Nate Bird

“Mr. Incredible can touch his toes, but Dad can’t.” - L. Bird (age 8)

That’s the kind of thing I’ve been collecting for years: funny, wise, and unexpectedly profound lines from my kids, my wife, and the people around me. Today I’m announcing Quips, an app for saving the quotes that matter to you, coming soon to iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

I chose today on purpose. Fifteen years ago, on October 5, 2011, Steve Jobs passed away. Among the many things he said, one idea has stayed with me more than any other: that we show our appreciation for humanity when we “make something wonderful and put it out there.” That idea is a big part of why Quips exists. It’s my attempt to do exactly that.

A long road to launch When I got the first iPhone in 2007, I started out keeping quotes in the Notes app. A few years later, the talented crew at Lickability released Quotebook, a dedicated quote app, and I loved it. Unfortunately, Quotebook stopped getting updates and was discontinued in 2016. Since I was already journaling in Day One, I moved my quotes there.

Day One was usable, but it never truly replaced Quotebook. So in the summer of 2020 I opened Xcode and started a new project called “quotebook.” It was a simple app, built just for my own phone, that recreated most of what I missed. My day job and other obligations kept that first attempt short. I came back to it in 2022 to refine features and add a proper storage system, and then other priorities pushed it aside again.

In 2025, Anthropic released Claude Code. After using Claude on a few web projects, I wondered what it could do for my quote app. It turned out to be a lot. Between explaining the complexities of Swift concurrency and quickly prototyping UI features, I made tremendous progress in a matter of months.

The empty library problem With development moving quickly, I planned a January 2026 launch with a solid 1.0: save, edit, search, and tag quotes, and share them through Messages and social media. I also set a firm rule that I wouldn’t run or maintain any servers. Your quotes should be private and belong to you.

By the end of 2025 I had a name, Quips, along with the domains and social handles. But while finishing the last features, I realized something. The app worked beautifully for me because I already had hundreds of meaningful quotes. A new user, however, starts with an empty library, and features like widgets and reminder notifications do almost nothing when you only have a handful of quotes.

So I finished the 1.0 features and started building what became Discover: a public library of nearly 100 collections and more than 3,000 verified quotes. The public library is served as static files through Cloudflare and also bundled with the app, so there are no accounts, and your personal library is never shared outside your device or iCloud.

Discover turned into some of the most fun work of the whole project. Digging into quotes and the stories behind them has become a hobby of its own, which is why I started my newsletter, Quote Unquote. I’m grateful to Quote Investigator and similar sites for years of careful work tracing how quotes evolve and who actually said them.

Why 2.0 While building the library, I kept adding to the app: Share Studio, Widget Studio, and full iPad and Mac support. That’s why Quips is launching at version 2.0, six years after the first commit. It isn’t done, but it is much more than a 1.0, and I plan to write more about how individual features came together.

For today, I hope you’ll keep an eye out for Quips, and that once it arrives it becomes something wonderful for you too. It might be a daily notification that helps you take on the day, or your kid’s latest hilarious line smiling back at you from your home screen.

Quips is coming soon to the App Store · Free for up to 100 quotes, or $2.49/month or $19.99/year for unlimited · quipsapp.com

I opened Preview.app to find my name in a PDF document of the Firefox 1.0 ad that ran in the NYTimes a long time ago. I tried to highlight my name and I could barely tell that the menu bar opened because it is so illegible. What’s the point? So I can see the blurry names that are also illegible? Please give us back opaque menu bars.

Background. I’ve had Tahoe installed as a beta on my Mac Mini since June 2025. I’ve used it a lot over the last 7-8 months. So any normalization of the UI should be in full swing by now. This is the first post in what I think will be many as I document my usage of Tahoe and some of the thoughts I’ve been ignoring or passing over in my past usage.

Se the attached image for visual description of the bad parts of the UI of the Books app.

Top left I keep finding myself questioning whether the Window buttons (Close, Maximize, Minimize) apply to just the sidebar or to the whole window. I know the answer but there is definitely still a cognitive load based on where the buttons are placed in the left sidebar and not in a window menu bar.

