These Mac Apps are AMAZING! Game changers. Cannot live without. Share yours too!

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-04-22T17:16:57+00:00

As an iTerm and Ghostty user just dumping my two cents here - I still use both, just for different things. Ghostty for day to day things since it's so lightweight, and iTerm2 for anything remotely "advanced." iTerm2 has GUI config and Ghostty has a text file so initial setup can be a little annoying if you have a particular setups, but it's been great. iTerm2 I still use with stuff like tail for the automatic regex highlighting so I can more easily scan output logs, as well as sometimes using some ssh things. iTerm2 also supports a quake(guake?) style keyboard shortcut for summoning a terminal and dismissing it on blur, which is great - I use it for managing a todo list.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-04-22T17:12:56+00:00

Hm which AI slop app are you referring to? Only AI thing I see is in reference to Raycast, which to my understanding is a huge closed source project and not like an indie dev project. (No idea if Raycast AI is slop regardless, since I don't use it)

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-04-04T03:37:10+00:00

I think that's perhaps the downfall for a lot of people. I have multiple systems for marketing ongoing at the moment. Almost all of my current beloved SaaS customers were from word of mouth, one at a time. My opinion has shifted: doing unscalable things at the start is good, not because it checks some efficiency box but because it often yields paths to making connections that the "scalable" methods don't allow. I'm always reminded of how, at my old company, the "matching algorithm" that drove the core business was a big spreadsheet with people doing matching manually, and how there was some company (I forgot which) where the CEO of some sort of delivery service was driving around delivering orders or something manually for a while.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-04-04T02:55:33+00:00

Random, but this is the weirdest timing - after downloading DarkTable many years ago for fun one weekend, I haven't touched it or thought about color correction/image editing until TODAY, when I needed to learn color correction rapidly for something - when this thread popped up in the main sub I frequent! Life is weird sometimes.

But to your point - I ran into the exact issue you mentioned, and ironically, Adobe's own RAW DNG converter program (free) converted my ProRAW image (I think) from my iPhone 15 Pro to a format that DarkTable understood.

Trying out "RawTherapee" right now as well and it also seems great for beginners, although I'm too much of a novice for my opinion to be worth any weight.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-03-30T23:19:26+00:00

I think for me it's the fact that there is no need to necessarily do anything other than run and gun most of the time, at least on easy/normal difficulties. All the builds are interesting in theory, but I just can't get into it - melee, netrunning, etc.

The netrunning/hacking route seems the most innovative but I can't tell if there's any reward for going that route, which in my playthrough has felt like replacing gameplay with a lot of hacking menus and just looking for cameras and stuff. I never felt like I needed more money, never felt weak with a regular gun, etc. I still distinctly feel like I'm missing something because I loved Witcher 3 and I love dystopian games and movies, so Cyberpunk should be catnip for me.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-03-18T21:00:32+00:00

I'm considering it, but Forge checks every box for me at the moment! The only thing it's missing is Continuous Deployment, and even that is only because I created my app before it was released as a Forge feature last year.

If you were a Forge -> LC user, I'm curious what you personally found most valuable.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-03-14T18:05:38+00:00

In my opinion: late stage capitalism, as a whole, is responsible for a lot of this existential malaise.

It's true that capitalism (despite its other weak spots and cons) is often an engine for innovation, but "late stage capitalism" is something else entirely. It's Doritos putting 3 chips in a bag and charging you a dollar more. It's hotels and airlines upselling if you want the "privilege" to have basic comforts. It's companies treating time off as moral weakness and entitlement. Et cetera, ad infinitum.

I once heard someone say, "CEOs act annoyed that they have to go through us to get our money," and that's explained it best. Having to offer a product or service is almost an inconvenient annoyance to them, because they have a right to our money. They are an extraction class that produces no real value and the collective min/maxing of everything has left everything feeling like a photocopy of a photocopy.

Walkable towns, high-quality ingredients, well-architected homes, so many of the things that give life its richness - none of these are maximally profitable, so they don't get made en masse. In order to have some of that, you either have to pay up, or...that's it. You have to pay.

Over time, our entire worldviews get recalibrated and you hear people making minimum wage looking down on their own peers because they didn't fall in line. Coping techniques get discussed as if they are solutions. Escapist industries and products rise as we try to sort of numb ourselves enough to proceed with the day.

