The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Apple / classic Mac

Allen Pike

allenpike.com

Apple / classic MacSoftware / engineering practiceAI / MLMobile / iOS / AndroidEngineering management / careersEssays / personal

’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
438 from 3 Apr 2002 to 30 Sep 2026
Posting
monthly (17 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://feeds.allenpike.com/feed/

2026 14

  1. Vancouver Election Guide, 2026
  2. Launch Now
  3. The Brains of the Operation
  4. The Rise of Transparency
  5. Weighing the Business Case for Quality
  6. We Can Do Hard Things
  7. Building for Voice In, Visuals Out
  8. Test Coverage Won’t Save You
  9. Surprise! Pay $1000
  10. Voice In, Visuals Out @ AI Engineering World’s Fair
  11. How To (Not) Spend $10k/wk on Coding Agents
  12. The Persistent Gravity of Cross Platform
  13. Maggie Appleton on Gas Town and Coding Agent Orchestration
  14. A Broken Heart

2025 14

  1. A Box of Many Inputs
  2. Why is ChatGPT for Mac So… Bad?
  3. Why is ChatGPT for Mac So Good?
  4. How to Not Get Acquired
  5. UX Entropy
  6. Building Something Big
  7. Getting Tied Up
  8. Spending Too Much Money on a Coding Agent
  9. Figma Slides is a Beautiful Disaster
  10. Post-Chat UI
  11. Canada Votes
  12. A Score for Snacks
  13. JavaScript Fatigue Strikes Back
  14. The Era of Tab Continuation

2024 18

  1. An Unreasonable Amount of Time
  2. The Talk Show, Ep. 415
  3. It’s Good for Apple, and Okay for You
  4. Final Fact
  5. Testing the Untestable
  6. BC Votes
  7. Infer, an AI Eng Meetup in Vancouver
  8. Our Unevenly Distributed Future
  9. Starting Forestwalk
  10. Pushing the Frontier
  11. Feeding the Baby
  12. LLMs Aren’t Just “Trained On the Internet” Anymore
  13. Building Slack
  14. Sell First, or Build First?
  15. Steamclock’s Next Chapter
  16. The Dangers of Curiosity
  17. Once a Month
  18. From Chatbot to Everything Engine

2023 14

  1. Splitting Services and Product
  2. You Should Have a Research Question
  3. Build a Deck of Heroes
  4. The Curse of Dialup World
  5. Make the Thing a Link
  6. The Feedback Wizard
  7. Do Something, So We Can Change It!
  8. Going Way Beyond ChatGPT
  9. How Leaders Manage Time & Attention
  10. Collect Stories, Not Generalizations
  11. 32K of Context in Your Pocket
  12. A 175-Billion-Parameter Goldfish
  13. Humans Need Play
  14. The Care and Feeding of Feeds

2022 14

  1. Dungeons & Developers
  2. It Shipped That Way
  3. You Should Propose More Things
  4. 2022 Vancouver Election Guide
  5. A Password Autofill Surprise
  6. How to Go Over Budget
  7. Setting Two Spies Free
  8. Giving a Shit as a Service
  9. Someone Wants to Learn From You
  10. How to Buy a Family EV
  11. Coda vs. Notion, and Emoji Pickers
  12. How Two Spies Closes Cities
  13. What Doesn’t Need to Be Done
  14. Beyond Optimism

2021 14

  1. The Burgeoning Need for Focus
  2. Fresh Air Life
  3. Fight for Outside Perspective
  4. The Persistent Gravity of Cross Platform
  5. How to Write Docs People Read
  6. Amazing Atelic Activities
  7. The Teams You Worked on May Have Sucked
  8. Should You Build a Mobile App?
  9. Books Are a Seed You Can Plant
  10. Remote Hiring at Steamclock
  11. An Iterative Workflow for Attention
  12. Do Great Work, Then Tell People About It
  13. App Tracking and Analytics
  14. Streaming Stories and Troubling Tales

2020 14

  1. Two Birds, One Scone
  2. Living, Fast and Slow
  3. On Refining Apps’ Text
  4. How to Not Build a Social Network
  5. 6 Months in the Closet
  6. The Case of the Missing Tuna
  7. Being Good at Roulette
  8. The Secret Rules of iOS Development
  9. Half Here, Half There
  10. The Unified Theory of Cereal
  11. Explain Like I’m 3
  12. Don’t Drink the Cream
  13. Ode to the Beginning
  14. Two Spies

