Steve Wozniak cofounded Apple with Steve Jobs, and he sold most of his stake in the company in the 1980s.

In 2025, around his 75th birthday, someone commented on this decision. Wozniak wrote this reply (emphasis mine):

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

He is a wealthy person, worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s not nothing.

But the simple line “wealth and power are not what I live for” is a striking counterpoint to the attitudes of many of the world’s current richest people, whose primary roles have shifted from company leaders to soulless corporate politicians and power-hungry egomaniacs.

You think $1 billion is a lot of money. It is. Yet: it’s less than 0.2% of what he’s worth. Not 2%. Two tenths of one percent. It’s less than that.

This is not his problem, alone. He is not the only one. This applies to those other couple dozen ultra-billionaires, too. But when you’re the number one fella, you’re the one in the spotlight. You’re not the only guilty one, but you absolutely are guilty as hell.

You have the power to help thousands (millions?) of people who are suffering, and you wake up every day and choose not to help them. Every living day.

I had a long essay in the works about billionaires², but no need. This is the bottom line.

“Dawn Chorus” just breaks my heart.

More importantly, Clew is an app I love using every day.

For better or worse, this is an artisanal app. My approach isn’t really scalable if your intention is commercial-first.

But I’m having a great time working on this, so I think it’s for the better.

But back to the beginning.

Learning to Code From the Ground Up

Because I was learning everything from scratch, I decided early on that I wanted to keep things as native as possible. So, I stuck to built-in iOS frameworks like SwiftUI and iCloud Drive.

For its basic structure and look, I took inspiration from the apps that come with your iPhone—Mail and Reminders and Calendar. They’re function-forward, clean, and clear interfaces for entering text, adding metadata, and tracking information.¹

When I started, SwiftUI was still very new. (I suppose it still is very new, compared to other languages.) It lets you describe what you want the system to do and display, which is a little different than some other programming languages.

At the very simplest, writing SwiftUI code looks something like this:

struct HighlightsListView: View {
    @FetchRequest(entity: Highlight.entity(), sortDescriptors: []) var highlights: FetchedResults<Highlight>

    var body: some View {
        List {
            ForEach(highlights, id: \.id) { highlight in
                NavigationLink(destination:
                    HighlightDetailView(highlight: highlight)
                ) {
                    VStack {
                        Text(highlight.text).bold()
                        Text(highlight.note)
                    }
                }
            }
        }.padding(.horizontal)
    }
}

That’s an extremely simplified version of a generic view. It’s the kind of code that tells the iPhone to show a view, which contains a list, which pulls in saved highlights from the user’s database and displays each one in a vertical stack with the highlight text in bold on top and any note the user wrote below it.

Behind that, there’s a lot of code that’s responsible for making sure there is a database to save highlights to, that the app can read those saved items along with all their associated attributes, that the view can read and display each highlight’s attributes in the list’s rows, and that the user can tap on a list row to open up an entirely new view which shows the highlight’s full details.

There’s also much more that goes into making sure all of what I just described is fast, smooth, reliable, and aesthetically pleasing. That example view doesn’t even include a function—it doesn’t do anything other than show pre-loaded information and handle navigation from the list to the detail view.

But at a fundamental level, that’s the gist of what writing a visual interface in SwiftUI looks like.

A Beginner’s Process for SwiftUI Development

I learned by doing. Every time I started working on a new button or view or function, I spent a lot of time reading how-to articles and watching YouTube videos.

I also bought a couple amazingly inexpensive (like, $20 on sale) courses on Udemy and Coursera that were valuable as a solid foundation at the beginning. I probably got through 30% of any of those courses before it became just too conceptual for my attention span, and I needed to start working on real examples in my app. And so, back to YouTube.

Here’s what my process looked like:

1. I want to let the user type text into a text box that they can save as a note that’s attached to the highlight they’ve saved, I think.
2. Search the web: “How to make a text box in SwiftUI.”
3. Find an article or YouTube video showing how to create a TextEditor (back then it was different, but today that’s how it’s done) in SwiftUI.
4. Put a TextEditor in my code and watch it be weird and (probably) not work exactly how I want it to work.
5. Do another web search: “How to change the default height of a TextEditor in SwiftUI.”
6. Read another article or watch another video about changing the size and probably a dozen other characteristics of a SwiftUI TextBox (or, in many cases, find out that what I want is very difficult/nearly impossible without lots of custom, hacky code).
7. Try to implement the relevant parts of the article/video and see that it’s still not doing quite what I want.
8. Also start seeing errors pop up because I’ve written something incorrectly or broken something else.
9. Search the web for how to fix these various errors and continue figuring out how to get the text box just right. (Remember that this is one text box in the notes section of one kind of detail view in the app.)
10. Later—many hours later—finally get the app to build successfully (with no errors) and test the text box and… it works!
11. Notice that the keyboard hides a lot of the view while the user is typing, and there’s no way to hide the keyboard when they’re done. Decide to add a button right above the keyboard to hide it.
12. Search the web: “How to add a button above the keyboard in SwiftUI”…

And so on…

This is what I’ve done for thousands of hours, now.

