of screen to screenshot, annotate, Cmd-C, Cmd-V

It saves me way more time than what amounts to $30.

It definitely is relative, if you don't have this kind of need or workflow, $30 seems like too much for screenshots.

* One nitpick I had with it was that the resulting screenshots were not size optimized, so I created a free app that optimizes the app in the clipboard directly: https://lowtechguys.com/clop

Another tip: Run "Clop" at the same time to automatically save space: https://lowtechguys.com/clop/

https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/Clop Clipboard optimizer for macOS similar to above, but works right after you take screenshot useful to paste screenshots in apps like mail, notes to save image size

For simple one-page presentation websites, try https://carrd.co

In my experience, knowing CSS is 90% of making a pretty and informative page. HTML is mostly just h1 for title, h2 for subtitle, div for groups and p for copy text.

I don’t like writing neither HTML nor CSS so my websites are written in Plim with Tailwind classes for styling.

Here’s a snippet that defines the icon on the https://lowtechguys.com/clop page

        section#hero.min-w-[100vw].flex-center.flex-col.relative.pb-20

My most ambitious web project was https://noiseblend.com which is a web app for discovering music on Spotify.

It’s a next.js + React slow and memory hungry mess [1] which could have been static HTML with some JS for the dynamic bits.

Experience taught me to keep it simple nowadays, but I had to go through the Noiseblend mistakes first.

The stack is Python with Sanic for the backend, Postgres for db and Redis for cache.

That’s what remained after removing all the unnecessary services I implemented because I thought they were paramount: high availability, data locality, time series databases, performance monitoring, alerts etc. Forget about those until you start making money on the product.

The biggest disadvantage a web service has over a desktop app is that you have to keep it up. No matter what, you have a server to manage and make sure it keeps responding. That worry doesn’t exist on offline desktop apps.

The other is finding the market for it. Noiseblend didn’t have a market, and it being dependent on Spotify didn’t allow me to ask for money unless I did something more. That’s another problem, avoid creating functionality that depends heavily on big companies.

I thought about “pivoting” and turning it into a playlist building tool for DJs. I added filtering songs by key and mode (e.g. A minor) and asked a few people if they would use such a thing. Turns out that they use a semi-offline desktop app [2] that already does that and is much faster and powerful.

Oh well, at least now I have a way to find songs to improvise on with my Kaval and guitar.

From my observations, people are reluctant on paying for websites. I guess they don’t feel as “owned” as a desktop app.

[1] https://github.com/Noiseblend/ui/blob/master/pages/artists.c...

[2] https://mixedinkey.com/camelot-wheel/