Moments
Moments
RSS2026-09-15
Murmur is downloadable. Signed, notarised, and it runs on any Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 26 or later; on-device recognition needs no account and nothing configured, and it still types with the network off. Months of work, and today was the first time I could send the link straight to someone I don't know — which is nothing like using it myself every day.
2026-09-15
Started building Murmur's input method at the beginning of September. One thing became clear: typing and speaking should have been two hands of the same product. Switch to this input source and pinyin gives you Chinese exactly as usual; hold that one key and speak, and the words land at your cursor — no switching apps, no copy-paste. Its own dictionary passed 520,000 entries this week, and there's no shortcut to that part: filter, dedupe, annotate, benchmark, batch after batch, and never ship one that makes accuracy worse.
2026-09-15
Took the pricing section off the site. It's not that I don't want the money — it's that it isn't worth charging for yet. Make it genuinely good first, talk about the rest after.
2026-09-15
Spent a night on a failing notarisation before I found it: when the outer signature doesn't go deep, the libraries bundled inside the app are still signed with a development certificate. Every local check comes back green; Apple rejects it as Invalid the moment you submit. Noting it down — sign nested things one by one, and passing locally is not the same as being distributable.
2026-08-28
azureliu.com is live. Between “I want to build a site” and now: four rounds of design, two AIs reviewing each other, and one dead link of my own dug out and rebuilt. This is where I keep the record from here — what I make, what I think.
2026-08-16
MacPulse's app window got a proper shell: sidebar, multi-column grid, a home screen you arrange yourself, 16 components on the register. One step closer to a packaged release.
2026-08-16
Had a different AI model cross-review this site's code end to end. It caught a dead-link bug I'd missed; once that was fixed, I ran a full review back at it. Two AIs checking each other beats either one working alone — which is more or less how I build things.
2026-08-15
Murmur now runs on a speech engine picked specifically for mixed Chinese-English. On my own test set its error rate on mixed speech is 7.7%; GPT-4o on the same recordings is 44%. You never learn that without benchmarking — which is why the soul of this tool is the benchmark, not the recognition.
2026-08-15
Bought azureliu.com. This site went from plan to working skeleton in a day: Next.js on Cloudflare Workers, running cost for the year somewhere around a coffee plus a lunch. What I build and what I think through will land here from now on.
2026-08-14
The handbook promoted its arrivals hall to top-level navigation — a live room you can walk into the day you land: verified students only, messages deleted on a rolling seven-day window, no exchanging contact details. People read that last rule as a restriction. It's protection.
2026-08-12
Settled MacPulse's visual direction. I call it glass instrumentation: panels that let the desktop show through, colour used only to signal state, every number monospaced. The restraint of a precision instrument, not the noise of neon bubbles. All the rainbow icons are gone.
2026-08-03
The iOS version of the handbook ran on a real device for the first time. A native SwiftUI rewrite on the same backend and the same content as the web version — the content exports from the web repo in one command, so the two can't drift apart.
2026-08-03
Moved into the new place in Melbourne; the balcony looks out on the city skyline. The same day, the web version of the Melbourne Arrival Handbook went live — written for people who had just landed, like me. Moved myself in and paved the way for someone else, in one day. That felt complete.
2026-08-01
Spent a round on animation performance for the Others Studio site: pause what's off-screen, keep animations on the compositor, throttle the interactions — not a word of content changed. That's performance work at its best: nobody sees anything, everything just moves better.
2026-07-21
Wrote the first outline for the podcast. The name took a while — On My Way, because what I want to record is the things you figure out en route. Still choosing a microphone.