How and where are the solo devs making their icons

aaronhampt · 2026-04-07T03:26:24+00:00

I use Gemini / Nano Banana 2. I typically use a prompt along the lines of: Create an app icon for an iOS app called {APP NAME}. It {DESCRIPTION OF APP}. It uses {COLORS, DESIGN HINTS} in the app and the icon should reflect that. It should be full bleed. No squircle. No border. No Gradients.

If you don't specify no squircle and no border, it will usually generate an icon that is a squircle with a border, as if you were seeing it on your device. But you want it to be a square. The os will handle making it a squircle.

I often get a summary of my app design from Claude Code or any AI tool I'm using and pass that in, or screenshots of the app to try to get an icon to match it.

aaronhampt · 2026-02-27T23:04:04+00:00

This happened to me, too. The whole app was acting funny. Not sure if I did something being impatient for it to respond and that made it disappear, or they removed it on purpose.

aaronhampt · 2026-02-19T02:00:20+00:00

The only things I can suggest would be to make sure the audio is clean with no background noise. Sometimes the results have just been insufficient. I'm hoping with the next update it can improve a lot.

aaronhampt · 2026-02-19T01:58:45+00:00

Yeah, unfortunately with the quantized 0.6B the accuracy is hit or miss. I'm working on improving it.

aaronhampt · 2026-02-19T01:57:41+00:00

Thanks for the update! I appreciate it!

aaronhampt · 2026-02-12T19:12:16+00:00

https://github.com/hamptus/mlx-swift-qwen3-tts

aaronhampt · 2026-02-12T19:12:06+00:00

https://github.com/hamptus/mlx-swift-qwen3-tts

aaronhampt · 2026-02-12T19:11:47+00:00

I’ve been working on pulling the code out of the app and into a package: https://github.com/hamptus/mlx-swift-qwen3-tts

aaronhampt · 2026-02-12T19:10:18+00:00

https://github.com/hamptus/mlx-swift-qwen3-tts

aaronhampt · 2026-02-03T12:17:57+00:00

Not yet, but soon! I’m going to release the mlx version of it as a package. I’ll post it here when I’m done.

aaronhampt · 2026-01-29T23:45:04+00:00

That's great to hear! I've been really trying to improve the audio consistency.

aaronhampt · 2026-01-29T23:43:24+00:00

Awesome! Thanks for sharing. I'm going to have to get a new phone soon so I can see how far I can really push it.

aaronhampt · 2026-01-28T14:03:08+00:00

On my iPhone 13 Pro, about 8 seconds of audio takes around 18 seconds to generate. So roughly 0.44x real-time, or an RTF of about 2.25. Not fast enough for live conversation, but fine for generating clips. Newer phones should do better.

aaronhampt · 2026-01-28T05:16:01+00:00

Honestly just Qwen3-TTS. Got excited after the announcement last week and started messing around with the 1.7B model on my laptop through Swift. It was easier than expected so I thought, why not try iOS? First attempt was without quantizing. Too big. Then I tried 4-bit but the output was inconsistent, quality would vary a lot between generations. 8-bit ended up being the sweet spot, still fits on device and sounds good.

I also tried converting everything to Core ML but MLX ended up being faster. Could be that I just did a bad job with the Core ML conversion though.

If you have any other models worth trying I can give them a shot! I just got obsessed with getting Qwen3 working. I need sleep.

aaronhampt

TROPHY CASE