Build · 2025-11-09 · 11 min

Shipping Tapsy 1.0

Eight weekends from the first commit to the first shipped binary. Two TestFlight builds with a total of fourteen testers. One App Store rejection, not for the app — for the metadata.

A condensed timeline

Weekend 1: A widget that counts. That’s it.
Weekend 2: Storage layer. The “data model” is a [Counter] in a property list. It stays that way.
Weekend 3: iCloud sync. CloudKit is fine. The hard part is naming what to send.
Weekend 4: The first usable widget. Tap target felt too small. Bumped.
Weekends 5–6: watchOS complication. Half a weekend wasted on a layout bug that was a missing relationship in the entitlement.
Weekend 7: Settings, export, the app body. Honest 50% of the work for ~5% of the use.
Weekend 8: TestFlight, fix-ups, ship.

The body of this note will go deeper into the rejection (an unhappy metadata note about widget naming) and the small calls — like rounding the count up when displayed wide — that turned out to matter.

More notes

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A menu-bar app from scratch

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Versioning prompts like code

Notes on building a diff view for plain text without rebuilding git.

Design · 6 min

Why a stamp, not a checkbox

Checkboxes turn habits into chores. A stamp is heavier, slower, more deliberate — and that turns out to matter.