2026-02-01 20:00:00
The Secret Agent
2025, Kleber Mendonça Filho
My rating: I like it
As a Brazilian I’m extremely proud of this movie, and it’s extremely good in pretty much all regards. Trying to avoid spoilers here, but… it feels like it’s missing a huge part though? With the historical context I have I can kind of imagine why it’s missing, but it felt frustrating, unlike the rest of the movie that’s actually there.
2026-01-31 08:00:00
TL;DR: I’ve just released an iOS version of Phanpy on the App Store and AltStore. It provides better performance and a Liquid Glass icon compared to the installed web app.
Now, if you want some more context…
If you’re reading this, chances are you already know what Mastodon (or the Fediverse) is. If you don’t, the gist of it is that they’re people-owned social media; a bunch of different websites that talk to each other as if they were all the same thing. It’s really nice, and has garnered a lot of interesting people over the years.
One of the best perks of Mastodon is that there’s a bazillion ways to use it. Even though there are official apps (and they’re pretty good), there’s also a ton of 3rd party ones that do an excellent job of satisfying many usage niches. I’ve used a few, but one of them has always stood out: Phanpy.
Phanpy is a web client for Mastodon developed by Chee Aun, and it’s easily become my favorite way to use it. It’s not only pretty and kinda soothing, but it packs a bunch of UX touches that actually make a difference.
It is a web client though, and while on desktop it provides a top-notch experience (and probably on Android too), on iOS the experience was less than ideal, because Apple hates web apps (and the web in general). While you can install Phanpy as a full-screen web app via Safari, it has significant performance limitations, keeps reloading when in the background, and now with iOS 26, can’t have adaptive icons to fit in with other apps.
Which is why I decided to take advantage of Phanpy’s open source code, wrap it in a native package for iOS, and distribute it as an iOS app!
[!info] Launching iOS apps costs money, but my developer license was fully covered by the good folks at AltStore! AltStore has been around for a while as a way to sideload apps into an iPhone, but now it’s a proper alternative marketplace for iOS in the EU and Japan! Meaning that it’s the only way to install apps that Apple won’t allow you to. iPhanpy is available on both the AltStore and the Apple App Store, but I highly recommend checking out the AltStore version if you’re able, so you can also check out the other apps in there 😊
Phanpy is a web client for Mastodon developed by Chee Aun, and it’s easily become my favorite way to use it. It’s not only pretty and kinda soothing, but it packs a bunch of UX touches that actually make a difference.
These touches can be small, but make all the difference. For example, whenever your timeline includes a reply to another post, Phanpy will show a preview of the post being replied to (something that is challenging to do on chronological feeds):
Some can be also small, but very opinionated, like the fact that Alt text is automatically displayed below an image (if it’s short enough to fit in there). This highlights how alt text is not just for vision-impaired users; it’s also a way to provide context to the images, or draw attention to the thing you specifically wanted to highlight.
But the UX touches can also be big: one of my favorites is “Catch-up”, perfect for when you haven’t opened the app in a while and want to see if you’ve missed anything important or want to quickly check posts by the people you care about the most. You choose a period of time and Phanpy will grab all the posts from that period and display them in a highly filterable view.
In the screenshot below, I’m seeing the posts from my timeline from the past 8 hours:
These are definitely not all the nice touches in there, just my favorites. Definitely check out the main Phanpy website to learn about the rest.
Since Phanpy is open source and under the MIT license, this means I could create a fork of it and add whatever changes are necessary to get it to work as an installable iOS app (I did get Chee Aun’s blessing for doing this, though, as I felt it was polite to ask). Why is what I did: this is iPhanpy’s source code, which I try to keep as up-to-date as possible with the main one.
The repo explains the technical side of the implementation in case you’re curious.
While the installed web app (PWA) on iOS is perfectly usable, in my experience it has a few annoyances:
As I said, these were mostly annoyances, not dealbreakers. Still, iPhanpy fixes all of those.
Technically, it’s possible to make one, yes. It wasn’t a priority for me because I don’t use Android (and don’t have a device to test with), but I’m not saying it won’t happen. I just need time and volition to work on it. Maybe once I get a bit more comfortable with keeping the iOS one up-to-date.
If you know a little about Capacitor and how to build/test Android apps, feel free to try it and open a PR with your findings!
I’m aware that logging in to some specific instances is not working on the iOS app, even though it works on the web app. I’m looking into it. What I know so far is that it seems to be related to either an older Mastodon version (< 4.3.0) or to some specific security settings being enabled/disabled. It will be fixed in a future update.
If you’re using the installed version, iPhanpy, then probably to me. You can do it either on the GitHub repo if you have an account there, or just shoot me a message on my Mastodon account.