Bottom right The content of the window is allowed to scroll under the sidebar. But the contents of the sidebar are also allowed to scroll under other elements in the sidebar. Really? Do you see that list scrolling under my account link? At first I thought it was something behind the sidebar but it took a second to realize it was just the sidebar list going under another item in the sidebar. What if there were books under the sidebar too? Would those also stack under the translucent sidebar?

Top Right We have all this room at the top of the window and there are only three (3!) possible buttons to make accessible for the user directly but instead they are stuck in a generic {…} button with a down chevron. It has a view (grid vs list), sort by (recent, title, author, manual), and what I think is an App setting, Remove downloads (automatically or manually).

This is a disappointing UI for the books app. Options are less accessible as they require a click on a button that has no context. The top right could easily just be two buttons, one for the view toggle and one for the sort toggle with actual icons that represent what they do.

The translucent sidebar is just a mess. I think the translucent sidebars and top bars should be scratched. They are bad in so many ways. I don’t know how you salvage it without just making them opaque. I think they actually have negative utility because they cause cognitive load to the user trying to discern what is the blurred content under the bar.

I’ve been using Claude Code for a side project recently, and it has significantly improved my productivity as a developer.

Instead of diving straight into code, I now spend more time crafting detailed prompts that describe new features or changes. This approach forces me to articulate in plain language exactly how the application should behave and why. It reminds me of test-driven development, but with prompts guiding the process instead of tests. I’ve started saving these prompts as documentation, creating a clear record of the intended functionality.

While some visual adjustments and refactoring are still necessary, this method of programming has been refreshing. As someone who enjoys building things, I find myself spending less time stuck on technical problems and more time conceptualizing new features. I no longer need deep expertise in languages like Ruby or Swift, nor comprehensive knowledge of libraries and SDKs. I can create simply by knowing what I want to build.

Looking ahead, I can envision Claude Code evolving into an advanced pair programming tool where Claude sits on one side of the screen while my application runs on the other. We could discuss changes conversationally, implement them immediately, and see the results without touching a keyboard. While some developers might resist this approach, I find it exciting and look forward to building new applications in significantly less time.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

I enjoyed John Gruber’s post on daringfireball about the advanced features of Apple Intelligence not being demo-able even 9 months after being announced.

I think Apple has been headed on this path for a while due to their change in their OS release cycle. We used to get iOS version X in September and although maybe with a few bugs it was pretty much feature complete. Then we started getting new features in the x.1 or x.2 version. Portrait mode comes to mind but I’m not sure if that was the first.

Then a few years ago a lot of features started shipping in x.4 versions in February/March. I think some sort of hubris has taken hold and Apple has bitten off more than they can chew. While it is nice to get features throughout the year, that also means that those features are 8-9 months away from being ready to ship when they are shown off at WWDC. The farther away the ship date from when it is announced the greater risk of it not shipping at all.

I think Apple has been on this path for a while and it was only a matter of time for when announced features just wouldn’t make a 9-10 months away deadline. Whether they can actually pull of some version of what they showed is yet to be seen but I’m not surprised they missed their publicly announced deadline.

I am thankful for family and friends who love and support me.

I am thankful for a community that supports my kids and provides them opportunities to learn and grow into responsible adults.

I am thankful for free and fair elections where I can vote to continue the messy experiment of democracy.

I am thankful for a career which allows me to create, build, scale, mentor, and learn.

I am thankful for a healthy body to walk, run, hike, play tennis, take care of myself and serve others.

I am thankful for service opportunities to mentor students, give to local non-profit organizations , and teach the benefits of giving.

Nilay, at The Verge, nails why Trump is too inept to be President in his endorsement for Kamala Harris.

Trump simply cannot use the tools of democracy to run the country on our behalf. His brain does not work that way, even when it appears to be working. He is too selfish, too stupid, too cognitively impaired, too fucked in the head by social media — too whatever. He just can’t do it. He will make our collective action problems worse because he doesn’t even know what kind of problems they are. There is a reason he loves dictators and that all his biggest ideas involve forcing people to do things at the barrel of a gun: mass deportations, arresting his critics, sending the military into American cities to quell protests. He is unable to imagine a world where people cooperate for any reason other than the threat of violence, and so violence has become an inextricable part of his movement.