And what’s fun is that, as I’ve become comfortable with these fundamentals, I’ve also moved on to much more complex ideas, like data model migrations, AI-powered tag suggestions, and comprehensive data backups.

Thus, the process has remained pretty much the same. It’s incredibly frustrating and incredibly satisfying.

Resources for Learning iOS Software Development

If you’re interested in learning to build apps for iPhones, iPads, and Macs, these are some of my absolute favorite resources that I continue to go back to as I build new features:

1. Hacking with Swift
2. Swift by Sundell
3. Swift with Majid
4. Natalia Panferova at Nil Coalescing
5. Kilo Loco
6. Sean Allen
7. CodeWithChris

For higher level discussions about iOS app development, the recently concluded Under the Radar podcast is incredible.

If you’d like to follow my development of Clew, check out the Clew website for updates and the roadmap. 📱

When I was an English major reading three books a week, it was easy to remember those notes and passages because I was using them in discussions and essays every day, referencing them alongside other works, and making connections all the time.

I wanted that kind of experience—creating and discovering links across books, genres, centuries, and even between books and films, songs, poems, and more.

I wanted to create an intelligent tool to store these highlights and surface them, to put them in conversation with each other.

There are places out there like Goodreads where you can store notes and clippings online. There’s your iPhone’s Notes app, where you can toss thousands of highlights from books and, similar to my problem on paper, never see them again. There are complex systems, wiki-style note-taking apps like Obsidian and Notion, that could do this with a lot of heavy lifting.

I wanted to build something better.

I wanted something that made it faster to save highlights, simpler to categorize them, and more fun to collect and explore them. I wanted it to work with no fuss on all my devices (Apple devices, at least for now…).

So, I started learning iOS development and building an app, which I was calling ‘Breadcrumbs.’ Pretty quickly, I realized that this was the way I wanted to build a library of highlights over my lifetime.

That was in 2021. Been working on this for 4+ years.

Today, you can download Clew for free on the App Store.

What Is Clew?

A commonplace book is what used to be a physical notebook that creative people used to save passages from books, poems, correspondence, etc. Things that inspired them, that made them laugh or cry, that they’d like to reference in future work.

It hit me on Friday, September 19, 2025 at 10:47 p.m., that this is the fundamental idea behind Clew. I know this because I was reading Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 when I underlined this passage on page 129 of the book and saved it as a highlight in Clew:

Lucky for me,” said Bortz,” Wharfinger, like Milton, kept a commonplace book, where he jotted down quotes and things from his reading.”

Until that moment, I hadn’t had the exact word for what Clew was—a database, a notebook, a research app, a PKM tool/digital garden?

It’s all of those things, I guess, but at its heart, it’s a modern commonplace book—one that’s searchable, easy to organize, and fun to use.

What Is a “Clew?”

Want to know the meaning behind the name? Download the app and go to the About section in Settings to find out! (You could look it up. But it’s more fun if you don’t.)

Why Clew Is Better

My goals for Clew are:

• intelligent context and connections between saved highlights
• simple but powerful organization capabilities
• the fastest highlight creation possible, so you don’t interrupt your reading flow

Intelligence

Clew is smart, and it’s only getting smarter.

Right now, when viewing a highlight, it shows related highlights based on the source (book, website, song, etc.) and the tags you’ve attached.

Clew also suggests new and existing tags when you’re creating and editing highlights.

In the near future, the app will use your iPhone’s on-device AI to provide additional context and connections between saved items (no internet connection required).

Organization

In the old days of paper commonplace books, people had to set up their organization system ahead of time. They had to define sections and keep them sorted and organized as they added clippings.

In Clew, you simply add tags to your highlights. You come up with the tags as you go, so you don’t have to plan anything or stick to one organization style. And it’s easy to go back and add new tags to old highlights.

You can use tags like “funny” and “inspiring” to connect highlights by themes. Then, you can use the “inspiring” tag in a home screen widget to show sparks of motivation throughout the day.

You can also browse collections by source or author. And, soon, you’ll be able to create custom collections based on tags, dates, and other characteristics.

