I've got 8 apps on the App Store, several web apps, and over 20 micro-apps. It turns out that giving me the tools to create fast means I will create a lot. I'm really proud of what I've built this year, but I also want to take a moment to pause. I don't want to chase new ideas for a bit, I want to level up and sand off the rough edges of what I've already built. I've got a few major updates planned for Quick Reads, Quick Reviews, and Quick Subtitles that I want to get out the door, and there are some tweaks I think the other apps deserve.

Basically, I have more than enough on my plate, and I want to slow down, because left to its own devices, my brain will keep coming up with new things to build.

All that said, I will be making a new thing available to More Birchtree subscribers shortly, but that's truly it…until September, that is.

Good lord, play with this thing.

However, in 2026, I think there's a third contender. In addition to being a hardware company and a software company, Apple is very much a rent-seeking company. Based on how lots of people talk about Apple these days, that rent-seeking characteristic seems to be the only absolute hard requirement for them. Basically, unless the winds really change in the future, Apple will never make another computer where they don't always collect 15-30% of all commerce that happens on that device.

Quinn Nelson recently raised the possibility of Apple making a portable gaming device. Based on what we know about Apple, it seems like they could make a really nice competitor to the Nintendo Switch, the Steam Deck, and other gaming PCs. They even have the Game Porting Toolkit for macOS, which they could use to make it possible for people to play Windows games they purchased on something like Steam, the Epic Games Store, or Xbox on the device. Quinn was on The Talk Show last week, and the conversation honestly depressed me a bit. The primary reason both John and Quinn seem to think this will never happen is that Apple would never make a new product where they don't control what you can buy while taking their chunk of the profits.

Whether that's actually true or not, I find it a bit depressing that that's where we are in the Apple punditry, where we won't even entertain the idea of Apple making something, not because the hardware would be bad, not because the software couldn't work, and not because it isn't the sort of thing the company does, but because they wouldn't be able to collect their commission on everything sold for it.

Ghosthunter is a new CLI that lets you browse and search your Ghost site. It’s free and works with any Ghost blog. You can install it via homebrew with:

brew install mattbirchler/tap/ghosthunter

After installed, you run ghosthunter init to add your site URL and admin key. This will run an initial sync so you have a local cache of your posts. From then on, you just run ghosthunter (or ght) and you get a super quick interface to see your whole history. From here, you have quick access to every post ever, complete with search. The use case I was trying to solve was for when I need to remind myself of when I wrote something, so I just need a link to something I wrote recently. I currently do it by opening my browser, coming here, hit Command+K to bring up search, and find what I need. It's okay, but it's a hell of a lot quicker to do this in the CLI on a local database (don't worry about storage either, my 4873 posts amount to 21MB storage with this tool).

Oh, and because it's a CLI, your agents can use it as well. Here's an example of using an open-ended search that gets results in a way a normal search from the Ghost UI would not find results on its own. This won't be the main use case for me, but hey, if it's useful sometimes, that's lovely.

That's really all there is to it. If you have a Ghost blog and work from the command line, I think you'll like having this tool in your toolbelt.

An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening hasn’t just caused issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too.

When Sony announced that they were discontinuing physical discs for PlayStation, I was less outraged than many. The reason I felt this way wasn't because I loved what Sony was doing. I think it came from an understanding that physical media ain't what it used to be.

I got an analog pocket a couple years ago, and I think it's an awesome product. I was able to insert my Game Boy cartridges from 20 years ago and was able to play them immediately, just like I did back then. Well, on a backlit screen with 10x the pixel density, but still.

The impression I get is that a lot of people have this vision in their head for what physical media still is today, and it simply isn't. Sure, I technically didn't own Golden Sun on the GBA. I technically had a license, but for all intents and purposes, I owned that game. And the evidence is, without Nintendo authorizing anything, I'm able to play it on a new piece of hardware, and it works great. No network downtime is gonna prevent me from doing that.

But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing. It's still just a license, and Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo can either intentionally or, in this case, unintentionally prevent you from playing that game, even if you own the physical copy. This isn't even to mention the fact that when you pop the disc in your drive, you're not playing from the disc. It's installing it to your internal hard drive and is probably installing a bunch of updates that are required to make the game actually work at all.

All I'm saying is it's all digital on the PC side of things, and has been for ages, but we have means of maintaining access to the games we love over here, and it's one of the reasons I've gravitated to the PC for quite a while now.

TLDR: You can play three daily puzzles at nonogame.app right now!

Here is one I didn't see coming…

In the mid-2000s, around the time Sudoku was getting popular here in the US, another game came on my radar around the same time, nonograms. Nonograms were similar to Sudoku in that they gave you a grid and asked you to use process of elimination logic to fill it out in a very particular way, and it scratched the same itch as Sudoku for me.

I got back into playing this game in the past month, and while I found a really good app on the iPhone, I hadn't found a web interface that I actually enjoy using. And well, that sounded like a fun weekend project, so I took some time this weekend and put together nonogame.

I won't get into all the details here. You should just go play it if you want to get an idea for how it works, but it is a desktop optimized way to play nonograms, and for my money, it is the best UI for doing this on the web.