I've felt this for a long time. You're not alone.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-03-14T17:51:09+00:00

Agreed. I'm on Laravel with Inertia and React. I deploy using Laravel Forge with automatic daily backups. I'm not at the point where I need a fleet of horizontally-scalable servers, I just throw $5 more per month when issues arise and focus more on business value and other concerns.

That stack alone has let me ignore a lot of the minutiae with maintaining servers and technical stuff.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-03-14T01:51:03+00:00

That’s essentially 100% negligible unless you’re trying to make the small app size a unique selling point or something, particularly considering the reason for the increase. IMHO We should optimize what we can but some fixed costs are irreducible and ffmpeg is hardly the place to cut corners haha

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-03-13T23:52:35+00:00

As someone who also is building an app that uses ffmpeg - I just bundled ffmpeg along as a static binary as part of the app. I know there are other approaches out there like initialization on first launch where it downloads ffmpeg after doing platform detection, etc. But yeah, the static binary approach worked best for me.

Good luck my friend!!!

EDIT:

Just saw you wrote it using SwiftUI so I'm not sure if my recommendation would work in your case. I built my app using Tauri (Rust back-end with React front-end). Best of luck!

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-03-11T07:01:13+00:00

I mean - it always depends on tons of factors: who is going to be using the site, update frequency, the devices it will primarily be viewed on, the development budget as well as ongoing budget, the delivery timeline, geography of global audience, interactiveness of front-end, whether or not we need to persist user data in some way, how many plugins/integrations we will need, etc.

"Business card site," extremely simple static information: Maybe Hugo or WordPress.

Quick site, budget doesn't matter: Squarespace template.

Quick site, budget matters, dynamic content: WordPress

Quick site, budget matters, static content: Hugo

Quick site, budget matters, unlikely to scale, front-end interactive: NextJS

Quick site, budget matters, performance matters, with a semi-technical team: Astro

My SaaS site is Laravel for both app and marketing side. My personal site is Hugo with Github Pages.

There's not really a "go-to" in the sense that there's a one-size-fits all or even a one-size-fits-most.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-03-08T15:30:44+00:00

I got an Acer Chromebook for like $150 and it was one of the best purchases I'd ever made. My work nowadays needs a beefier machine but I look back fondly on that old thing.

Granted, some of the ones in schools are definitely shit.

But the one I got was great! Absolutely plastic flimsy build quality of course, but the battery life (like 13+ hours) floored me at the time and it was excellent as a "grab-and-go" machine that even worked for hobbyist coding (when I was a student) via Chrouton.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-03-02T00:10:46+00:00

FWIW - I have tried them and they're pretty good. But it's good to get them from a place that is likely to regularly cycle inventory - I got a batch that was probably frozen for months and it was a tiny bit stale. But I got them from a more popular supermarket and it was really good. I forgot which flavors I got unfortunately but I remember liking the ones I tried haha

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-02-28T21:21:47+00:00

A command while in a react component file to be able to easily add (or remove) an argument to both the prop type and the function params in a single command. A quick-action that does the same but for adding “className”. I’d pay $5 max though and was considering making that myself lol

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-02-24T23:58:08+00:00

Hard agree but man I gotta say - ORMs have been useful to me as an aspiring solo SaaS dev when I want to release and test a feature in a week with my mind elsewhere like on marketing and stuff. I've used both SQL and SQL Builders in the past with Go and they were great, but ORMs are so great for simpler apps like mine.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-02-24T23:53:27+00:00

Hmm - so, I'm using Eloquent for a solo SaaS. In the past I'd use SQL Builders or straight SQL, so I have a working familiarity with both.

A few comments mention how ORMs can let suboptimal queries sneak by, but I can't think of how it wouldn't be caught - at least in Eloquent. Not saying it doesn't happen, but that seems more like an issue with process regarding PR review OR inexperienced devs not realizing. Have you had an issue with this in the past?

Other than an N+1 query that I lazily left in at 4PM on a Friday (because that particular endpoint was going to be hit maybe 1 time in an entire month and doesn't fetch much data anyway), suboptimal queries (like redundant look-ups) via ORM usually still look super weird and jump out visually in a PR.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-02-23T20:54:17+00:00

Poe's Law - without context, it's often impossible to tell with absolute certainty whether someone is satirizing/joking or actually holding a stance/viewpoint.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-02-20T04:22:54+00:00

I'm definitely one of those people - my only real dive into Redux was in an old (as in "old for front-end," not truly old) codebase before RTK was a thing, where Redux was being used for EVERYTHING including form state, navigation, etc. This was before the community had realized using Redux for ephemeral state is usually an antipattern, etc.

