shaneos

Author here: this was a fun one. An experiment to build the same app for Mac, Windows and Linux, all completely native and optimized. I wanted to see how easy it is in 2026, and it turns out it’s about 12 hours of work.

I’m beginning to wonder if the value of cross platform frameworks is rapidly diminishing. What do you think?

This comment reminds me of the general malaise affecting the public discourse in the US these days. "Don't listen to the experts, all the context and knowledge they have makes them biased!!"

Of course Sam is "qualified" to speak to the ethos of Stainless, he was there longer than anyone except the founder.

Anthropic technically use the Stainless docs platform for their docs, in that it’s all rendered by Stainless components. They just don’t use the full suite of Stainless tools for docs. The ability to use as little or as much as you like was a great feature of the Stainless docs product

Citizens always have a choice. The cost can be terrible, but there’s always a choice

Author here, happy to answer any questions. The open source code here works server side, in the browser client or in a Worker thread. Hope you find it useful!

Thanks, done!

Whoa, so excited to try this out! As a regular Firefox user, does it pull over my settings?

Author here, hi all. There are a number of ways to skin this cat. This is my preferred method. What's yours?

[author] It's my idea of how app builders should design and build apps. It's an anti-pattern to build an app that allows children to spend their parent's money without express permission.

You can drop balloons full of paint in this, even rainbow coloured paint :-)

The app's audience is children. The blog post's audience are professional designers and engineers. I am speaking their language. People build apps for a variety of reasons - I started off with this app just making it for my kids, until I decided to make an effort to find more users - and one of those reasons is to make a living off the time spent working on it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with hoping to be compensated for your time and effort, and that is why we must discuss user retention and monetization. These are not dirty or exploitative terms in and of themselves, they are simply tools used to measure an app's usage and current level of progress towards your goals so that you can react accordingly.

What is exploitative is the way almost all supposedly child friendly apps try to trick or corrupt children with ads and gamified purchases. My post comes out very explicitly against this, which I presume you read.

So happy to hear it’s helpful! I’d love to check out the game when it’s done

Author here. Not every app needs to be focused on teaching kids to read. When my 3 year old was using the app, putting words on the icons was meaningless, and a sign that I needed to put more effort into communicating visually. Older kids can handle more text, but I found that the app could achieve it's primary functions without it, and there is a beauty in simplicity.

Of course I read with my children every day, and they are now both voracious consumers of real world books. I encourage you to do the same. I also included features in Kidz Fun Art that help kids practice their hand writing and math problem solving. However, trying to have every app solve every need for every child (e.g. reading in this case), just leads to an ugly, messy interface that is off putting to everyone. Add lightness - take things away that are not needed.

[author] If you double tap the rainbow button you can design your own gradient, so use all the shades of brown you like :-)

Author here. I find this to be a pretty cynical take. I tried to express that if I build something and it makes my kids smile then it stays in the app. You appear to have a different take on it. Should we not try to make children enjoy using the tools they use? What's the alternative? Make you app actively hostile and difficult to they'll go touch grass? I'm honestly not clear on the point you're making here.

Using MCP in production has a lot of tricky edge cases. This post describes some cool solutions to them https://www.stainless.com/blog/what-we-learned-converting-co...

Congrats Beau!

Heh, yeah that happened right after I made the post above. Fate, it would seem, has a sense of irony :-)

Great to see more competition in this space - I'm currently on Slack and not happy about it. Here's hoping Emdash can fill the void left by Workplace and get some momentum to put pressure on Slack. It's much needed

People accused Facebook of this for years, and it was Apple all along. So much for the privacy-first company nonsense they've been spouting for years. The fact that this fine is so low is a real injustice. How is this not bigger than Cambridge Analytica?

Kidz Fun Art (https://kidzfun.art). Three years ago my two kids were 5 and 3 and loved to draw. I tried and tried to find a good iPad app suitable for them but everything I found was full of terrible click bait offensive ads. So, I decided to make them an app myself. It’s been a huge amount of fun, and these days thousands of other people’s kids use it too. I especially love when I get emails from them saying how their 4 year old just saw it and immediately understood how to use it.

Given how much use it’s getting I hope to keep working on it as an active side project for years to come