2019 14

  1. Guide to the Cold-Industrial Complex
  2. The Coming Supremacy of AR
  3. Rate This App
  4. Canada Election Guide, 2019
  5. Kitten See, Kitten Do
  6. Multiply Your Time
  7. Being More than Nice
  8. Control the Silence
  9. iTunes: An Error Occurred
  10. Making a List, Bolding It Twice
  11. Information Needed
  12. 325: Podcast Episode Numbers
  13. Navigation Should Be Boring
  14. Fun Fact

2018 13

  1. No More Oppatoo
  2. Leadership Mode Activate
  3. Vancouver Election Guide, 2018
  4. Blowing Up Your OmniFocus
  5. White Guys Are the Worst
  6. The Big Deal
  7. 372 Easy Steps to Expanding Your Mind
  8. The Great Bug Hunt
  9. Caravan to Xcoders
  10. The Canadian Cheese Cartel
  11. Human-Only Inboxes
  12. Try the Opposite
  13. Chain of Fools

2017 12

  1. No Pain, No Gain
  2. Longphone
  3. Top Banana
  4. Do Not Disturb While Living
  5. Bright Side of the Moon
  6. Developing for iPhone Pro
  7. What Your Career Wants to Be
  8. People You Want to Work With
  9. Steve Stories
  10. The Principle of Least Surprise
  11. Feedback Mountain
  12. Assassinating for Fun and Profit

2016 11

  1. Goals, Dreams, and Pea Mayo
  2. Rules to Get Paid By
  3. The Disclosure Indicator
  4. Socking Simians
  5. Creative Destruction
  6. New Here
  7. Organizational Size Classes
  8. Too Many Slacks
  9. Diagrammatically Correct
  10. Cofounding Variables
  11. The Joy of Shortcuts

2015 13

  1. Some Things About OmniFocus
  2. The Worst App
  3. Being Less Wrong
  4. Working Title
  5. Moving Swiftly
  6. Can’t Stop the Music
  7. The Supply-side Blues
  8. Fix Your Mac With One Weird Trick
  9. User Agents of Change
  10. Moving Mountains
  11. A JS Framework on Every Table
  12. When Used Properly
  13. Maximal Products at Çingleton

2014 12

  1. Buying One of Everything
  2. A Great App for Recording Podcasts
  3. The iPad Zombie
  4. Schrödinger’s Shift Key
  5. Being Bad at Things
  6. A Lot Can Change in 6 Years
  7. A Company Made of People
  8. Feeding the Baby
  9. Burying the URL
  10. Hashed Out
  11. Up Up Down Down
  12. Elizabeth and Samantha

2013 5

  1. Unprofessionalism
  2. The Fall and Rise of Podcasting
  3. Searching the Curatorium
  4. Maximum Viable Products
  5. iOS 7: Catch Me if You Can

2012 15

  1. Making a funky app video
  2. Shipping Party Monster
  3. The Retina 13″: Awkward
  4. The end of Rich Corinthian Leather
  5. 50 shades of black
  6. iPhone product shots, 5 years on
  7. A Monster in the lab
  8. Speciation in computing
  9. iPhone apps on the iPad 3
  10. iTunes’ ball and chain: Windows
  11. The tweet to nowhere: protected replies
  12. 3 megapixels in your lap
  13. Anchoring startups
  14. Homes for Vancouver startups
  15. The pain of text formatting on iOS

2011 6

  1. Design your way out of that paper bag
  2. Prism, the image browser
  3. Web technology in native apps
  4. Video: Making a JS meetup blow minds
  5. Providing joy at 60 fps
  6. Micro-subscriptions are here

2010 16

  1. The Chrome Web Store: get paid to make things
  2. HOWTO start a technical meetup
  3. Simple lessons about the App Store
  4. Announcing WeddingDJ
  5. A Tale of two Budgetable competitors
  6. SproutCore spreads its wings
  7. Leaving Apple
  8. Twitter is fixing links
  9. Scrolling libraries for Mobile Safari
  10. Choosing a viewport for iPad sites
  11. Four-way racing coming to PS3
  12. Altering Time retired
  13. Cassandra: Too fast
  14. More JSLint, less JSWTF
  15. An ode to split screen
  16. Unladen Follow 2: How annoying would this user be?

