Week 43 - Smaller steps forward
Week 43 - Smaller steps forward
Read entry →A fairer way to pick the daily letter
Letterly picks one letter a day. Random turned out to be the wrong answer. Here is the switch to a shuffled bag, so every letter gets its turn.
Read entry →A year of puzzles without an API bill
Rankle and Cluster quietly ran out of fresh puzzles. Rather than keep paying an AI service to write more for games with a small audience, the next eighteen months were written and checked by hand.
Read entry →When the answer key was wrong - a lesson from Rankle
Rankle asks you to put four things in order. For a while, one puzzle in six was marking correct answers as wrong. Here is how that happened, and the small boring check that now stops it for good.
Read entry →Where players actually come from
Letterly has picked up a steady stream of new players. Almost none of them come from search. Most come from friends, or from one daily games directory. Here is what that taught me about promoting small web games.
Read entry →Building for the high street, not just the app store
Most of what I make is a consumer app you download. This week I pointed the same machinery at local businesses instead, and shipped two web apps that live on a shop's own site - no app store in sight.
Read entry →The high-street toolkit is five apps now
A few days ago I had two web apps for small businesses and a promise that the list would get longer. It got longer. There are five now, and together they cover most of what a shop, salon or cafe actually needs software to do.
Read entry →I turned Inkframe around to face the other way
Inkframe started life as an aftercare app for people getting tattooed. It never felt right. So I kept the name and pointed it at the other end of the chair, at the artist, and the whole thing finally made sense.
Read entry →What free actually costs - keeping a word game honest
A free daily word game is only fun if the scoring is fair. This week that meant chasing down why the answer checker was waving through nonsense, and working out what it really costs to keep a free app honest.
Read entry →Tenth app launched - Spot On, score predictions
Launched Spot On, a score-prediction pools app for the World Cup and other events, where friends call the exact scoreline and climb a shared table. Also added a hidden daily bonus word to Letterly.
Read entry →Ninth app launched - Rankle, plus a games hub
Launched Rankle, a daily ranking puzzle game where you order four items from lowest to highest. Also shipped games.cyber-jack.uk, a hub page for all three daily games. Five weeks to ship three puzzle games.
Read entry →Seventh app, first one for the web - Letterly is live
Letterly is a daily word categories game. Same letter, same ten categories, ninety seconds, for everyone in the world each day. Why I built a pure-web game, how the originality scoring works, and the honest state of it.
Read entry →Dabbling in web design for small businesses
A new side of the studio. Building modern, responsive websites for small UK businesses still stuck on dated, mobile-broken sites. Free concept redesign first, then a simple monthly plan.
Read entry →Adding to the shopping list by voice
A weekend experiment wiring ListLedger up to a voice assistant, so you can add items hands-free. Why it needed a custom skill, how it works, and the honest state of it.
Read entry →Sixth app on the bench - meet Settle
Announcing Settle, a FODMAP-aware meal planner that imports any recipe by URL and hands the shopping list straight to ListLedger. Why this app, why now, and what the next three weeks look like.
Read entry →Why I'm writing this journal
I'm writing in public so the people downloading my apps know there's a real person behind them, and so I have to be honest with myself about what's actually working.
Read entry →Week 19 - Smarter ingredient recognition
Week 19 - Smarter ingredient recognition
Read entry →Week 19 - Studio relaunch, Brevo migration, Inkframe lands
This week I rebuilt the cyber-jack.uk studio page from scratch, migrated the GutLedger newsletter to Brevo, and added Inkframe as a fifth product.
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