Speed

It’s important that the app doesn’t interrupt you while you’re reading, so I’m focused on making it as fast as possible to create new highlights.

You can use the page scanner to scan book pages and paper documents and quickly select the text you want to save. Or, you can dictate highlight text using the iPhone’s microphone.

I’ve got more ideas to speed things up even more, so stay tuned.

BONUS: Widgets on the Home Screen and Lock Screen

I didn’t know how much I’d love Clew’s widgets until I built them.

You can show random or specific highlights from your collection right there on the home screen or lock screen of your iPhone, iPad, and Mac!

Throughout the day, you’ll get glimpses of past highlights you’ve saved. Maybe you’ll experience some serendipity as the app surfaces funny, beautiful, inspiring, or interesting snippets that past-you saved for future-you.

Clew 1.0 Is Just the Beginning

At the time of writing, Clew is already on version 1.3, and it’s been available on the App Store since April. But that was more of a soft launch.

Since then, I’ve polished all the rough edges and added significant new features: view customizations, AI tag suggestions, support for songs in addition to books and websites, and more.

Now, it’s showtime.

And it’s only going to get better from here. I’m talking support for movies and TV series, podcasts, and audiobooks. I’m talking fun social features, like gorgeous shareable highlight images for your feeds and stories.

For a more complete rundown of what I’m working on, check out the roadmap on the Clew website.

If you like the app, let me know! And if there’s a feature that you’d love to see (or a bug you spot), send me an email and I’ll see what I can do. 📱

Join me as I try to find out who even to pay for the sports I want to watch and how much they want from me.

It’s Sunday and I Want to Watch All of the Football

Everybody keeps buying each other and each other’s brands. In 2025, ESPN launched a “new” streaming service, called ESPN¹, and it bought the rights to show NFL RedZone as part of a bundle with NFL+ Premium.

You’re supposed to be able to get RedZone as part of other bundle offers from other streaming services and cable packages, like Sling, DirecTV, and Hulu + Live TV. So, I thought there must be a way to add it onto one of my existing subscriptions and save a little money.

I watch football and soccer and a bit of basketball and, like, the Olympics. Turns out, I’ve assembled quite the collection of streaming TV subscriptions for live sports over the years.

It’s akin to the tangle of cables clogging the drawer next to my desk, USB-As and Cs and microUSBs and special ones for hard drives and toothbrushes and pencil sharpeners and I don’t remember what else.

I kept needing to add them for specific reasons and now there are too many of them and they’re all a little less valuable (and a little more expensive!).

Here’s my current roster of streaming services relevant to this adventure:

With this lineup, there are a few options to add or bundle RedZone:

• Subscribe to NFL+ Premium on its own for $15 a month
• Upgrade ESPN+ to ESPN Unlimited with the NFL+ Premium add-on for $45 a month
• Add the Sports Extra package to Sling for a total of $57 a month

At this point, I’m paying for Disney+ and ESPN+. Can’t I bundle those into the giant conglomerate DISNEY® subscription that unnecessarily includes some flavor of Hulu?²

As an aside, streaming TV websites are mostly terrible. So bad. Have you tried logging in to a streaming service and managing account settings on your phone? Torture. I had to break out the grown-up computer.

I Would Rather a Horrifying Apparition Crawled Out of the Screen and Attacked Me Right Now

I start loading various Disney and ESPN pages, trying to find the bundle I’m looking for.

When I log in to Disney+ and click the button to browse plans, it… takes me to the ESPN website and asks me to log in again. To the same account. Cool. Great work everybody so convenient glad we merged all these things.

It offers me “ESPN Unlimited,” which is “all ESPN networks and ESPN+.” I am currently subscribed to ESPN+, so that sounds basically the same, but it’s $30 to also stream the cable channels. No mention of Disney+ or Hulu.

I go back to the Disney website and find the subscription options. I’m currently subscribed to “Disney+ Premium,” but to manage this I have to go to my Verizon account. Because that’s where I signed up for Disney+ to get some promotion, I don’t know, five years ago?

Great.

Now I’m in Verizon’s FAQ section researching what Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ bundles are.³

Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ sounds like the right bundle, but where’s NFL RedZone? Well, that’s an add-on to the bundle. More more give me more!

Oh. I’m apparently not allowed to upgrade to Verizon’s Disney+ and Hulu and ESPN bundle. Why? I don’t know. It just says it’s no longer available for my account.

I’m guessing it’s because I’d already chosen the lesser Disney+ (solo) subscription, thus unknowingly using up my one credit in the machine.

