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Birchtree
Developer and creator.
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Birchtree
Welcome to Birchtree

Welcome to Birchtree

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

Blog

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What is a developer?

Andy Nicolaides: I’m not sure what I am, but I know what I’m not I am a developer by trade, but not anything close to iOS development, so whilst no stranger to coding, I’ve spent a couple of months in Xcode and there is not a chance I could tell any of
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Software authorship

Lex Friedman: Claude writes code; I author the apps My initial prompt when I started on The Universe, Controlled was about 1,000 words — more than half the length of this article to this point. And it was explicitly only for a very limited subset of the game’s functionality. I’ve since prompted Claude

AirPods 5 are better than I even realized

I knew the AirPods 5 were top-tier AirPods almost immediately after using them for the first time, but I did still have one bit of doubt: how good were these going to be as airplane earbuds? AirPods Pro are awesome, and over-the-ear options from Apple, Sony, and Bose are all great, but

Unread 5.1 adds Birchfeed and Quick Reads support

Unread 5.1 adds Birchfeed and Quick Reads support
Unread 5.1 came out this week, and it's the most significant update to the app for me

Hand-drawn Emoji for Chrome and Obsidian

Hand-drawn Emoji for Chrome and Obsidian
Last week, I discovered a custom, hand-drawn emoji set created by Frank Rausch called FrankMoji. It was playful, delightful,

Say hello to "Parakeet Turbo"

Say hello to "Parakeet Turbo"
Parakeet has long been a fan favorite local transcription model in Quick Subtitles. Apple's is slower and not
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The party of making things worse

Justine Calma: Trump finalizes rule to make cars less fuel efficient The US Department of Transportation finalized its plans today to weaken fuel efficiency standards, calling it “among the largest deregulatory actions under the second Trump Administration.” I just think there's something wild about Republicans in the US constantly advocating for things to