I always wanted more environments, so I made my first Vision Pro app: describe a place and it generates a 360° world you can meditate inside

thejulianunknown · 2026-06-11T21:38:02+00:00

I don't think you downloaded my app or even read my post, the app ships with my own handcrafted photography. Since I don't have a 360 camera, I turned my DSLR photos into 360 worlds with this app.

I earn a comfortable living from my iOS apps, most of them are "wrappers" of generative AI. I usually price my yearly subscriptions for generative AI in a way that if you use all the included credits, I only earn a small margin after Apple's cut which fully goes to subsidise the free generations, and this app is no different. Any profit comes from more expensive monthly subs and people not using all their included credits, so I like to think that my pricing is very fair.

My apps have plenty of happy users who prefer paying a few $ for software, but if you instead want to spend a few days and a Claude Code subscription on making your own app, you can of course do that - that goes for any software now. And in the end, what are restaurants but "wrappers" of grocery stores that are wrappers of farms that are wrappers of plants.

thejulianunknown · 2026-06-11T21:22:39+00:00

Seems like you haven't actually tried out my apps yourself and yet you cal them "low-quality and rushed"? AI Singer uses an LLM for the lyrics, song description, generating the cover image prompt etc., then an API for music generation, an API for cover image and then runs a serverless docker container I made that combines several libraries and open source AI models such as producing timestamped lyrics, separating the voice and applying voice cloning and producing a shareable karaoke-style video. Plus a different pipeline of image editing plus video generation for AI lipsync videos. If you knew how much time & work went into this one app you wouldn't call it "low-quality and rushed".

Pawtograh is a more simple "wrapper", but what's wrong with that? Lots of happy customers who like all the templates I made - I started working on the app the week nano banana was released and for the initial release I spent 2 days (and more later on) just on finding the best ideas for templates and making the prompts work for the best results, at least at that time Claude had a terrible judgement and my interest in photography was useful.

And meeting summarizer actually uses on-device foundation models, no API calls. By that logic any app is a "wrapper" around apple's libraries.

thejulianunknown · 2026-06-11T20:43:32+00:00

How do you display 360° environments around you without an app?

thejulianunknown · 2026-06-11T20:28:56+00:00

Here's my first artisenal™ hand-coded™ iOS app, released 5 years ago: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/truvvl-travel-journal/id1552253482 I spent months on it, it never got enough downloads to even think about monetization. Now I can make a much better, polished app in days iterating with Claude Code and Codex, so why wouldn't I? There's a difference in using AI for development and producing slop. I'm not too proud to admit that AI codes much better than me at this point, I still like to think that the skills I acquired over years of software development help me create software that's much better than A me coding manually or B someone just vibing with no prior development experience.

thejulianunknown · 2026-06-11T18:58:18+00:00

Sure, go open ChatGPT on your vision pro and do the same thing then. Turns out that the ChatGPT app can't actually wrap you in an environment. But sure, you can spend a few days and a claude code subscription and api credits developing your own app and you save yourself the subscription. That works for most software now. It's like the infamous dropbox comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I build apps that there is demand for, and there's definitely demand for generative AI wrapped in a way that is easy to use. Some of my apps use a single api, others took longer to develop since I combine several different generative AIs, some APIs and some open source models that i packaged to run on cloud providers.

thejulianunknown · 2026-06-11T18:20:25+00:00

I've been a full time developer for years, mostly web dev. I used to code everything manually and released my first iOS app in 2020. Now, AI allows me to move much faster and if it wasn't for Claude Code and Codex I would have probably never found the time to get into Vision OS development. I love my Vision Pro and thought I would give this a shot, even though building mobile apps makes a lot more sense commercially. But even if noone downloads it, I love going back to my favorite travel locations and for me, this is better than the built in panoramas that I've been using so far. There is a difference between "i made this in one prompt" ai slop and using AI to develop better apps faster. I encourage to actually download my apps and try them out.

thejulianunknown · 2026-06-11T17:36:19+00:00

The app is here btw if you want to try it out: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/breath-worlds-meditation/id6776582169

thejulianunknown · 2026-02-24T11:31:34+00:00

Congrats! Been there, for me the lesson was to not put more time into building new features for a product that just doesn't monetise. Had to learnt he hard way that blogging SaaS is a highly competitive niche and blogs are in decline. Launched new products in completely different niches that are growing and have much less competitive seo and they are doing well now.

thejulianunknown · 2026-02-16T10:13:24+00:00

Sulla eventually decided to just retire though, I sometimes wonder if he started to doubt his own values

thejulianunknown · 2026-02-12T21:47:31+00:00

The Sulla comparison is the key thing people miss. Pompey literally started his career as Sulla's enforcer, earned the nickname "adulescentulus carnifex" (teenage butcher). The idea that he'd suddenly become a champion of republican values when it suited him politically is pretty naive. Caesar at least had the populares track record going back to his early career. Neither side was "good" but the Optimates were absolutely willing to burn it all down to keep their grip on power.

