And a Dinosaur

andadinosaur.com · English

Zhenyi Tan writes about designing, building, and selling small apps for iOS and Mac. Maker of Vinegar, Baking Soda, Lucky, and Web Inspector for iOS.

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Last post: Sep 5, 2026
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Launch: Litterbox
Sep 5, 2026 · original
Let me get you up to speed: Elon Musk took over Twitter and renamed it X and X became a shitty place and Nitter was an alternative X frontend that let you see X content without going to x.com and XCancel was one of the Nitter instances and as they got more popular they got cease-and-desist’d . This is why we can’t have nice things. But sometimes people still post X content. Maybe you want to see Gruber roast Google Design . Maybe you want to see posts by Federico Viticci who recently returned to X. So I made Litterbox , a browser extension that opens x.com links in a popup. The idea is you open it, take a look, gag a little, then close the lid. Notice the little ⊙ after the link. That’s Litterbox saying it can handle this one. Because sometimes people just link to their own profile page and you can’t embed profile pages. (I tried to decorate the link with stink lines, but some sites’ CSP
Launch: Wallflower
Aug 20, 2026 · original
The second law of enshittification states that the total shittiness of a platform must always increase over time. First Reddit started nagging you to install the app. Then they killed the third-party clients. Then they added ads inside comment threads, then AI-generated summaries as “answers”, then a “Get the app to keep using Reddit” overlay you can’t dismiss. Now they’re putting old.reddit.com behind a login wall. That last one was the anvil that broke the camel’s back. I can’t read Reddit on my phone anymore, so I made yet another Safari extension. (You might ask, if Reddit is so shitty, why not just stop? Because I don’t use Reddit day to day. It just shows up in my search results. It’s either reddit.com or ai-content-farm.com.) What It Does Wallflower replaces Reddit’s web pages with a boring reader. Sound familiar? Because that’s kind of my whole shtick . After years of dealing wit
Getting Your Data Out of History Book
Aug 5, 2026 · original
History Book stores all the saved pages with Core Data, which means there’s an SQLite database somewhere on your Mac. If you want to export those pages somewhere, you can read that database directly. Disclaimer: This is all undocumented and unsupported by Apple. Only follow this tutorial if you’re comfortable with the terminal. Where is the database ~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.andadinosaur.HistoryBook/ We only care about 3 files: History.sqlite , History.sqlite-wal , and History.sqlite-shm . SQLite runs this database in write-ahead logging mode, meaning SQLite will write the changes to the -wal file first, then add them to History.sqlite later. So we need all 3 files. Let’s copy them to somewhere safe. Before you copy, quit History Book so all the transactions are committed: mkdir -p ~/history-book-export cd ~/history-book-export cp ~/Library/Group \ Containers/group.com.andadin
Why History Book Doesn’t Have a Real Export Feature
Aug 5, 2026 · original
By far the most requested feature for History Book is some way to automate exporting saved webpages, so users can import them into other archival services or Obsidian or whatever. I added a simple export feature ages ago, but the SwiftUI modifier is very limited. When you’re exporting multiple files, you can’t even specify the file names. So you end up with names like Exported HTML text 1.html . I tried adding AppleScript support to History Book, but I could never seem to get it right. I couldn’t find much information online. Even Apple’s. Especially Apple’s . It seems like a lost art. My limited understanding is that to implement AppleScript support, you need to create an .sdef file, add a few keys to Info.plist , then implement a KVC object graph for everything you want to script, including NSApplication . Then you need to implement objectSpecifier for all the exposed objects. Then whe
The App Store Redownload Bug
Jul 24, 2026 · original
You’ve probably seen this before. You bought an app, then for some reason you deleted it. Later, when you tried to redownload it from the App Store, the button shows the price (like “$0.99”) instead of showing the redownload icon. This bug has been around for at least 11 years . Usually it’s because you’ve hidden the purchase, or the app was shared through Family Sharing. If you click the price button anyway, you’ll see a dialog telling you that you’ve already purchased the app and can download it for free. Some of us learned about this and just lived with it. Accepted it as another part of Apple’s declining software quality . But not everyone knows. So when users see that price button, they contact the developers. Like contacting a website’s owner because your internet is down. As developers, we can’t do anything about it. We can explain the glitch to the users and say “trust us”, or we
