# 277. Brush Cherry

> The cover shot is a tiny potted plant sitting on the speaker on my desk, a brush cherry. It looks full of life and works well indoors, though its small leaves drop pretty easily. Still looks great, and I like my study having a bit of life in it.

- Issue: 277
- Published: 2026/08/10
- HTML: https://weekly.tw93.fun/en/posts/277
- JSON: https://weekly.tw93.fun/api/en/posts/277.json
- Chinese original: https://weekly.tw93.fun/posts/277.md

---

<img src="https://cdn.tw93.fun/uPic/27756.jpg" width="800" />

<small>The cover shot is a tiny potted plant sitting on the speaker on my desk, a brush cherry. It looks full of life and works well indoors, though its small leaves drop pretty easily. Still looks great, and I like my study having a bit of life in it.</small>

> **Recording down-to-earth trending tech I see every week, filtered and published here. Follow this weekly newsletter to get update notifications**

## Trending Tools

**Tinycast: a well-made open-source Raycast alternative**
<https://abue-ammar.github.io/tinycast/>
Tried it and it's solid. Lighter than Raycast, but still covers a lot of the extras I use often, like clipboard management, window management, shortcuts, and more. The key thing is it's a lot more polished than other open-source alternatives I've seen. I even sent the author a few suggestions.
<video width="800px" preload="metadata" loop autoplay muted><source src="https://cdn.tw93.fun/uPic/zXITSrc_HJpKjSyU24.mp4" type="video/mp4"></video>

**Maya turns your screen recording into a shareable video**
<https://ronaldo-avalos.github.io/Maya/>
Impressive, and it's free and open source. This tool wraps your iPhone screen recording in a phone case mockup, then adds cinematic zoom animations. Great for making product videos, going head to head with paid tools like Rotato.
<img src="https://cdn.tw93.fun/uPic/GnOiIo59.png" width="800" />

**Saw a really good AI outfit-swap plugin on Twitter, impressive stuff**
<https://anywear.decart.ai/>
Found via a case Paidax shared on Twitter. "Try clothes on, anywhere online" is such a great idea. I think it could spark a ton of ideas for e-commerce, way better than the tech that came before it.
<video width="800px" preload="metadata" autoplay controls><source src="https://cdn.tw93.fun/uPic/VPEz98liVxKD7unj32.mp4" type="video/mp4"></video>

**An Online Chronicle of the US Stock Market**
<https://historyofmarket.com/>
The material in this US stock market chronicle is incredibly rich, covering the S&P 500, Nasdaq, semiconductors, information technology, finance, the Magnificent Seven, the top 10, and more. When I have time, I'm definitely going to dig through it properly.
<img src="https://cdn.tw93.fun/uPic/ZgG0N430.png" width="800" />

## Just Looking Around

**How we built a realtime system for responsive voice AI in six months**
<https://openai.com/index/continuous-voice-interaction-with-gpt-live/>
A post from OpenAI's official blog about how they got voice AI working this well. There's a lot in it worth learning from.
<img src="https://cdn.tw93.fun/uPic/HulhWE39.png" width="800" />

**Bought a small Android tablet**
An Oppo Mini. Set your expectations right, app compatibility isn't as good as an iPad. I mainly use it as a browser and for reading content. It's thin and the bezels are narrow, which I like, and it feels comfortable to hold and read on. I went ahead and tuned how my product displays on it right away, and it looks a lot better now.

<table>
    <tr>
        <td width="25%">
          <img src="https://cdn.tw93.fun/uPic/IMG_260542.JPG" width="400" />
        </td>
        <td width="25%">
            <img src="https://cdn.tw93.fun/uPic/IMG_260649.JPG" width="400" />
        </td>
        <td width="25%">
            <img src="https://cdn.tw93.fun/uPic/IMG_260955.jpg" width="400" />
        </td>
          <td width="25%">
            <img src="https://cdn.tw93.fun/uPic/IMG_261001.JPG" width="400" />
        </td>
    </tr>
</table>

**Let's talk about how being an indie developer isn't just about developing**

I've seen a lot of reflections on indie development lately, so I thought I'd use Mole's journey from an open-source CLI to a paid Mac app to share my thinking and what's actually worked. Hope it helps.

