Category: Projects (Page 1 of 37)

Posts introducing, updating, and covering various projects to which I’ve contributed or that I maintain.

Holocron: A Searchable Podcast Archive

June 15, 2026 / Tom

A few years ago I started building a thing called Backcast. The idea was simple: I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I wanted a way to back them up. I got as far as parsing OPML exports, writing some unit tests, setting up PHPCS, and documenting the whole thing on this blog. Then life happened, I lost the thread, and it sat untouched.

The itch never went away, though. I kept finding myself thinking, “I know someone said something about this on a podcast, but which one? Which episode? When?” Podcasts are full of ideas and I had no way to get back to them.

So I started over. Different project, different approach, same underlying frustration.

Where Can I Watch? 1.4.0: Today, and Detail Pages Everywhere

June 8, 2026 / Tom

Where Can I Watch? 1.4.0 is out, and it’s one of the bigger releases since launch. Two ideas drove most of the work: making Today its own top-level tab, and giving Episode Detail a consistent home in every place in the app where you might tap into an episode.

When 1.3.0 shipped, the plan I wrote for 1.4.0 was a detail-page overhaul:

content rating badges,
runtime,
on-your-services callouts,
and person search.

The more I continued to use the app, the more it was clear the foundation for those enhancements wasn’t quite in place yet:

Episode Detail only opened from one corner of the app,
Today was still a pinned section inside Watchlist,
and the streaming service name, the whole point of the app, was missing from a few places a user would most want it.

1.4.0 puts those foundations in place. The detail-page enhancements will be in 1.5.0, built on top of everything in this release.

Retiring BurnRate (In Favor of Claude’s Status Line)

May 25, 2026 / Tom

A few months ago I shipped the first version of BurnRate (and another version after that). It’s a macOS menu bar app that showed your Claude Code usage limits at a glance.

It solved a real problem: I didn’t want to stop what I was doing to type /usage every time I wondered how close I was to hitting my limits.

But Claude Code solved it better.

Now Playing Notify 1.2.0: Less to Notice

May 18, 2026 / Tom

The first version of Now Playing Notify was primarily focus on notifications for the currently playing track. The second release was about being able to do something with them such as being able to click to open a track, copy a link, and launch at login.

This release is focused more on optimizing several things behind the scenes. As such, most of what’s in 1.2.0 is invisible.

Where Can I Watch? 1.3.0: A Clarity Pass

May 11, 2026 / Tom

Where Can I Watch? 1.3.0 is out, and this one is less about new features and more about making controls that have been in the app since launch easier to find and easier to trust.

When 1.2.0 shipped, I wrote that 1.3.0 was going to be a detail-page overhaul. But the more I used the app, the more I noticed another set of issues specifically around the filtering controls in the Services tab. They’ve been there since 1.0.0, but they’re buried far too low beneath the list of streaming service providers. So I shifted gears. The detail-page work moved to 1.4.0, and 1.3.0 became a clarity pass on the filtering experience across Search and Trending.

Holocron: A Searchable Podcast Archive

Where Can I Watch? 1.4.0: Today, and Detail Pages Everywhere

Retiring BurnRate (In Favor of Claude’s Status Line)

Now Playing Notify 1.2.0: Less to Notice

Where Can I Watch? 1.3.0: A Clarity Pass

Current Projects