Hacker News: jpsimons

New comment by jpsimons in "New Apple TV 4K"

jpsimons — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 22:53:18 +0000

I'd kill for an Apple TV with a built in television tuner. All the ATSC tuners on Amazon are such garbage.

New comment by jpsimons in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

jpsimons — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:19:08 +0000

Here's what I _wish_ someone was working on, I'd build it myself but I'm too busy with other projects. A browser extension that's not a popup blocker but a popup minimizer. So any popup (newsletter, cookie notification, even social signin) gets sucked down into a Windows 95 style taskbar. You can restore them easily but they get out of your main browsing flow. Maybe start as a fork of one of the popup blockers?

New comment by jpsimons in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

jpsimons — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:14:21 +0000

I like working in native apps on my Mac for spreadsheets, so I've used Numbers a little bit, but if you have the same iCloud file open on two machines they conflict and don't merge nicely. Does this have a better story there?

New comment by jpsimons in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)"

jpsimons — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 18:10:00 +0000

Jumping into this "handcrafted with love by a small indie shop" landscape of commercial Mac apps, with Mojave Paint, my Photoshop and Affinity Photo competitor. https://mojavepaint.app

New comment by jpsimons in "Show HN: Mojave Paint for macOS, edit images like it's 1999"

jpsimons — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:30:09 +0000

And I just discovered there's a group in Seattle called XCoders (https://xcoders.org/), I'll drop in on their social next week and maybe learn more about the Swift/Apple ecosystem.

New comment by jpsimons in "Show HN: Mojave Paint for macOS, edit images like it's 1999"

jpsimons — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:14:11 +0000

Honestly Swift is a pleasure to read. I love the guard statements and the enum values starting with a dot.

New comment by jpsimons in "Show HN: Mojave Paint for macOS, edit images like it's 1999"

jpsimons — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 15:22:22 +0000

Thanks, yep comes in at 3 MB. It's all Swift and Metal. I'm a web developer by trade, done that at a high level for 20 years including Amazon, Google, other big tech, but this was my first native app and first time using Swift. At the moment I'm learning all about weak refs and reference cycles causing memory to be retained when you don't want it to be.

Show HN: Mojave Paint for macOS, edit images like it's 1999

jpsimons — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 12:29:07 +0000

We all need a swiss army knife for images. A tool for really getting in there and dealing with the pixels precisely. You might be combining images into a sprite sheet, you might be matting images to squares, cutting out solid backgrounds, re-tinting graphical elements. For a website, a video game, for an app.

There's a million photo editors, there's a million design tools, and Mojave Paint can do those things in varying degrees but "graphical asset production" is its first and primary mission.

It's cheap! $9.99 (one-time, sad I even have to say that) for the "Pro" version. It's Mac-only, and Apple Silicon Mac at that. Does it look a little like Photoshop 5.5 from the year 1999? Maybe a little but also it's got plenty of its own original ideas. (Blog post on that is forthcoming…)

I've always been passionate about image editing tools for the technically-minded so I'm throwing my hat in the ring in that space. And sure GIMP is for the technically-minded but boy is it ugly on the Mac!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48858972

Points: 3

# Comments: 5

New comment by jpsimons in "Ask HN: Do you have an unusual income source"

jpsimons — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:12:58 +0000

I quit my engineering job at Apple in 2023 to buy an aluminum Olson-Grumman step van, and start a mobile knife sharpening business, in Seattle. burlyburr.com Each knife takes maybe 5 minutes and I charge $2/inch, mostly working on summer weekends in the farmers markets. Makes over $150/hr when business is lined up. Sporadic work though.

New comment by jpsimons in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)"

jpsimons — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:19:59 +0000

Got my first in app purchase for my first Mac app, a photoshop like image editor with layers and blend modes and a pretty retro look and feel. $8 in revenue so far! https://mojavepaint.app

New comment by jpsimons in "Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?"

jpsimons — Sun, 24 May 2026 02:36:59 +0000

Not vibe coded exactly, but certainly AI assisted: https://mojavepaint.app

New comment by jpsimons in "Node.js 26.0.0 (Now with Temporal)"

jpsimons — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:33:37 +0000

I always thought the old Date is kind of elegant... increment anything with an overflow and it all wraps around correctly, like `d.setDate(d.getDate() + 100)` to advance a date 100 days. "March 208th" is interpreted like you'd expect, as are the hours and minutes and such.

Of course, complete lack of non-local non-GMT time zones is a huge downside.

New comment by jpsimons in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)"

jpsimons — Mon, 11 May 2026 08:11:41 +0000

I got my app in the Mac App Store! It's a layer based image editor, which as a developer has been a nerd's paradise to develop. How should disparate blend modes work with "merge down"? What does it mean to have one color channel selected when you move a layer? Should type layers use their Oriented Bounding Box or their Axis Aligned Bound Box with free transform? So much ambiguity to resolve and I'm loving it.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mojave-paint/id6759276677?mt=1...

New comment by jpsimons in "I am worried about Bun"

jpsimons — Mon, 04 May 2026 22:29:53 +0000

Sure, but at least on Node 22 I think I have to pass `--env-file=.env` option to make it pick up .env.

New comment by jpsimons in "I am worried about Bun"

jpsimons — Mon, 04 May 2026 22:28:38 +0000

Claude did write me a simple wrapper so I can keep using tagged template literals in the same way with Node.

New comment by jpsimons in "I am worried about Bun"

jpsimons — Mon, 04 May 2026 21:07:40 +0000

I just spent a couple hours migrating my knife sharpening website backend from Bun to Node. Feels good to avoid that lock-in. I was initially gung-ho for Bun but increasingly unsure about it. Things I'll miss for sure:

- Querying sqlite with tagged template literals

- Bun.password.verify being argon2 is a better default

- HTML imports

- JSX transpilation

- Auto loading .env file

https://burlyburr.com, which hits https://backend.burlyburr.com

New comment by jpsimons in "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (May 2026)"

jpsimons — Fri, 01 May 2026 16:33:19 +0000

Location: Seattle

Remote: maybe

Willing to relocated: No

Technologies: web frontend, JS, CSS, Svelte, Swift

Resume: ex-Google, ex-Amazon, see linkedin.com/in/jpsimons

Email: coolcucumber@gmail.com

New comment by jpsimons in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

jpsimons — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 17:30:05 +0000

I'm getting pretty darn close to doing a "Show HN" about my new macOS paint app, called Mojave Paint. I just posted a feature tour video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=61FJ2xzUiIU showing how to make halftoned edges, which happens to cover a lot of of the basics including layers, alpha masks, selections, foreground/background color, gradients, etc.

I would say Photoshop is awesome but expensive (if you can look past how invasive it is for your machine), Affinity is free but "meh", I'm going for the "awesome and cheap" square of the quadrant. Find it at https://skullrocksoftware.com

New comment by jpsimons in "Ask HN: What are you building that's not AI related?"

jpsimons — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:47:41 +0000

I'm building a macOS image editor -- no AI here, just Metal textures, compositing, blend modes, all that mathematical raster goodness. It's getting closer to a Mac App Store release and has a preview version on https://skullrocksoftware.com

New comment by jpsimons in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)"

jpsimons — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 04:50:59 +0000

Thanks! I'm hand drawing all the icons which is slow going, but I'm drawing them in Mojave Paint. Nothing better than eating your own dogfood.