iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 22/09/2026

Haze 2.0 is here, and it's a big one! 🎉 For Compose Multiplatform: 🫧 Glass with refraction & lighting ⚡ Faster blur 🎛️ Adaptive rendering quality 🎨 Reusable styles 🛠️ Build your own effects chrisbanes.me/posts/haze-2...

chrisbanes.me

Haze 2.0

Haze 2.0 brings Glass, a new effects API, performance improvements, and experimental Android native backdrop support to Compose Multiplatform.

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 12/08/2026

🚀 Haze 2.0.0-alpha05 has been released! 🔎 Glass visual effect (finally) ⚙️ New Style-like API structure 💨 HazePerformanceMode toggle This should hopefully be the last alpha release chrisbanes.github.io/haze/

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 03/08/2026

Here's a little preview of the new glass effect coming to Haze 2.0 Should be in the next alpha release

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 22/07/2026

🛍️ Shopping isn’t a category I got Hermes Agent to match marketplace orders with my bank transactions, then categorise each item by what I actually bought. Same spending. A much clearer picture of where the money went. chrisbanes.me/posts/shoppi...

chrisbanes.me

Shopping Is Not a Category

How I used Hermes Agent to match marketplace order emails with Actual Budget transactions, split purchases into individual items, and reveal where the money actually went.

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 26/05/2026

Hunting down Jetpack Compose recomposition issues manually is a huge time sink I’ve spent the past few weeks using @mmckenna.me’s Dejavu to simplify this: - Write Dejavu tests to establish a baseline - Tell the agent to hunt for issues and A/B fixes - Profit

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 12/05/2026

🤖 I've just open-sourced a new set of skills, covering Kotlin, Compose and Android development. Very early days, but it covers a lot of things which crop up in code review regularly. github.com/chrisbanes/s...

github.com

GitHub - chrisbanes/skills: Skills for Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, and Android development

Skills for Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, and Android development - chrisbanes/skills

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 29/04/2026

💠 Haze 2.0-alpha01 is out! This is a big release, splitting Haze up into layers, with the goal of enabling pluggable visual effects. Let me know what you think! chrisbanes.me/posts/haze-2...

chrisbanes.me

Haze 2.0: A Pluggable Visual Effects Engine

Haze 2.0-alpha01 turns blur into a pluggable effect, splitting it into a separate module and opening the door to custom visual effects built on top of a shared rendering infrastructure.

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 30/03/2026

Starting hacking on an AI Agent orchestration tool (for myself). Decided to build it in Rust (because why not), and holy cow: the entire CI run takes ~40 seconds, and most of that is setting up the toolchain. github.com/chrisbanes/e...

github.com

feat: ACP agent client, orchestrator state machine, and multi-agent p… · chrisbanes/ensemble@930a0e7

Contribute to chrisbanes/ensemble development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Reposted by Chris Banes

sinasamaki @sinasamaki.com · 21/01/2026

✨ ChromaDial is a new #ComposeMultiplatform library that enables you to create beautiful Dials for your #JetpackCompose app Its API is similar to the Slider, but instead works in degrees Just pass in and set the degree state #buildinpublic

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 15/01/2026

After becoming infuriated by Codex (the tool) lately, I've switched to @mariozechner.at's `Pi` and it's like a breathe of fresh air 🧘 All of the stuff I actually use, it's super fast, and most importantly it doesn't constantly ask permission to run `git` shittycodingagent.ai

shittycodingagent.ai

buildwithpi.ai

A terminal-based coding agent

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 24/12/2025

Tried out @github Copilot to write a small feature for Haze, all from my phone. It’s the ultimate in lazy programming, but I’m pretty mind blown. 🧵…

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 28/09/2025

As a little experiment I asked Gemini 2.5 (Pro) to compare itself to ChatGPT-5. It ended up telling me about Gemini 1.5 and that “Google has not announced a Gemini 2.5 model.” I think I’ll be sticking with ChatGPT… g.co/gemini/share...

g.co

‎Gemini - Gemini Advanced vs. ChatGPT-5 Comparison

Created with Gemini

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 17/09/2025

My team is looking for a new Android + KMP engineer! 🇺🇸/🇨🇦 Looking for someone in Boston, New York, Toronto, Washington DC 📺 Working on Ventura TV OS (www.thetradedesk.com/ventura-stre...) If you have any questions, feel free to ask! 🔗: careers.thetradedesk.com/jobs/4870331...

careers.thetradedesk.com

Staff Android Software Engineer - VenturaOS

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 22/08/2025

Looking forward to being back at @droidcon.bsky.social London this year. I spent quite a while on this talk title…

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 19/07/2025

I migrated our entire codebase over to it last week, and we’re now fully on the Metro train. 💺 It has pretty much everything y’all will need, right now.

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 02/07/2025

I don’t know how they expect anyone to know the location of this bar…

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 24/06/2025

What is it with Facebook adding pull-up gestures for the most random actions: Instagram DMs: Pull up to toggle disappearing messages. WhatsApp: Pull up to call. The amount of times I’ve triggered these actions: too many. The amount of times that I’ve meant to perform them: absolutely zero.

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 15/06/2025

I've been trying out @jetbrains.com Junie over the past few few days, and have pretty blown away with it. I've managed to do everything from a complex refactoring of Haze (with follow up tasks), to fairly complex string manipulation (pretty printing data class toString).

