iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 08/08/2025

OpenAI dropped GPT-5 yesterday, how are you finding it? Honestly, I'm not blown away. Doubt I’d pass a blind test vs 4o. Post-training might change that, but for now I’m sticking with Claude Opus 4.1.

Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

New Backdrop detail view design with Liquid Glass UI and live previews

Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

Growing up is realising “organic growth” was never real. It was always either distribution, or leaving it up to chance. If you’re not spending as much time on distribution as on engineering, you’re not building a product. You’re building a hobby project for one user: yourself.

Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

I've released some huge feature updates to Backdrop lately. Now I'm also updating the pricing based on user feedback. Monthly $2.99 -> $1.99 Yearly $19.99 -> $14.99 Lifetime $49.99 -> $39.99 Also offering a 25% discount on Lifetime for a limited time 🔥

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Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

Backdrop 1.4 is out! I've added a new detail view with a high-quality preview of each backdrop. Both the thumbnail and detail previews load nearly instantly, and have no negative effect on scrolling performance. Also added support for Light Mode, and adopted more Liquid Glass design elements 💧

Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 29/07/2025

What if Backdrop could play 4K video wallpapers on your Mac lock screen? 👀

Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

Did you know that you can sample the background below a window on macOS? NSVisualEffectView.windowBackground calculates the avg color of the wallpaper below your window. Together with masks and filters, you can create glass effects without the need for costly blur, making it super performant.

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Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 27/07/2025

Just when Claude Code was getting good… What are you gonna do when the weekly cap hits?

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Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 25/07/2025

The #1 requested feature for Backdrop is previews of the animated wallpapers. It took a while, but it's finally happening!

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Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 21/07/2025

Built a paginated collection view with masonry/grid layout in SwiftUI. Should I open source it?

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Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 09/07/2025

Super happy with this design. Backdrop Editor on macOS Tahoe, featuring Liquid Glass UI. Starting in Backdrop 1.4, you’ll be able to edit & create your own animated video wallpaper for your Mac.

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Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 01/07/2025

Found the first (and only?) actual use of the morphing Liquid Glass design in macOS Tahoe 🫧

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Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

💧 Sneak peek of the new Backdrop Editor. Create your own macOS video wallpaper in seconds, now with support for trimming, muting and optimising file size with a quality slider. Looks great with the glass style inspector on macOS Tahoe!

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Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 25/06/2025

There’s a gigantic need for better tooling around AI coding. I hate opening a new Claude and burning tokens + time just to get it oriented again. Docs help, but I wonder if there are gains to be had from a proper, dynamic RAG pipeline with structural & semantic embeddings...

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Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 24/06/2025

Yikes, poor automator. macOS Tahoe did him dirty 🤖

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Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 15/06/2025

Loving this cute app by @ariv.se for getting quick ELI5's or learn new concepts. Go check it out 👇

Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

Is there a trick to get the sidebar in an NSSplitViewController to extend below the window buttons? Seems to work in SwiftUI, but not AppKit

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Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

The Sensei icon was truly ahead of its time 👀

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Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

If the new Toggle shape is designed to "match the contour of the human finger", then you gotta ask... why has it been ported to macOS as well? With the new shape and sizing of the UI on macOS Tahoe, it sure seems like Apple is preparing macOS for a touch-screen capable Mac to release in this cycle.

Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Should I send off my reverse-engineering agent to decompile Liquid Glass on macOS, and create a library + complete demo playground app, giving you access to all the private parameters of various Liquid Glass effects in a custom component?

Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

If you can dream it, formulate it in text, and pay $20 to Anthropic, you can build anything with Claude Code right now. Literally anything. In hours and days, not months or years.

With the larger, floating-style UI and the additional spacing it requires, screen space definitely feel quite cramped on macOS. While it works on low-UI experiences like iOS/iPadOS, the problems compound on macOS where you can have multiple windows, toolbars, sidebars etc.

Nooo bring back the unified tab bar for Safari, please...A whole 100px of web page height is lost to this toolbar

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Backdrop not only works, but it looks amazing with the new design! The animated wallpaper can now extend to the edge of the screen 🙌

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Hello Tahoe! Ok first up, what's going on with these sidebars? Having the foreground panels somehow emit light from below looks really off.

In a timeline where AI didn’t exist, I’d be all over these new Apple updates. But with these changes going public in September, and then taking 1-2 more years(!) to align with [current-2] OS deployment targets, it’s pretty hard to argue why it’s worth investment at this point

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Which one do you prefer?

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So what's the new CABackdropLayer? CAGlassLayer?

There was a time where I'd sit glued to Xcode by now, inspired to try out all the new stuff in Swift, excited about where app frameworks are going next. This year? I'm glued to Claude Code, which is building me an agentic platform in Python 🐍

You can instantly generate app icons in the new Apple Liquid Glass design style with one single prompt 💬

I have a hunch that glassy materials on macOS will be much more opaque cause there is no chance that 3rd party monitors will be able to provide enough contrast for some of the iOS-designs we've seen so far

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Yeahh idk about the level of opacity on those glass materials, looked like an AX nightmare

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"hey claude build me a liquid glass component that is backwards compatible with 2 major os versions"

On device models sounds cool until you realise how bad the quality is compared to current API's

Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

I’ve been building my first agentic system, and I love how it’s mostly about psychology and cognitive design, not code. Shaping focus, intent, and managing working memory in a very limited context. And when you get it right, the level of quality on the output is just mind-blowing

Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 29/05/2025

🤯 The last week has felt like one of those dreams where you have superpowers and can do anything. We really went from "what bug should I fix today" to "what app/SaaS should I build from scratch today"

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Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Sometimes I obsess over details a bit too much. For example, dynamically rendering the UI on the screenshots on cindori.com/backdrop The dock and menu bar are actually scaled HTML components (with random icons!) so they maintain fidelity at all scales 😄

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Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

Coding will never be the same

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Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 24/05/2025

I’ve never built anything with python or AI API’s. Today I built a whole product prototype of a platform with a python backend and NextJS frontend that leverages OpenAI to solve a fairly complex problem. I did not write a single line of code. All done with AI 🤯

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Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 23/05/2025

Cursor with Gemini 2.5 is absolutely insane. Highest quality Swift output I've seen. It's implementing whole features from singular prompts. Still needs supervision, but way less than other models, and the corrections are spot on.

Oskar @oskargroth.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

TIL the Apple race car emoji comes with an easter egg...