2009 49

  1. Crafting realistic interfaces
  2. Tab Modality: Chrome makes it happen
  3. Announcing Unladen Follow
  4. Chrome for Mac annoyances
  5. Accessing Twitter with the OAuth Gem and Rails
  6. IE9 will be faster and rounder
  7. Feeds worth reading
  8. Blogger impersonation rampant
  9. Friedisms
  10. Stop the fire hose: Primary sources
  11. Not everybody likes LinkedIn
  12. I am not a contact
  13. Vancouver Javascript Meetup
  14. iPhone coming to everyone else in Canada
  15. Sony is Going after the touch
  16. iWork.com updated
  17. Want to use Wave in Explorer? No problem!
  18. GMail for HTML5: Loading code via comments
  19. Forum upgraded!
  20. Web app theme showdown: Aristo and Ace
  21. Rainbow pies
  22. Shaw trying to drown Novus
  23. Niche blogs: Saving you from my tea rants
  24. Unlimited music downloads
  25. Array.sort browser differences
  26. 3D CSS Transforms hit WebKit trunk
  27. Wine, donuts, and sex
  28. Electrolysis: Separating Firefox
  29. Textmate 2 Still Coming™
  30. Chrome’s Webkit fork ends
  31. Real function names come to WebKit debugger
  32. Google’s 3D on the web vs. Mozilla’s
  33. Pricing games by length
  34. Mobifying the world
  35. GMail adds Undo Send
  36. iTunes DJ
  37. What your time is worth
  38. The California Guys
  39. Kindle for iPhone
  40. Safari 4: Webkit gets dressed up
  41. Taking advantage of IE
  42. Dropping IE6 Roundup
  43. Twitter and URL mangling
  44. Antipode realigned
  45. All content needs dates
  46. Vancouver now in 3D
  47. Wesabe spices up your budgets
  48. Just let me play, would you kindly?
  49. iWork.com launches

2008 45

  1. I’m not dead yet!
  2. Chromey Goodness
  3. Designing a dune buggy genetically
  4. Feature shotguns vs. feature lasers
  5. Textmate 2: “I’m not dead yet!”
  6. WordPress admin usability study
  7. SurfaceWare video
  8. Ten Tidbits from IE8
  9. JQuery kicking Prototype’s ass
  10. Translink iPhone site launches
  11. CSS3 Borders still mired
  12. Seeing red: CSS sprite borders
  13. IE8 takes on Firebug
  14. Javascript engine showdown
  15. A better object.toString() in Javascript
  16. Firefox 3.1 adds border-image
  17. The horror of sneaker design
  18. Free Ideas
  19. XBox 360 drops to 5th place
  20. Two down, n to go
  21. Not another photoshop montage
  22. Google Lively
  23. No unlimited plan, thank you
  24. IE wants to know your background
  25. Canadian iPhone plans released
  26. Shipley on being oneself
  27. Appled
  28. Bad UI followup
  29. Cancelling “Yes or No”
  30. You will lose all unsaved progress!
  31. Twitter and dogs’ butts
  32. Mac addicts and Firefox
  33. Elegant authentication in CodeIgniter?
  34. C++ getting lambdas and closures
  35. Farewell floating footer
  36. Japan shuns URLs
  37. Your browser’s command line
  38. iPhone developer program stalled
  39. OLPC dream dies
  40. Indentation voodoo in Python
  41. Facebook attacks application spam
  42. Highlights from Web Directions North ’08
  43. Firefox’s new Mac theme
  44. The MacBook Cube
  45. One week of Safari