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 11/06/2025

Seems to be a lot of talk about Haze and Liquid Glass… At its core, Haze is a background content transform library, and the ‘visual effect’ (blurring, etc) is just an implementation detail. Liquid Glass will be a runtime shader like others which Haze already uses.

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 12/05/2025

💠 Haze 1.6.0 has been released! This is a big release: 🤖 Blurring for all versions of Android 🎨 Foreground (content) blurring 📐 Blurred edge treatment 🔗: github.com/chrisbanes/h...

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 23/04/2025

💠 Haze 1.6.0-beta01 has been released! 🐛: Android 12 is now enabled by default 🤖: Experimental blurring support for all Android versions The video below is recorded on a Pixel 3 running Android 11, but it works back to Android 5. Please give it a try and report back! 🔗: github.com/chrisbanes/h...

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 18/04/2025

Dug out an old Pixel 3 today, to do some testing on earlier Android versions. I forgot how small and light devices used to be. Feels like a feather compared to my iPhone Pro Max 16

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 10/04/2025

Had a little hack getting Haze working on older Android devices. It uses RenderScript, so is never going to be real-time, but the lag isn't too bad. Everything is performed asynchronously, so this isn't jank. I'm undecided whether to keep going with it. Let me know if this would be useful to you.

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 09/04/2025

Focus bugs in Compose are the absolute worst. The system is so opaque and hidden, that trying to deal with them is borderline impossible.

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 06/03/2025

Haze 1.5.0 has been released: 💨 Optimised blur shader implementation (thanks to Kyant) 🖌️ New: HazeProgressive.Brush for custom progressive effects 🐛 Usual load of bugfixes github.com/chrisbanes/h...

github.com

Release 1.5.0 · chrisbanes/haze

Highlights Optimised blurring shader for progressive effects. Thanks to @Kyant0 in #537 HazeProgressive.Brush. You can now supply completely custom masks (via a shader) for progressive effects. Ad...

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 20/02/2025

🪢 Multiplatform Strings This blog post talks through a solution which we've landed on, using a single file as the source of truth for all strings, across all of our apps. chrisbanes.me/posts/multip...

chrisbanes.me

Multiplatform Strings

Simplify multilingual app development with Twine! Learn how to manage and export strings for iOS, Android, and Compose Multiplatform efficiently

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 13/02/2025

🚀 Should you use Kotlin Sequences for Performance? I have always thought that using asSequence() was the way to optimize chained operations in Kotlin. But after benchmarking, the results shocked me: Sequences are often slower! 😱 #Kotlin #AndroidDev chrisbanes.me/posts/use-se...

chrisbanes.me

Should you use Kotlin Sequences for Performance?

Should you use Kotlin Sequences for performance? I put List, Sequence, and Flow to the test with kotlinx-benchmark, and the results were surprising!

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 11/02/2025

Spent 10 mins integrating Bluesky comments into my Hugo blog Shamelessly reusing @kau.sh’s code from bsky.app/profile/kau....

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 11/02/2025

Just tried asking ChatGPT and Gemini to convert a `composed` modifier to use `Modifier.Node`, and both failed miserably. Gemini probably got closest of the two, but it hallucinated all sorts of random callbacks which don't exist.

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 14/01/2025

Big +💯 to this However, the same can be said about AndroidX bumping up the compileSdkVersion

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 09/01/2025

💠 Haze 1.2.0 has been released The big change in this release is that it now supports overlapping blurred areas. 🔗: github.com/chrisbanes/h...

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 11/12/2024

💠 Here's a sneak preview of something that I've been working on in Haze: overlapping areas With this you'll be able to implement those classic glassmorphic card effects. I still need to run the performance benchmarks, but it seems to be working nicely... 🔗: github.com/chrisbanes/h...

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 09/12/2024

Here's the slides from a talk I gave at work about Haze. There's no recording or anything, but the slides should hopefully be self-explanatory chrisbanes.me/talks/haze-t...

chrisbanes.me

Haze - Real time background blurring

Description # This is an short tech talk which I delivered at work about Haze: https://github.

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 03/12/2024

Haze 1.1 💠 has been released! The main change is the new 'Input Scale' parameter, which allows you to set an optional (down)scaling mode. This should have a positive effect on performance when enabled. github.com/chrisbanes/h...

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 29/11/2024

12x difference between the top and bottom quartiles (for WFH) is eye opening. Even for in-office, that difference is 5x.

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 29/11/2024

Opened up Keynote for the first time, in what feels like forever. Hello my old friend. Where's that Magic Move button again?

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 12/11/2024

After what feels like a lifetime of development, I've decided to deprecate and archive Tivi 🫡 github.com/chrisbanes/t...

After roughly 9 years of development, I've decided that now (12th November 2024) is the time for Tivi to be 'complete'. After releasing 1.0.0 recently, I unfortunately just don't have the time or inclination to keep developing the app.

Another reason which has prompted this change is that I have no intention of allowing Google Play to publish my home address (through it's 'verification' process), therefore my developer account has been restricted and locked. C'est la vie.

I've also delisted the app on the iOS App Store.

Thanks to everyone who has used and tested the app. I hope that it's been useful to learn from.

🫡

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Chris Banes @chrisbanes.me · 07/11/2024

Haze 1.0 💠 has been released! This is a big release, not only because of the version number, but also because of the amount of changes since the latest stable release. You can read more below: chrisbanes.me/posts/haze-1...

chrisbanes.me

Haze 1.0

Haze 1.0 is a powerful library for achieving background blurring effects within Jetpack Compose and Compose Multiplatform apps.

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