Failed startups are selling their old Slack archives to AI companies now. Every internal message, priced and sold, because the company holding them held them in plaintext.

Enjoy WidgeOne’s July wallpaper!

We shipped Mermster quietly last week. Saying it properly now: a native Mermaid diagram editor for Mac and Windows. Real code editor, live preview, exports to SVG, PNG, or PDF. No account, no cloud, no telemetry. The free tier has every feature. www.viaelo.app/apps/mermster/

Happy June! Here's your wallpaper for this month.

AtticAlbum 1.4 is out today. Smoother restores on a new device, plus stronger lockouts and a few quiet improvements underneath.

What's the smallest setting on your iPhone that took you the longest to settle? For us, it was the lock screen. We tried two dozen wallpaper-and-overlay combinations before picking the one that actually stays put.

If you need text to stay readable over an unpredictable image (wallpaper, photo background), the trick is to sample the average color and pick the overlay shade by luminance. Core Image has the averaging primitive built in. WidgeOne picks the calendar overlay color this way.

Multi-GB video files on iOS will tank memory if you try to encrypt them whole. The trick is chunking. CryptoKit's AES-GCM does the encryption; the work is just keeping one chunk in memory at a time. AtticAlbum handles videos this way.

Your wallpaper does not have to know what month it is, but it can. WidgeOne adds a small calendar overlay to any photo, exports for iPhone, iPad, and Mac at the right pixel size.

There are two ways to ship: keep adding so each version is bigger than the last, or polish so the latest one is what you would actually keep on your phone. We pick the second.

What's a small piece of your iPhone setup that does more work than it looks like it does? For us, it's the Keychain. We trust it for the master key, the passcode hash, the iCloud sync flag. The whole privacy model rides on Apple getting that piece right.

AtticAlbum's Photos permission prompt asks for full library access. The wording is unfortunate, and Apple controls it, not us. What we control is the screen before. We tell you what we read, write, and why, before the system dialog fires. The Info.plist string is not enough.

Viaelo ships 7 locales for AtticAlbum and 6 for WidgeOne. The metadata lives in per-locale markdown files we wrote ourselves, source-controlled alongside the app code. Drift detection is git diff against last release. We've shipped both apps this way and it holds up.

WidgeOne renders calendar overlays pixel-aligned across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Pixel-aligned means rendering math runs at the device's actual pixel grid, so the date glyph edges land on whole pixels regardless of @2x or @3x scale. No fuzz, no half-pixel blur.

How AtticAlbum's encryption is structured, since the question keeps coming up. Random 256-bit master key, generated once on first launch and stored in the iOS Keychain. Every photo encrypted via AES-256-GCM through Apple's CryptoKit. Stateless and thread-safe.