Just launched my new personal site: oskargroth.com Excited to expand my work from native Mac apps into the next era of AI-powered products, and exploring new opportunities to build at scale.

Announcing Backdrop 2.0 – World First Custom Video Wallpapers on your Mac Lock Screen cindori.com/news/backdro...

OpenAI dropped GPT-5 yesterday, how are you finding it? Honestly, I'm not blown away. Doubt I’d pass a blind test vs 4o. Post-training might change that, but for now I’m sticking with Claude Opus 4.1.

New Backdrop detail view design with Liquid Glass UI and live previews

Growing up is realising “organic growth” was never real. It was always either distribution, or leaving it up to chance. If you’re not spending as much time on distribution as on engineering, you’re not building a product. You’re building a hobby project for one user: yourself.

I've released some huge feature updates to Backdrop lately. Now I'm also updating the pricing based on user feedback. Monthly $2.99 -> $1.99 Yearly $19.99 -> $14.99 Lifetime $49.99 -> $39.99 Also offering a 25% discount on Lifetime for a limited time 🔥

Backdrop 1.4 is out! I've added a new detail view with a high-quality preview of each backdrop. Both the thumbnail and detail previews load nearly instantly, and have no negative effect on scrolling performance. Also added support for Light Mode, and adopted more Liquid Glass design elements 💧

What if Backdrop could play 4K video wallpapers on your Mac lock screen? 👀

Did you know that you can sample the background below a window on macOS? NSVisualEffectView.windowBackground calculates the avg color of the wallpaper below your window. Together with masks and filters, you can create glass effects without the need for costly blur, making it super performant.

Just when Claude Code was getting good… What are you gonna do when the weekly cap hits?

The #1 requested feature for Backdrop is previews of the animated wallpapers. It took a while, but it's finally happening!

Built a paginated collection view with masonry/grid layout in SwiftUI. Should I open source it?

Super happy with this design. Backdrop Editor on macOS Tahoe, featuring Liquid Glass UI. Starting in Backdrop 1.4, you’ll be able to edit & create your own animated video wallpaper for your Mac.

Found the first (and only?) actual use of the morphing Liquid Glass design in macOS Tahoe 🫧

💧 Sneak peek of the new Backdrop Editor. Create your own macOS video wallpaper in seconds, now with support for trimming, muting and optimising file size with a quality slider. Looks great with the glass style inspector on macOS Tahoe!

There’s a gigantic need for better tooling around AI coding. I hate opening a new Claude and burning tokens + time just to get it oriented again. Docs help, but I wonder if there are gains to be had from a proper, dynamic RAG pipeline with structural & semantic embeddings...

Yikes, poor automator. macOS Tahoe did him dirty 🤖

Loving this cute app by @ariv.se for getting quick ELI5's or learn new concepts. Go check it out 👇

Is there a trick to get the sidebar in an NSSplitViewController to extend below the window buttons? Seems to work in SwiftUI, but not AppKit

The Sensei icon was truly ahead of its time 👀

If the new Toggle shape is designed to "match the contour of the human finger", then you gotta ask... why has it been ported to macOS as well? With the new shape and sizing of the UI on macOS Tahoe, it sure seems like Apple is preparing macOS for a touch-screen capable Mac to release in this cycle.

Should I send off my reverse-engineering agent to decompile Liquid Glass on macOS, and create a library + complete demo playground app, giving you access to all the private parameters of various Liquid Glass effects in a custom component?

If you can dream it, formulate it in text, and pay $20 to Anthropic, you can build anything with Claude Code right now. Literally anything. In hours and days, not months or years.

With the larger, floating-style UI and the additional spacing it requires, screen space definitely feel quite cramped on macOS. While it works on low-UI experiences like iOS/iPadOS, the problems compound on macOS where you can have multiple windows, toolbars, sidebars etc.

Nooo bring back the unified tab bar for Safari, please...A whole 100px of web page height is lost to this toolbar

Backdrop not only works, but it looks amazing with the new design! The animated wallpaper can now extend to the edge of the screen 🙌

Hello Tahoe! Ok first up, what's going on with these sidebars? Having the foreground panels somehow emit light from below looks really off.

In a timeline where AI didn’t exist, I’d be all over these new Apple updates. But with these changes going public in September, and then taking 1-2 more years(!) to align with [current-2] OS deployment targets, it’s pretty hard to argue why it’s worth investment at this point

Which one do you prefer?

So what's the new CABackdropLayer? CAGlassLayer?

There was a time where I'd sit glued to Xcode by now, inspired to try out all the new stuff in Swift, excited about where app frameworks are going next. This year? I'm glued to Claude Code, which is building me an agentic platform in Python 🐍

You can instantly generate app icons in the new Apple Liquid Glass design style with one single prompt 💬

I have a hunch that glassy materials on macOS will be much more opaque cause there is no chance that 3rd party monitors will be able to provide enough contrast for some of the iOS-designs we've seen so far

Yeahh idk about the level of opacity on those glass materials, looked like an AX nightmare

"hey claude build me a liquid glass component that is backwards compatible with 2 major os versions"

On device models sounds cool until you realise how bad the quality is compared to current API's

I’ve been building my first agentic system, and I love how it’s mostly about psychology and cognitive design, not code. Shaping focus, intent, and managing working memory in a very limited context. And when you get it right, the level of quality on the output is just mind-blowing

🤯 The last week has felt like one of those dreams where you have superpowers and can do anything. We really went from "what bug should I fix today" to "what app/SaaS should I build from scratch today"

Sometimes I obsess over details a bit too much. For example, dynamically rendering the UI on the screenshots on cindori.com/backdrop The dock and menu bar are actually scaled HTML components (with random icons!) so they maintain fidelity at all scales 😄

Coding will never be the same

I’ve never built anything with python or AI API’s. Today I built a whole product prototype of a platform with a python backend and NextJS frontend that leverages OpenAI to solve a fairly complex problem. I did not write a single line of code. All done with AI 🤯

Cursor with Gemini 2.5 is absolutely insane. Highest quality Swift output I've seen. It's implementing whole features from singular prompts. Still needs supervision, but way less than other models, and the corrections are spot on.

TIL the Apple race car emoji comes with an easter egg...

Sensei 1.6.2 is out, with a bunch of bug fixes and a brand new Feedback view. Go make your voice heard on what features you'd like to see improve for a 2.0 version!

We're closing up on 1 year since the launch of Paddle Billing, and I'm not sure whether anyone at Paddle is still working on it. How can the vendor portal be so useless? I can't even see breakdown of sales per product. Left is what they promise, right is the actual dashboard

I’ve been working on a major update to Sensei over the last few weeks. This update is a total overhaul of the architecture of the app, improving performance across the board and squishing some of the most persistent bugs.

Preparing a big update to Sensei ⚡️

I think people want AI to be useless, to consume huge amounts of water, etc. because that lets you find another reason for it to be bad that isn’t: it’s useful and that’s why it’s bad. The thing works and is getting better, millions have found use cases for it, and that is why it is bad.

I made a state-driven Navigation system for macOS that is compatible with both SwiftUI and AppKit

So it only took the legal system 16 years(!) to figure out that the core business model of the App Store is illegal… right around where the golden era of apps is ending. Hundreds of billions $ that should have gone to indie devs.