In 2018 I got to go to WWDC, which was an incredible experience. I had so much fun. I still vividly remember sitting in the convention hall at one of the long wooden tables with my headphones on, jamming to the WWDC playlist, and banging out a new iOS app after having attended a few sessions on the new OAuth libraries & text API’s.

I had been annoyed all week at flipping back and forth between Apple Notes on my phone and GitHub gists on my laptop to take notes during sessions. At the time I had been bouncing around between all sorts of note-taking iOS apps that had markdown support, but there wasn’t a perfect solution out there. One that offered a great iOS and desktop experience for editing markdown notes. There were apps that did it, but none that I enjoyed using.

Basically I just wanted to be able to take notes on GitHub in the browser as GitHub gists and access them on my phone, which didn’t exist. Even now, the GitHub first party app doesn’t have great gist support - and they defintely don’t focus on using gists as a way to edit & share markdown.

So that’s what I was working on that week. A way to view & edit my GitHub gists on my phone. That app eventually became OctoNote, which shipped later that year.

Over the course of the next year or two, I shipped some enhancements to OctoNote, but otherwise it’s been largely dormant. Over the last couple of OS releases, stability has gotten progressively bad, including issues with auth at startup that would block users from using the app normally. Time to either shelve it or update it!

It wasn’t the first time I’d given myself that ultimatum and inevitably kicked the can down the road. But this year, with the power of Claude Opus to help me plan and execute my app update vision, I was able to carve out just enough of my limited personal time to dedicate myself to updating the app. Claude enabled me to quickly hurdle previous stumbling blocks I had with my limited/aging iOS experience. It saved me from a ton of boilerplate writing and helped me focus on the product vision. Maybe most critically, it helped me reason through the arcane rules of the App Store and some of Apple’s APIs that still lack good documentation for newcomers.

The result is a very familiar OctoNote, but one that works and is updated for the latest versions of iOS & iPadOS (+ macOS via Catalyst). Old IAPs and subscriptions work as they did before, similar upgrade features exist for general parity with version 1.1, and, in general, the app is just the same but more stable. I’m honestly proud of how similar it is to my original vision, and how it still holds a valuable place in my workflow.

In the future, I hope to continue iterating on the value prop of OctoNote while bringing people some cool new features. I hope you’ll follow along!