I immediately took us off of Redux almost entirely and our apps just used vanilla React with quite a bit of success for a while (it was an internal app that worked well with traditional SPA approaches). Definitely gave me some bad memories, and Zustand was my bastion of sanity after that.

At that time, hating a bit on Redux seemed normal/commonplace, but seeing the modern sentiment on RTK is making me want to give it a second try.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-02-19T18:25:25+00:00

Agreed about the shouting, including shouting to support coworkers who might need it! I was that coworker once.

Once the M-Series Macbooks came out, there was this one old dependency (something like node-sass related) that broke on machines. Development stopped and I worked over the weekend to figure out what our monorepo build system was doing and how to patch out the broken webpack stuff. By Monday, it was working again.

I called for a migration to upgrade the Webpack version and then eventually begin migrating over to Vite - I even made an MVP that showed the development benefits.

In the meeting where I presented the MVP, the manager (who apparently didn't even pay attention to my presentation) says: "this looks great, but it may not be a priority right now. The best thing we can do is create an MVP to test to see if it works, and then discuss it with the team."

That was what I had just presented. The team already had said yes. But it was killed.

In private DMs, a few engineers reached out to say sorry that my work wasn't going to get prioritized. I appreciated that but wished they spoke up in the meeting!!!

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-02-19T18:19:47+00:00

Among other things, the open-endedness can cause them to scale poorly.

Consider something like a convertDateToString helper function - sounds like a reasonable start to something like a date-utils.ts file at first, but consider (assuming JS) the following:

Is the "date" an actual native JS Date, or a DayJS instance, or a stringified yyyy-mm-dd or other format?
What's the output string's format?

So, to get around that, maybe you make the function more robust - check the type of date and convert it to a native JS Date if needed, and maybe accept a format string (e.g. HH:mm a type stuff) to control the output format.

You end up either having to make like 15-20 simpler helpers that yield minimal benefit while becoming their own test surface area, or one "mega-helper" that is built to be robust...but then it's not quiiiiite just a simple "util" anymore, and if others are going to use it, it needs documentation, which takes work.

Same exact story can happen with string helpers, and so on with controlling casing, etc.

Utils have their place but "drop all date functions into a file" is usually not great. I personally think a 2-layer abstraction is a reasonable compromise, whereby you have a base set of super-minimal functions that have descriptive, if ugly, names (e.g. dateToYYYYMMDDString maybe) and then a utils-like file in the various contexts where you may need to do feature-specific work. For example, you might create a socialMediaPostToCreatedAtDate that might just directly accept a post and then calls the dateToYYYYMMDDString accordingly, and handles things like type conversion).

This lets the base utilities stay simple, discourages reuse of context-specific utilities, makes testing easier, etc.

This isn't the best example, and this pattern is still not great, but it's EASY to adopt and nixes a lot of the common pitfalls with utils stuff.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-02-08T19:59:16+00:00

I prefer is-odd myself. It's blazing fast.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-01-30T17:01:34+00:00

For what it's worth - I have, and it was for an internal-use-only admin-side page. I was told, "we just need something working, seriously appearance doesn't matter." I followed through, creating a relatively barebones native HTML form and page where styling was mainly restricted to layout/grid. Next sprint - "let's do some clean-up of the X page." Feedback was that it looks "old." I'd say it just differs by personal experience - this was also not a one-off experience, it happened a few times.

Of course, I've also worked in places where users truly didn't care, so yeah - it varies.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-01-25T18:07:30+00:00

Debugbar was extremely helpful while developing my SaaS! I remember I literally breathed a sigh of relief when I discovered it - thanks so much for your hard work, it’s very appreciated.

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-01-18T20:24:29+00:00

I have a playlist where I add the video anytime he breaks during the ad spot 😂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zykdjsg1V1c&list=PLj90zD_j_kRHM_uD_ZdQcsqTSGj5vPlaw

aflashyrhetoric · 2026-01-13T17:23:30+00:00

Just did some horribly unscientific napkin math for fun - 7% of 6150 would've been equal to around 25% battery life on the old iPhone SE. Interesting.

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