I can cancel the subscription through Verizon and just sign up for the bundle through Disney. Why not. Back to Disney to try to figure out once and for all what bundle I’d actually need and how it compares to what I’m paying now.

This is where I wind up: a truly absurd chart on Disney support page about plans and pricing with enough brand name variations to give me nightmares.

Relevant to me: the “Disney+, Hulu, ESPN Unlimited Bundle Premium” bundle, $45/month.

And then, a major plot twist: the Disney+, Hulu, Max Bundle (No Ads), $30/month.

Yes, I am also subscribed to HBO Max-not-Go-not-just-Max-and-not-just-HBO. HBO, not even sports related, has now thrust itself brazenly into the story in a leading role.

Scott Hanson Save Me Plz

Before I get to the final standings and, I think, an actual solution, I just want to emphasize what’s happening: I am juggling details for six different subscriptions—one of which (Hulu) I don’t even have and don’t want but might have to acquire—in at least four different permutations.

All this to try to “bundle” NFL RedZone.

What I could’ve done is simply subscribed to NFL+ Premium for $15 per month. But surely, with all this advertising and all these promotions, there’s a way to save a few bucks. You know, for brand loyalty or whatever.

The Final Standings

It was around 4pm when I started this project and it’s now 7:30pm and RedZone will be logging off for the week any minute as the final pre-primetime games tick down. There’s always next week, I guess. I hope.

Here are the four options I’ve come up with:

Current Roster Plus NFL+ Premium

Bundle HBO Max

Bundle ESPN

Use Sling Add-On

By this math, the cheapest option—by $2—is simply adding NFL+ Premium as, yes, ANOTHER STREAMING SERVICE.

The best value is technically the Disney+, Hulu, ESPN Unlimited bundle with the NFL+ add-on because it adds Hulu for just $2 more, but is it really better value if I don’t want or need Hulu? Also isn’t Hulu dead?

Maybe I Won’t Watch Football

After all this, it’ll be easiest and seemingly cheapest to suck it up and just subscribe to NFL+ for a couple months and then cancel it till next season. Underwhelming.

Not to mention that it took almost TWO HOURS of painfully logging in to accounts and checking my credit card statement and doing math to untangle this web of IP and subscription tiers.

I’m not even going to compare streaming TV to buying old-fashioned cable packages, because it doesn’t matter if they were bad or better or worse. The point is: why is this so bad?

When I first subscribed to Sling it was $25 a month and soccer was still on NBC and Fox Sports, so it was a great deal. That wasn’t that long ago. Now it’s all over the place, and I have five different subscriptions for one sport plus a whole new bundle for football.

Maybe instead I should just blow up my TV.

*Note to self and to you: I’ve been switching between browser tabs and subscription management pages and plan comparison charts for so long today, I might’ve gotten any of these numbers wrong and wound up making the incorrect decision in the end. If I did, please let me know. With our combined power, we can make sure the corporations cannot confuse us into paying them more than we should.

E.g., making late-summer plans:

“Must do beach before cold. Desperate.”

Scoring, for no reason:

• +2 krypto super dog ❤️
• -1 it fake dog
• +2 mr terrific never heard of him he’s awesome
• -1 dimensional rift like why does every superhero movie have to have weird space-bending extra universe plot but at least no time travel
• +2 the Superman theme song still SLAPS got chills
• -1 what even was the anti-proton river if they just took a baby into it and everybody was fine
• +1 daily planet CMS appearance
• -1 Green lantern is asshole and that made me sad
• +1 green lantern’s giant middle fingers
• +2 Superman saved a squirrel
• -1 the S on his chest is just a diagonal line

Superman job description: Primarily catching heavy things before they fall on people.

The movie: I liked it.

My reference for Superman is the Justice League animated show in the 90s/00s, so this one’s a bit goofier than what I tend to expect. But he’s fun, has a bit of depth, and his chemistry with Lois is fantastic.

Sooo, I guess the DC Universe is over?

*

Why does every superhero movie need inter-dimensional rifts and space-warping alternate universes? At least there was no time travel in this one.

But there was a code to close the rift?? What does that even mean? I guess that is a very comic-book-style plot device, which fine. But why?

*

Must I always gravitate toward the superhero movies where, by the end, the hero hasn’t even averted the disaster (see: The Batman) but at least they defeated the villain and it’s the glimmer of hope that counts as a triumphant resolution?

*

Just a funny thought: Superman is raised by loving active parents and grows into an optimistic hopeful trusting adult (“maybe that’s the real punk”) and Batman watches his parents get murdered in front of him by a stranger and starts dressing like a bat and slinking around at night and neglecting all social relationships and responsibilities.