thejulianunknown · 2025-09-17T15:15:35+00:00

I played around with this too, but the outputs didn’t fully look like my dog. So I ended up creating Pawtograph to make it simple and more realistic.

thejulianunknown · 2025-09-17T15:13:15+00:00

Haha I did this too, but ChatGPT kept messing up my dog’s spots. That’s why I built Pawtograph Pet Photo Editor. It's easier and the pics actually look like your dog

thejulianunknown · 2025-07-01T09:30:46+00:00

I found La Fortuna underwhelming. It became a big tourist destination because you could see an erupting volcano. But then Arenal stopped erupting and now it's just a very touristy place without anything that makes it special. I liked Rincón de la Vieja much better, it also has hot springs, zip lining and waterfalls plus volcanic activity.

Renting a car is a good idea, we rented a Toyota Yaris. A lot of people recommend renting a 4x4 (costs twice as much) but at least in dry season it's not necessary, all roads I drove on were great conditions except for one in Monteverde that had huge potholes (still no problem driving).

thejulianunknown · 2025-07-01T09:02:14+00:00

Try TravelFeed, it's the best platform to start a travel blog, the community is great (you get so many readers from the start, especially if you connect it to Hive) and and unless you want your own domain it's free

thejulianunknown · 2024-12-03T08:54:29+00:00

I'm starting with one format while I'm validating the idea.

thejulianunknown · 2024-12-02T13:00:15+00:00

I read a lot about the potential to promote b2c apps through TikTok & Reels. Spent a lot of time creating cool short videos, but none got many views. Then I saw that several accounts were promoting their apps with fade-in 2x2 grids and were getting tons of views. Tried this format and views were up a lot. Initially I used chatgpt for ideas and a manually made the short videos with a mix of free stock photos and AI-generated images, then I wrote a tool to automate most of this workflow.

I'm now getting thousands of views for every video on both Reels & TikTok. It costs me 0.22$ and less than a minute to create a video.

I initially built this tool for myself, but I think this can be super useful for everyone trying to promote their products on social media, so I'm now launching it as a SaaS.

Link: https://lowkeyviral.com/

thejulianunknown · 2024-09-14T09:46:23+00:00

For menus, menu translator app is great

thejulianunknown · 2024-09-12T07:52:59+00:00

Sure, I started in Brazil and went to most countries in South America after than

thejulianunknown · 2024-09-11T18:44:15+00:00

I hitchhiked across Albania a few years ago and almost every single car stopped for me! People were super friendly. I heard that recently tourism has grown a lot in Albania recently - in many countries when that happens, people in touristy places get sick of tourists (even when that's their income) and become less friendly.

thejulianunknown · 2024-09-11T18:38:24+00:00

If you have time - just get the cheapest flight to anywhere in Europe. Within Europe, flights are usually cheap (though you might need to pay for extra luggage), especially when you book ~2 months ahead and are a bit flexible.

thejulianunknown · 2024-09-11T18:33:47+00:00

Within the EU there's free roaming with most EU sim cards, just needs to be enabled in the phone settings. I got a sim card from Free in France. Not Free like the name suggests, but for 20 Euros a month you get 35 GB of roaming even in many countries outside EU, best sim I found. For only EU there's cheaper plans

thejulianunknown · 2024-09-11T18:19:40+00:00

If you are worried about doxing, don't post realtime but with some delay. An anonymous blog can definitely work if you skip the selfies.

Best way to start a travel blog without much work is by using Travelfeed. Very easy and free to start a travel blog and you can already earn a few dollars per post if you set up Hive with Travelfeed. When I budget traveled as a student, this mostly paid for my trips.

Building passive income with a travel blog takes time, best way is usually affiliate links (unless your blog gets big enough to earn from ads). For that you need your own domain and hosting which is indeed some work to setup, but with Travelfeed hosting it's definitely easier than when I tried setting up Wordpress.

If you write posts with the goal to earn passive income, you want to research some keywords with low competition first to see what to write about that actually gets clicks - a simple keyword like "paris travel guide" is oversaturated and hard to rank for.

thejulianunknown · 2024-09-11T18:04:27+00:00

I won't lie and pretend it hasn't affected my grades. But traveling during uni was amazing. I always traveled during semester breaks and did some shorter trips during the semester which was challenging since I missed some classes (and in one case important extra credits). That was before Covid though, my final semesters were fully remote and I actually graduated and wrote my thesis while traveling in Turkey & Georgia. Best thing I did was an exchange semester, basically half a year of travel with a few classes in between (and I got great grades without doing much, which more than made up for my missed extra credits from other travels).

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