I’ve been getting more into making music lately, especially around areas of writing interesting parts and how to mix them well. It’s a steep learning curve if you want to go beyond hitting record and leaving it at that, so I used some free credits to generate some tools to help out. It’s completely AI coded, and might not have all the right information there, but I guess I’ll learn that lesson the…
One of the fun parts when learning to make music is playing around with different sounds to see what it kicks off. Pianos and cellos often evoke a cinematic sort of mood in me, so after coming up with a simple piano melody, I layered it over time, then stripped it back. The melody stuck in my head for days, and I think I’ll expand on it in the future with a “main theme” type approach. I’ll…
I’ve been toying with the idea of writing music for many years now. I tried it nearly 20 years ago, directly wiring up my amp to my desktop computer using software called Mixcraft. It was version 3 at the time, I think. It didn’t really pan out. I just stuck to recording guitar covers, with a few original recordings here and there, but nothing substantial. Over the last year, I’ve really…
Swatcher was officially launched in May of 2025, and in that time, it has gone through many updates. It has exceeded my own expectations in terms of traction and gets over a thousand visitors a month. The vast majority of those users come from Google, and they land on a specific paint detail page. From there, they typically visit the paint page on the brand’s website. That was my intended goal as…
Since launching Swatcher, many things have changed. The core of it - making paint colours available in one single place - remains the same, and has even expanded with even more paint brands. We’re nearing 8,000 paint colours now. Everything that matters most is free and doesn’t require an account. For those interested in managing more projects, collecting infinite favourite colours, and using more…
Since I’ve been working on Swatcher , I’ve struggled with the idea of SEO. From my experience, Google does crawl pages on a SPA successfully, but occasionally I find it won’t capture some meta tags. Perhaps that’s due to a delay in rendering when we update the meta tags on the client side. I also don’t know how other search engines handle SPAs. With that in mind, I wanted to provide the proper…
I was working away on Swatcher a few weeks ago, and the server-side situation started to bother me. I was using serverless functions, which really solved a lot of problems for me, but after a while, a few things started grabbing my attention. Like someone bouncing light at me from a watch face: Response times could be better due to cold starts Lots more front-end work required to try to optimise…
I recently put together an app for my wife, who had the idea of collecting the recipes she finds in one place, and making it easy to set up meal plans and shopping lists so we can plan our week. The idea is simple enough, but it’s a powerful tool for us. We can paste in a recipe video, it’ll transcribe it and merge with the caption to create a recipe - ingredients and instructions. Alternatively,…
It seems I’m changing things every day on Swatcher . I’m terrible for tinkering, but it’s a project I’m having great fun with. I’m happy with the main app area, which feels like a pretty typical app style. You have a sidebar and content. The homepage is something I struggle a bit more with, and originally it was far more complicated. I was listing all the details I could to get across all the…
I’ve been working on this project for over a month now, and it’s taken some twists and turns. Initially, it was for generating colour palettes using prompts or images. This expanded into more specific prompts, including interiors. From there, things became very paint-focused. You can choose any colour you like and find a matching paint colour. These starter colours can come from your camera, a…