“Mr. Incredible can touch his toes, but Dad can’t.” - L. Bird (age 8)
\nThat’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.
\nI 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.
\nA long road to launch\nWhen 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.
\nDay 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.
\nIn 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.
\nThe empty library problem\nWith 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.
\nBy 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.
\nSo 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.
\nDiscover 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.
\nWhy 2.0\nWhile 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.
\nFor 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.
\nQuips 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
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-05T10:25:00-04:00", "url": "https://natebird.co/2026/10/05/introducing-quips.html", "tags": ["Quips"] } ] }