Lately, the feedback coming in through Kosshi's contact form has been getting a bit wild. As I mentioned in an earlier post, hardly anyone outside Japan was using Kosshi, so when I put it on Product Hunt my expectations were honestly pretty light, something like "maybe the numbers will tick up a little." Then this week, a longtime overseas outliner user, m
Read more →At Design Festa 63 on May 23rd and 24th (a big indie art and craft fair in Tokyo), Naoyoshi let me place a mini Sankome at her booth. It was printed with Ohaco, the 3D builder I'm working on. Most of the character-and-merch side of Shirokuma, including the brand icon itself, has been made by my wife Naoyoshi. Lately she posts the goods-side things on the SH
Read more →I put Kosshi on Product Hunt. It had been about two months since the release. Kosshi was gradually picking up users in Japan, but barely anyone outside Japan was using it. That was where things stood at this point. When I lined the reasons up, well, yeah, that tracked. On social media I post almost exclusively in Japanese, and I'd said essentially nothing
Read more →Kosshi recently grew to nine languages, which means the App Store screenshots now need to exist in nine languages too. Last time it was about the inside of the app; this time the same work came around for the outside, the store page. And it needs separate sets for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Nine languages times three devices, times the number of shots per set
Read more →I needed to make a launch video for Kosshi (my outliner app) on Product Hunt. I've made videos before, but opening Premiere or Final Cut always means another round of wrestling with a timeline I'm not fluent in. So I tried Remotion. It's a framework where you write video in React: JSX components compile down to MP4. No timeline, just code that becomes the v
Read more →I'm not particularly strong in English. Programming is basically a wall of English, so I get exposed to it all day, but reading and writing it is still meaningfully harder for me than Japanese. These days I default to browser translation for most foreign-language sites. I suspect a fair number of Japanese developers sit somewhere around here. For the same re
Read more →I go back and forth between freelance engineering work and my own projects. It's been a while since I went independent, and lately my sense of the day has gotten a little strange. Morning, afternoon, evening: I'm not always sure which one it is. I'm coding on several projects at once, a 3D printer is rattling away next to me, and Slack pings me about a cli
Read more →"Making tools for makers" is the theme I've settled into lately. And something I've noticed while working on it: tools aimed at people who make things demand a lot from the UX side. The reason is that makers take their tools seriously. They use the same things every day, and the tools sit right up against their thinking and the motion of their hands. Small
Read more →I've always liked making things. But putting them out into the world (what people now call "self-promotion"), I've always been bad at it. I drop social accounts after a few weeks. Whenever I get busy, my feeds go silent. I genuinely envy people who can do this naturally. Lately I've been half-resigned about it. X in particular (well, Twitter) used to feel
Read more →We made a picture book called The Bear Who Couldn't Make. It'll be on sale at Naoyoshi's booth. If you're interested, check Naoyoshi's account for details. Since I was a student I've made a lot of things: short stories, drawing practice, code. But I've barely shipped any of it. Looking back, I think I was just scared of being criticized.
Read more →When I'd just started building Kosshi, I wasn't all that comfortable with Mac/iOS development to begin with, so the first thing I did was dig through Apple's docs trying to figure out which pieces I should combine to build an outliner. But I couldn't really find anything that would get me close. Even when I tried things out, something would always be off. M
Read more →I've said a few times that I was going to build a small robot called Sankome. Recently, though, I noticed something a little troubling. Maybe what I really wanted, more than the robot itself, was the time I spent making it. This is a bit of a problem. Whether the person who keeps saying "I'm going to build it" actually wants the finished robot, it turns ou
Read more →I left my company at the end of 2021. Before that, a few of us had been building a new product internally. The product itself didn't take off, but I couldn't shake the feeling of building something from zero, so I quit to do it full-time on my own. Going from a salary to nothing overnight was a stretch, so the plan was to take freelance work for a few year
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