Kodsnack 598 - Tiny dopamine hit, with Jack Cheng

Fredrik talks to Jack Cheng - author and creator of the iPhone note capture app Bebop. Jack describes where Bebop came from and how he built it, and how and why Copilot and other AI tools became integral parts of the workflow.

Being aware of the maintenance cost of each decision, keeping things focused, avoiding building yourself into a bloated corner - sometimes even deciding certain things don’t belong in your app.

Coding on the side, needing to balance the time you have? Use it to your advantage!

Jack also talks about the other apps he uses for working with notes and writing, and how different apps feel right for different types of writing.

(Yes, Obsidian once again makes an appearance.)

Thank you Cloudnet for sponsoring our VPS!

Comments, questions or tips? We a re @kodsnack, @tobiashieta, @oferlundand @bjoreman on Twitter, have a page on Facebook and can be emailed at [email protected] if you want to write longer. We read everything we receive.

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• Jack
• Detroit
• Jack’s books
• See you in the cosmos
• The many masks of Andy Zhou
• The slow web - Jack’s blog post
• Copilot
• Captio - the app Jack used which let you email a note to yourself
• Obsidian
• Nvalt
• Fsnotes
• Zapier
• Bebop
• Jack’s post introducing Bebop
• Ruby on rails
• Typepad
• Swift
• Swiftui
• Objective-C
• MVC
• App intents
• Visual studio code
• Xcode
• Figma
• Cursor is the editor with more builtin LLM features
• Support us on Ko-fi!
• Morning pages
• Jack’s newsletter
• Ghost
• Highland 2
• John August
• Cot
• Share extensions
• Testflight
• These days - Jack’s first novel, financed through Kickstarter
• Robin Sloan
• Robin’s text about how an app can be a home-cooked meal
• WWDC - Apple’s yearly developer conference
• The Humane AI pin
• Rabbit
• See you on the bookshelf - Jack’s podcast about creating See you in the cosmos
• Booksmitten
• jackcheng.com
• Jack on Instagram, Threads, and Mastodon

• Addicted to the slot machine of social media
• Just spin up an Iphone app
• A specific thing I want to build
• Advanced auto complete
• Gold coins along the way
• Freeze all these features
• The maintenance cost of every decision
• The speed of capture
• Tiny dopamine hit
• Use it to your advantage
• Immediately useful
• You can’t not be cliché
• Today as the title