Pixel-art avatar of Konstantinos Mastorakis

Hi, I'm Konstantinos.

This is my small corner of the internet: notes on things I find interesting, and the projects I build along the way.

Latest posts

Three problems that surprised me building Barista

In the last post I wrote about what Barista is and why I built it. This one is about the building part: three problems that took far longer to figure out than they should have, and what I learned from each.

Barista's weather widget uses WeatherKit, Apple's weather service. Adding it was supposed to be a small change: enable the service for the app, add one entitlement, call the API. Instead, the next development build refused to launch. No crash report, no error, nothing in the logs under the app's name. The process was simply killed the moment it started (exit code 137, a SIGKILL).

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Why I built Barista

Ten days ago I shipped Barista. This is a short write-up of what it is, what problem it solves for me, and a few decisions I made along the way.

A lot of what I do on my Mac during a day is small: check when the next meeting starts, glance at the weather, convert a unit, paste something I copied an hour ago, see what just landed in my inbox, jot down a note. Each one takes a couple of seconds. But doing it usually means stepping away from what I'm working on: switching to another app, opening yet another window, or hiding everything to get to the widgets on the desktop. And then finding my way back to where I was.

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