2007 48

  1. Thinking about Amazon’s SimpleDB
  2. The framework shouldn’t wag the app
  3. phpBB 3 Released
  4. Antipode tweaked
  5. Programming as checklists
  6. Flickr integrates Picnik
  7. Hosting software rocks
  8. Web designers converging on Vancouver
  9. Competition in wireless coming to Canada
  10. Should eBook readers display double-up?
  11. Games, cores, and functional languages
  12. Why scale teams?
  13. OmniFocus gets 2500 preorders in 5 days
  14. Firefox 3 hits beta
  15. Death to minimization
  16. Altering Time news moved
  17. Alterations delivered to your doorstep
  18. The Long Tail of your Tunes
  19. Worst web design known to man
  20. Goodbye Boing Boing
  21. Eee: Linux notebook for $200
  22. Walking on the nightly side
  23. Fake unlimited gets the smackdown
  24. Really hard things
  25. Apple Store coming to Vancouver... in 2009
  26. Reddit killing Silicon Valley?
  27. Welcome to Antipode
  28. Palm responds to stimulus
  29. 10 Days until Mac OS X 10.5
  30. PHP tip: Path-independent sites
  31. Showdown: iPod touch vs. iPhone
  32. Fat nano will fit in change pockets
  33. The dialog is dead, long live the bar
  34. Worst ISP acquisition ever
  35. BuyMeNowNowNowNow!
  36. One Year of Altering Log
  37. Death to ‘unlimited’
  38. EA’s UI design sucks: won’t let you play hockey
  39. Facebook commits seppuku
  40. The average marriage
  41. A message from the heavens Mountain View
  42. Workspacing
  43. Virtuosity: More Faith, fewer numbers
  44. Google Analyzes Altering Time
  45. Apache can do your speling for you
  46. Programming in a towel
  47. The iPhone: Awesome! Wait...
  48. The horror of ring tunes

2006 20

  1. Q: Why was Google Answers axed?
  2. FantasyTech 3: GOTO FUN
  3. The Zuney Bin
  4. What’s a Budgetable?
  5. Please let me design a cell phone
  6. Bye Bye Internet Explorer 6
  7. iPod SDK, where art thou?
  8. Sony doesn’t want you to buy a PlayStation 3
  9. Getting people to do boring things for fun and profit
  10. Faith competing for Engineering
  11. Altering Time altered
  12. Review: Coke and coffee, sitting in a tree
  13. Report from WWDC 2006
  14. Comment away!
  15. What won’t happen at WWDC 2006
  16. New Weblog Format
  17. Ass worked off; still faithful
  18. Vancouver Skytrain anagram map
  19. Places of Insanity
  20. Speaking of Faith

2005 28

  1. Not discouraged by hurricanes
  2. Hurricane honours Faith
  3. It’s Beta time!
  4. Beta: Baking for a couple weeks at 350
  5. Beta approaches
  6. What does loyalty look like?
  7. New insights
  8. Rocking in the free time
  9. Players want to interact
  10. First endgame nears
  11. health- burden+
  12. One thumb up
  13. It’ll be a game Real Soon Now™
  14. Alpha Test: Round 3
  15. Apple goes Intel; Force disrupted
  16. Trying to keep faith
  17. Finding the gaps
  18. Fixing bugs you don’t care about
  19. The blog post... of science!
  20. Quintillions of followers - a roundup
  21. Faith 3D and Internet Explorer 2 support
  22. New news article rumoured; experts baffled
  23. Eventful day of development
  24. Things to do, places to worship
  25. Graphs shown who’s boss
  26. Beings of worship & psychotic episodes
  27. RSS newsreaders
  28. Back to engineering

2004 8

  1. Work resumes
  2. Bit by bit
  3. Coding begins
  4. Logo chosen
  5. Engineering Faith announced!
  6. Google offers 1000MB of free email
  7. Next-gen barcodes track your every move
  8. “New cell phones suck” - youth

2003 6

  1. US passes anti-spam bill; spammers rejoice
  2. Apple kicks ass, takes names
  3. The oddly placed wet floor sign
  4. Netscape Dies
  5. 200 million Hotmail accounts compromised
  6. Unquestionable evidence of evil: Powell

2002 15

  1. “Asylum” development living up to namesake
  2. Youth sued for liking ninjas
  3. Get $10k for naming a baby
  4. Giga Hurts
  5. The Theatre Company Movie
  6. Why Ogg Vorbis?
  7. Website will suck less, experts expect
  8. Altering Time Newsroom uninspired
  9. Real’s bloated mess seeps into naming
  10. Cell phone spam to be banned
  11. 5″ by 7″ PC to be released; Mavis Beacon sues
  12. The Sims more addictive than cocaine, experts suggest
  13. Napster to be purchased by Bertelsmann - both users interviewed
  14. Microsoft Xbox sells poorly in Japan
  15. Microsoft’s anti-UNIX site hosted by UNIX