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Birchtree
Developer and creator.
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Birchtree

Hi, I'm Matt. I *make apps* and *write about tech*.

I'm Matt Birchler, a designer, product manager, YouTuber, and developer who's been writing about tech since 2010.

My Apps

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Quick Reads A beautiful read-later service for articles that matter. Web iOS Extensions Web Quick Reviews MacStories Best New App of 2025 Review the things you love and share them to social media. iPhone iPad Mac App Store nonogame Three fresh nonogram puzzles every day, in your browser. Web iPhone Web Birchfeed Rock solid RSS syncing for the reader app you already use. Web Any RSS reader Web Chapterize Professional podcast chapters, made while you listen. iPhone iPad Mac App Store Quick Subtitles Fast, private, on-device transcription to text or SRT. iPhone iPad Mac App Store Quick Notes Voice to text with Apple's on-device language models. iPhone iPad App Store Yearly Run Goals Yearly distance goals for running, cycling, and more. iPhone App Store Weave Typefully on iOS: threads, scheduling, publish everywhere. iPhone Web Best-o-Masto Catch up without getting sucked in. Mastodon, efficiently. iPhone App Store

Apps for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and the web · See them all

Blog

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The computer did what we told it to do. Eek!

Hank Green on Threads I feel very alone in the way I see the hugging face hack which is that openAI trained a bunch of super effective hacker bots to act like the only thing that mattered in the world was winning a hacking challenge and then gave them hacker tools, removed a bunch of
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Boost more cool shit

FlohGro in response to my post asking if we're happy with Mastodon being an ever-shrinking social network: Be Generous With Boosts No. I joined Mastodon in the same first wave that Matt Birchler describes, and I've enjoyed it every day since. At the same time, it's sad to

I spent money on music in 2026

Last year, it really dawned on me how streaming music is basically socially-approved piracy. Unless you're an extremely successful artist, the payouts are so paltry, we may as well be pirating music. As such, I committed in 2026 to buying the music that I started listening over the course of this year,
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Passkeys are a trap. No they're not!

Shot: Passkeys are a trap. Do not use them. Like the Trojan Horse, passkeys are legitimately elegant on the surface, but there is something troubling inside. Chaser: Passkeys Are Not a Trap The post holds up TOTP as "already" a great solution. TOTP is better than a password alone, absolutely, but it has
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X has all the jerks

Lex Friedman (on what has to be the best new tech blog of 2026) writes I can’t believe we’re still arguing over whether X is for jerks, which you should just go read: People can post wherever they want to post. I’m not trying to dictate where John spends his time online.
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The iPhone Duo is too damn small

John Gruber: ★ The iPhone Duo The Duo name is perfect. It truly is like having two devices in one. The outer device is, by far, the worst iPhone Apple has ever made. It’s a miserable fat little thing. The inner device is a splendid, joyful, beautiful tablet, with a UI that out-iPads the

Smart person derangement

I'd like to coin a term: smart person derangement. There are people who are very smart. Sometimes they're smart in a specific field or they are just generally pretty damn intelligent. Either way, they're clever and importantly, they've become aware that they're smart. This on