Anyway, the concept here is that you can come to the site every day and there are three puzzles for you to solve: a small, a medium, and a large. They follow the newspaper puzzle format of being easiest on Monday and getting harder through the week until you get the most difficult ones on Sunday.

I also wanted to explore having a really nice flow from anonymous to logged in to paid users. Anyone can go to the site and play today's daily games. Nothing carries over till tomorrow or anything, but you can play them and enjoy them for 5 to 30 minutes, depending on how difficult they are. If you create a free account, which is of course password free and relies on welcome emails and passkeys, you can still play those daily games, but you can also save your progress and build up streaks and play across different devices. Finally, if you pay for the service, you'll get to go back in time and play previous days puzzles. And there are dozens of collections and over a thousand other puzzles you can play on demand.

Last but not least, I'm pleased with the favicon I made for this, which evokes the Quick Reviews heart. ❤️

I'm happy to announce that Chapterize 2 is out today, and I think it is an essential tool for anyone who has a podcast. The app is free to try and has a one-time $20 unlock for unlimited use. If you've previously purchased the app, this is a free upgrade. Chaperize is available for Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

Your podcast home base

Version 2 adds an entirely new section to the app, which provides podcast hosts to more easily access important data about their show with ease. Switch over to the new "shows" tab and you can add as many podcasts as you'd like. I've added my three podcasts, and what this allows me to do is at a moment's notice, review my show information and see my recent episodes.

1. Copy URLs to the show on Apple Podcasts and other services like Overcast, Spotify, and more.
2. Get the HTML embed code for Apple Podcasts.
3. Copy show notes as HTML or Markdown.
4. See current Apple Podcasts rating (you can even dig in to see what your overall score is across all countries).
5. Download old episodes.

Adding a show is dead simple. You can search the Apple Podcasts directory, paste in the Apple Podcasts show link, or add the RSS feed, whichever is most convenient for you. When you go the Apple Podcasts route, the app will automatically find your Overcast and Pocket Casts sites, and if you want quick access to the YouTube channel, Spotify, or Castro, you can manually add those links as well. If you don't have them immediately, no worries, you can add them later.

One of the things I have to do every week for MacStories is to get the episode links, show notes, and embed code for our latest Comfort Zone episode. This was a bit of a pain before, but I've been using this app for a few months to do this and it's completely changed the game for me. What took like 5 minutes before takes less than a minute now.

A new editing interface

I think the killer feature in Chapterize is its ability to let you add and edit your chapter timings from the transcript. This has enabled me to hugely accelerate how quickly I can get my chapters into episodes over the past year.

In version 2, I'm not messing with the formula too much, but there is a critical change that I think levels up this experience even further. The previous UI had a toggle that lets you switch between the chapter list and the transcript view (if you're on an iPhone or a narrower window on an iPad or Mac, you'll still get that). But if you're on an iPad or Mac with enough space, you'll get both views side by side. It just makes it much easier to do everything. All the quality of life things around keyboard navigation and shortcuts work the same as they did before, but having this dual pane view really makes the experience easier.

I should say that if this isn't your thing, then your experience doesn't change at all. If you're not using transcripts in the app, then the UI is going to remain exactly how it was previously, and you can keep using it how you always have.

To encourage use of this feature, I've also added a setting that is off by default, but you can enable to automatically start transcribing files when you drag them into the app. I've also made it so that if you already have a transcript for an episode in the app, you can now override it with your own. So, for example, if you tend to use the automatic transcription I just talked about, but this time you have your own SRT or VTT file you'd like to use instead, you can drag it into the window, and it will replace what was there before.

And because the app now knows what podcasts you work on, when you drag a new episode in, you'll be prompted with which show it belongs to, and all the appropriate metadata, including the Hallmark, will automatically be added. Alternatively, if you're on the shows view and you drag a new audio file onto one of the shows in the list, it will assign it to that show.

The Chapterize CLI

I recently created a CLI for Quick Subtitles, and that was a great unlock for me personally in automating my podcast workflow. I was able to watch a folder that Chris would put a new Comfort Zone episode in and then kick off a job that generated a transcription and cleaned up that transcription. However, then I just had a couple of files at that point. What I really wanted to do was get that episode into Chapterize at the end.

Well, with the Chapterize CLI, you can now do that. The most basic use case would be to use this to pass in an audio file into the app, but you can do a bit more.

You can have the app launch once this job is completed or not, you can simultaneously pass in a subtitles file, and you have the ability to indicate which show this episode is associated with.

There isn't a command line interface to start adding your chapters or working in the app, the UI is definitely still the place to go for that, but this was the last step in the work that I felt I could automate quite well.

This has let me round out my script for Comfort Zone so that once the transcript is created and cleaned up, it automatically adds those to Chapterize, associates it with the correct show, and I can get to adding chapters from there.

Run brew install mattbirchler/tap/chapterize to install Chapterize on your Mac. Please be aware this CLI does nothing if you don't also have the Mac app installed.

Check it out!

If you host a podcast and you put chapters in your episodes, and let's be real, that should be most of us, you really should check out Chapterize. It's a tool I built for myself and it is the tool I would be using even if I didn't make it.