The summit date is optional
Most tracking apps make the date a required field. But plenty of people remember the mountain perfectly and the date not at all.
Half a million mountains, zero network calls
Peak search could have been an API call. Shipping 50 MB of SQLite instead made the feature work in the one place it matters most.
Denali counts twice
Two famous climbing lists overlap by exactly one mountain, and there are two competing versions of one of them. The catalog has 57 entries for a reason.
A globe made of triangles, not textures
The easy way to build a 3D globe is to wrap a picture of the Earth around a sphere. That approach falls apart the moment you want a country to light up.
What we decided not to lock behind Pro
The easiest subscription to sell is one that caps the core feature. Summit does not cap it, and here is the reasoning.
Why "Downloads" shouldn't be a search result
Type "downloads" into a launcher and you want your Downloads folder, not a stray one three levels deep. HyperKey resolves the obvious answer first.
One search field, two modes: designing Space-to-switch
HyperKey needed both app search and file search without turning into two separate tools. The answer was a single keystroke, not a second hotkey.
Designing a launcher that needs zero permissions
Most Mac launchers ask for Accessibility access on first launch. HyperKey never does - and that constraint shaped the whole architecture.
The 64KB pipe bug that made file search feel broken
File search worked perfectly in testing and then quietly hung on real machines. The cause was a subprocess pipe filling up faster than anyone expected.
Why we used Spotlight instead of building our own file index
Building a custom file index sounds like the "real" way to do fast file search. It is also a second copy of your filesystem to keep correct, forever.
How I decide which app to build next
With one person and no investors, every app has to earn its place. Here is the filter an idea has to pass before it becomes a Flowstate app.
The end-of-shift habit that pays off
The value of a tip tracker is not any single number. It is the small habit of logging every shift, and what that record tells you a month later.