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Weeknotes vol. 13: May the thirtieth be with you

By Garrett, : Weeknotes

A hand holding a fountain pen drawing squiggles on a sheet of paper, on an orange background

This week I reached the part of making stuff where all of the sudden you don’t have much to do. Aside from spending a few more days in polish-town, shipping is upon us for Braindrop for Mac beta.

Here, have yourself another teaser:

Braindrop welcome screen teaser
A screenshot of the Braindrop welcome screen for macOS.

A few highlights from the week:

  • The second edition of the Braindrop marketing website is underway and Phil clearly had some unicorns helping him
  • Finished some big Braindrop chunks: completed settings, file auto-uploading and better error handling.
  • I updated all of the Weeknote titles from the ‘Weeknotes: 5 to 9 May 2025’ format to less robotic names like ‘Weeknotes vol. 10: Back in the CSSaddle’ (Honestly, I don’t know what I was thinking before).
  • Continuing to brainstorm on app two and should have some rough sketches completed next week to help shape it up. Hoping to start development in June… more soon!
  • As of this week, Braindrop will also work as a progressive web app and can be installed directly from any browser.
  • I ran into this article about Role-Based Access Control, which feels novel in the context of making software but reminded me that CMS people had this figured out all along.
  • Upgraded to Ruby 3.4.4

May the thirtieth be with you.

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