For feature requests, it’s better to do it on the original project’s repo.
Keep in mind that Phanpy and iPhanpy are hobby projects to both of us and we have no obligation to work on your issue. Be sensible.
2026-01-31 08:00:00
Hey there, welcome to the first Cool Links digest of 2026!
Before I start with the links, I want to just mention that I just launched my first app on the App Store! It’s not something I built from scratch, but I took my favorite Mastodon client and wrapped it around nicely into an iOS app that plays along better with the system. I wrote about it on this other blog post from today!
You might have read before that I love the Catppuccin color theme. It’s the same one I use on this website! I also love using that theme on the apps that allow me to, like Obsidian, VS Code and Vivaldi.
To match all of that, I need some wallpapers that fit the palette too. And I just came across this tool that automatically adapts the color palette of any image you upload to a theme of your choice! I’ve had good results with it so far. Definitely makes my desktop look way nicer :)
This is awesome: an entire site dedicated to shoelaces, how to lace, tie or simply learn about them. It even includes the “world’s fastest shoelace knot”, created by the website’s author himself! I gotta try it out.
The Truth About Lying (and why we do it) (video), by Miss Chalice
Excuse me, I’m in a Lies of P obsession right now. This video (which contains some light spoilers) talks about the Truth/Lie choices in the game, which are an incredible narrative device, and how that relates to what makes us human.
It’s not surprising that a game based on the story of Pinocchio would have Lies and “becoming human” as parts of its theme, but I really like how they made it all make sense organically and not just like something they tacked in there because they had to.
I definitely didn’t expect seeing a new major jQuery release in 2026, but here it is! This is the first major release in 10 years and it doesn’t bring a lot of new things on the surface, but seems to have been a major overhaul behind the scenes. Looks like a future v5 will bring in bigger changes.
jQuery might be old by JS framework standards, but it’s still very useful, and I actually still use it almost daily at my job.
Case Study: lynnandtonic.com 2025 refresh, by Lynn Fisher
Lynn talks through a really neat effect added to the latest refresh of their website: a “squishy” animation on the content whenever the window gets resized!
This means you won’t get to see the effect live on your phone, but there’s videos of the effect on the article just in case.
Love the paper-like aesthetic of the website, too.
A Website To End All Websites, by Henry Desroches
This is a very interesting read that compares the internet’s development to that of the automobile, but I also want to highlight the design of the article itself. So good 🤌
Thanks for following along, and see you next month!
2026-01-25 19:32:53
Case Study: lynnandtonic.com 2025 refresh, by Lynn Fisher
Lynn talks through a really neat effect added to the latest refresh of their website: a “squishy” animation on the content whenever the window gets resized!
This means you won’t get to see the effect live on your phone, but there’s videos of the effect on the article just in case.
Love the paper-like aesthetic of the website, too.
2026-01-21 08:00:00
Last weekend I quietly launched another section in this website: a chronological feed that aggregates everything I post here, e.g. blog posts, quick reviews, photographies and cool links, all in one place.
I’ve struggled to think of a good name for it. I felt like “Timeline” could mean something else, as people usually use “Timeline” on their websites to talk about their life timeline or something like that. So, for now, I just went with “Feed”. I like it because it’s very creative.
The reasoning behind it is that I found it a bit annoying that you had to open 4 pages to see if I had posted anything new (unless you use RSS, which makes you awesome 🫶). Now, you only need to open one! I am sure everyone will make good use of these precious seconds that are being saved!
This is something I had designed quite a while ago, but always postponed building for some unknown reason. I took huge inspiration from the way Phanpy groups notifications by date, and did the same here. The initial idea was to have some fancy filtering, but I chose to skip it just so that I could get it out there. Maybe someday.
Dealing with the data fetching was also quite easy: even though Astro handles each post type as a separate collection, the fact that my website is static means I don’t have to worry much about performance: I just query for everything, sort by date, then only get the posts I need (12-ish per page). It’s only gonna run once anyway, so I don’t have to do anything fancy for that query. Simplicity is awesome.
I also wanted to make sure days don’t get cut off on pagination. i.e. if I’m showing 12 items per page but the 13th item is in the same day as the 12th one, they’re gonna show up together. Again, easily doable because I load all posts before building the pages. It’d probably be very annoying to do otherwise.
2026-01-19 05:01:11
I definitely didn’t expect seeing a new major jQuery release in 2026, but here it is! This is the first major release in 10 years and it doesn’t bring a lot of new things on the surface, but seems to have been a major overhaul behind the scenes. Looks like a future v5 will bring in bigger changes.
jQuery might be old by JS framework standards, but it’s still very useful, and I actually still use it almost daily at my job.
