John Scalo
After being dormant forever, this site is alive again! I’m pulling in some bloggy stuff from my Threads, Reddit, and Made by Windmill, but plan on adding more homegrown content on an ongoing basis.
And not that anyone was listening to it, but the music archive is still here, in /music.
I was just reminded of this story about my old buddy Nigel. About 30 years ago (yes, really!) I made a Mac app called File Freak. It was basically Spotlight before anything like Spotlight ever existed. But I needed an app icon.
Nigel was a great artist but had only ever worked in the analog world. Still, when I told him about what I needed he said he was game to try. So I (ahem) “lent” him a copy of Photoshop, and a week later, he delivered this cute icon. It was perfect!
I was so impressed that I asked him to show me his process in Photoshop. We sat down. He went to the pencil tool, set it to 1x1 px, zoomed all the way in, and started clicking on pixels one at a time. ONE FUCKING PIXEL AT A TIME. It was only a 32x32 icon (I think, at the time?), but still that’s a lot of clicks!
After I was done laughing my ass off, he said “what’s so funny?”, and I showed him the pen tool, region fills, layers, etc. He was like, “eh, I prefer my way”.
Maybe it’s just me but I cringe when I see a lot of obviously AI-written text in an app or web UI. It just reeks of laziness and makes apps/websites seem all alike.
So, I made this open-source Mac app that lets you review every user-facing string in your project. It won’t “fix” them - you have to do that - that’s the whole point.
For each string, you can approve, ignore, or tweak. And it intelligently tracks string status across launches. Then if anything later touches that string, it appears back in the review queue.
It’s a native Mac app, open sourced, with no dependencies. Hope you find it useful!
For years there’s been a spreadsheet floating around with every possible musical scale which I share and consult now and then. Just now I asked an AI to convert it to a website, and it did! You can search, filter, and even play back the scale tones.
I’m really into journaling. I have hundreds of them. Home journals, health journals, personal journals, finance journals, family journals, food journals. I have a journal for every car I’ve owned. Every project I work on gets multiple journals. I find it so useful to be able to quickly search through these and fill in the details that get lost over time.
Since my Airbnb days, I’ve used Quip for not only journaling but almost all my note-taking. As an Evernote user, discovering Quip was like getting a cold glass of water in hell. As a note-taking app, for me at least, it just got every detail right. It was opinionated about styling and formatting but in all the right ways. Cmd-J brought up a search field that searched through all notes instantly. And it was free to boot.