1. Before anything else, build your skills as a product engineer. Coding ability is only about 30% of it. What matters more is connecting your own pain points with what most users are struggling with, and turning that into a product solution that's genuinely easy to use, plus knowing how to present it well to your users so they think "thank god this product solved a real problem for me." In other words, a product engineer is a combination of user researcher, product person, engineer, growth, data, and business person all in one.

2. Following on from that, in the AI era the code moat keeps shrinking, so what matters more is spending your tokens precisely on solving user problems, then putting more tokens into requirement discussions, digging into data to find problems, and making content clear and easy to read. Even multiple $250 accounts aren't really enough. I don't mind spending more tokens, but they need to go somewhere useful. To me tokens are an investment, and investments still need to pay off.

3. On requirement control, what you don't do matters far more than what you do. Back in my freshman year when I was just starting out as a programmer, I was lucky enough to read a bunch of books on engineering discipline. Don't multiply entities without necessity, complexity should resolve into simplicity, and that slowly became a habit I keep in life, work, and code. I hate clutter and mess, and I like things that are beautiful, simple, and usable without reading a manual.

4. You really don't need to save up big features for a grand reveal. Try to ship every week, release every week, and fix user problems promptly. Real, human, person-to-person interaction with your users matters a lot. Every release, update, and announcement is actually a great chance to talk with your users, and it keeps putting your product in front of more people who hadn't seen your updates before.

5. On product growth, try to talk with the real world as little as possible in AI-speak. Twitter is a great channel for getting good things discovered. If it's genuinely useful, plenty of people will help spread the word. But don't go down the blue-checkmark follow-for-follow, cross-promote path. There's no need to chase that kind of fake prosperity, because your users aren't there. There's one precondition for product growth: your product has to be beautiful and polished, so that someone seeing it for the first time is curious enough to click and try it, instead of scrolling right past.

6. You might think "I don't have many followers, so promotion is pointless." That's not quite right, but I also really don't recommend growing your account with a heavy dose of self-interest, because that will just make you anxious. Instead, treat your account as a brand you're building, you yourself are that brand. Your thoughts, ideas, product updates, insights, conversations, and comments are all adding trust to your own brand. Trust matters especially in today's AI world, which is both fake and overhyped. So many things get talked up as amazing, but turn out mediocre once you actually check them out, and that has dragged a lot of users' expectations way down. Which means even if you have a good product, without any user trust you still won't get noticed. This is something you can build for the very long term. Your brand stays alive for as long as you stay active online, it's the longest-lived product of your life.

7. Talking about user trust means talking about sincerity. I still really love open source and a friendly, drama-free online environment. I'd also strongly suggest making your product global, or export-oriented, from day one, and posting more English-language content. You'll find the world is big, your potential users are everywhere, and they'll trust you from the very start. Help people whenever you can. Odds are, the people you help will become your future users, because you've already built a real connection.

8. Try not to spend money on ads. Instead, rely on the chance that some of your users are also creators. Twitter, in my experience, spikes hard but fades fast. I'd really recommend putting some content on YouTube instead, it decays much more slowly. If your product is good enough and someone recommends it, it can stay hot there for a long time and bring you a lot of value.

9. Definitely learn data analysis, it's incredibly useful. Break down your sales data by dimension and by time, combine it with traffic data, user reviews, everything from your conversations with users, and refund reasons. If it's an open-source product, every issue your users file is also a hugely valuable data source. All of it can surface problems you didn't know you had, help you make the product better, and reveal your sales funnel, so you know exactly what to optimize.

10. This ended up a bit rambling and long-winded to write by hand. If you're interested, feel free to check out Mole's website and try the product. It might give you some input for building your own.