I work on a very long horizon project. The kind where you can go for months and have nothing you can hold up and say "look, this is done!"
Rainlayer 3 is the opposite. It's a small but highly practical utility I ship on the side. And it's also the app I open every single day to tune out the noise around me and focus on the long hard work. So it's a strange loop: the side project is the tool that makes the main project possible.
My current main project, an autonomous research pipeline, in turn, is also a tool that is supposed to make my actual main project, a neurosymbolic AI system that can reason through near-infinite complexity, possible.
Rainlayer 3 just got approved by Apple ๐ Which means I get to tell you about the weirdest part of shipping it: the screenshots.
The standard iOS screenshot tools wait for your app to go idle before they act, but some highly dynamic apps like Rainlayer are never idle. For example, it renders continuously in Metal to create its motion-driven "semi-holographic" UI.
So fastlane's snapshot just waits. And waits. ๐๐ฒ๐๐ธ๐๐๐๐ assumes the app will settle down and go quiet before it captures. Mine never does. It also can't shoot mid-gesture, so the exact moments I most wanted to show, a luminous gravitational wave emitted 0.75 seconds ago, a gesture held halfway, were the ones it couldn't reach.
So I built my own pipeline. Three ideas carry it:
1) A ๐ณ๐ด๐ฑ๐๐ถ-only staging controller driven entirely by launch arguments. They land in ๐ฝ๐๐ฐ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ณ๐๐๐๐๐, which outranks every persisted plist, so every run is deterministic even if the app rewrote its own defaults yesterday.
2) The script owns the exact frame of capture, not a hardcoded sleep. It fires a Darwin notification to emit a wave, waits 0.75s, then shoots. Same animation, same moment, every time.
3) A copy-fit engine that shrinks each headline until it fits, counts characters by walking the DOM so it works in Japanese and Chinese with no spaces, avoids typographic widows, and fails the process if one translation overflows.
Rainlayer supports 7 languages. The naive path is 35 simulator launches. My pipeline re-stages only the shots where the UI actually changes and re-renders the rest based on a plain vanilla HTML + CSS template engine: 6 extra launches, not 30.
Rainlayer 3 is live on the App Store today. Every screenshot on its listing came out of this pipeline.
A great tool is great right up until your problem is genuinely different and requires a new solution. I might have come up with something that is genuinely useful for a certain class of apps that need more precision and control over their screenshot automation. I could turn this into a great general solution for developers, but it would distract from my core mission.
One of the hardest things about building with AI is that everything seems so within reach, and yet, we must continue to prioritize.
What's the small thing you shipped on the side while the big thing kept cooking?
Coming soon: Rainlayer 3 will feature AI-driven environmental noise masking with natural, crystal-clear 3D rain audio, so you can stay focused or sleep well despite the noise around you โจ
While active, it uses your iPhoneโs microphone to perform recurring Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) analysis using a high-resolution 4096-point Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) with Hann windowing. It continuously computes 29 one-third-octave band powers, ranging from 25 Hz to 16 kHz, and aggregates per-frame statistics like median, 10th percentile, and 90th percentile, while simultaneously extracting spectral features including power, loudness, centroid, and flatness, as well as temporal features such as modulation depth and onset rate. It then continuously scans the entire 3D rain audio landscape to find the most effectively masking ambience for the situation you are in.
To be released as a free update for all subscribers :)
I just cracked the code on AI animation ads ๐คฏ
every one of these cost me 12 cents and under 20 seconds to make
Gemini Omni + Claude Code is f*cking wild.
i built a system that turns any product into an end-to-end AI animated ad in ANY style you want.. claymation, pixar-style 3D, anime, paper cutout, lego, you name it
you drop in your product photo and a one line pitch and it handles everything end to end. images, video, voiceover, music, captions, all generated with AI inside Claude..
AI animation ads are crushing on Meta right now and everyone still assumes you need an expensive editor with a 3-week turnaround time to make one. you don't. you just need the right workflow.
Im making full end to end high quality AI animation ads in under 3 minutes with this system
and they work just as hard organically on TikTok, reels and shorts
so i packaged the whole thing up๏ฟฝ๏ฟฝ๏ฟฝ
here's what you're getting:
> every prompt i used across all 8 steps
> the exact tool stack + the order to run it in
> style recipes for claymation, pixar, anime, wes anderson, retro cartoon + CGI
> one system that works for paid Meta AND organic
built across Claude Code and Gemini Omni
RT + reply 'STYLES' and i'll send it over (must be following so i can dm)