Launch: Technotes
Jul 3, 2025 · original
Technotes is a browser extension that adds user-contributed notes to the Apple documentation website. It lets developers include extra explanations, sample code, and warnings right on the pages. Users can upvote helpful notes and downvote unhelpful ones, and notes that receive too many downvotes will disappear. If you’d like to learn more, read the origin story in this blog post . Technotes only becomes more useful as more developers join. Your help spreading the word makes a big difference. If you develop for Apple platforms, please download the extension for Safari , Firefox or Chrome and post your first Technote. Technotes Pricing Technotes is free. There’s no catch, no creepy business model, and no ulterior motive. Technotes Privacy Policy Technotes will never sell or trade your data. Email is used only to manage your account. Logs are deleted after 7 days and cookies are used only t
Launch: Teleplayer
Dec 23, 2024 · original
After reading about the in-house analog cable channel project , I thought I’d do something similar for the next Chinese New Year when my relatives come over. Since I don’t have the engineering skills to follow the cable channel project, I figured I’d just AirPlay a bunch of videos to the TV. For some reason, QuickTime Player can’t play multiple videos as a playlist, and VLC and IINA don’t support AirPlay. So I thought, how hard can it be to make my own video player? Turns out, it’s pretty hard : It’s Big Buck Bunny. It’s always Big Buck Bunny. Teleplayer is a video player with one main purpose, which is to AirPlay a list of videos to an Apple TV. If you have a collection of TV shows, you can create your own personalized TV channel. If you have music videos, you can recreate the old MTV channel. Or you can turn your homemade videos into a screensaver to play when you aren’t watching anyth
Launch: Spool
Nov 1, 2024 · original
Spool is a Safari extension that adds a few features to the Threads web app. With Spool, you can set Following as your default timeline. You can also filter posts from certain users (e.g. engagement farmers) or based on keywords (e.g. engagement bait). Threads like to show me posts from complete strangers, but I think it’s rude to mute them. So, instead of hiding posts completely, I added a reveal button to show filtered posts. (Filters are saved in iCloud, so sometimes you have to quit and reopen Safari for the new filters to take effect.) Spool also removes the l.threads.net redirect tracking when you click on an external link. Since Safari extensions don’t work on web apps added to your iPhone or iPad home screen, the mobile version of Spool lets you turn the app into a simple Threads browser, with your settings intact. If you use Threads but don’t like their approach to maximizing en
Explaining Passkeys with Way Too Many Analogies
Oct 21, 2024 · original
If you think about it, using passwords to log in is really weird. When you sign up, you’re basically shouting a secret word over the ether to the server. The server hears your word, writes it down, and stores it. Then when you want to log in, you shout your secret word to the server again. The server hears the word, writes it down, and checks it against their note. If it matches, you’re logged in. At this point, I hope you find it as weird as I do: shouting my word every time I log in? How is that “secret”? What happens if someone else hears it ? What happens if someone hacks into the server and steals the notes? What happens if someone tricks you into telling them the word? We can solve some of these problems by making our secret word complicated and hard to pronounce. To prevent people from overhearing it, we can whisper it over a walkie-talkie . To stop hackers, the server can write t
Lucky Now Supports !Bang Syntax
Oct 4, 2024 · original
It took some time, but I’ve finally added the 13,000+ bang shortcuts to Lucky . (It was a somewhat labor-intensive process.) Bangs in Lucky are faster than DuckDuckGo’s because they don’t need to go through a server. Random things about bangs you probably already know Bangs are special keywords that allow you to search other websites directly. You’ve probably used the popular ones, like !g for Google, !a for Amazon, !w for Wikipedia, and !yt for YouTube. But there are some lesser-known and weirder bangs. For example: !compose : create a new mail in Gmail. !fren , !ites : translate French to English, translate Italian to Spanish, etc. !inp (images, no Pinterest): image search, but exclude results from pinterest.com. !ade , !auk : amazon.de, amazon.co.uk, etc. !ios or !osx : search the Apple developer site. !rgi url : reverse image search. !bang : search all !bangs . Unlike Firefox’s smart

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