moehrenzahn.de

Oma

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I painted this painting as a gift for my dear mother, who is also a great grandmother.

I’m generally very happy with how this painting turned out. There is nice contrast between loosely and precisely painted sections and the lighting is very “painterly”.

Lichtstrahl auf dem Dachboden

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This small scene sat unfinished for nine months before I finally completed it.

I went up to the attic in our new house, and the afternoon sun was shining so intensely on a bucket of cleaning supplies and a few brooms it made this utterly mundane scene felt extremely epic. I took a photo, but it couldn’t capture the effect at all.

It was an interesting challenge to convey that effect instead in a painted sketch, and I think I succeeded.

Flyleaf 2.5 – Finally adding Widgets, and better ways to fix content issues

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today, version 2.5 of Flyleaf, my independently-created read-later app for iPhone, iPad and macOS, became available on the iOS and macOS App Store.

Free Download for
iPhone, iPad and Mac

In this post, I want to talk a little more in-depth about what’s new in this release.

It was about time for this update after some of Flyleaf’s functionality began to break recently: YouTube embeds stopped working a couple of weeks ago because of a change YouTube made. With Flyleaf 2.5, they are back and working. More critically: The archive.today integration in Flyleaf broke because the provider tightened their scraping protections, leaving Flyleaf unable to fetch pages mirrored by archive.today.¹ Again, Flyleaf 2.5 resolves this by introducing a new mechanism for downloading articles. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The headlining new feature of Flyleaf 2.5 are the new Widgets. I have added Widgets in all possible sizes and variants. The widgets simply display your recently read articles, and optionally your total unread article count. Along with that, I added support for some other useful system APIs like Home Screen and Dock icon quick actions.

I think the most important new feature for actually using Flyleaf is the new “Download via browser” action.² The issues with the archive.today integration I mentioned above are part of a broader trend of website owners tightening security against bots to protect against the new plague of AI scrapers that has befallen the web over the last years. Read-later apps like Flyleaf are unfortunately also often impacted by these measures.

Flyleaf 2.5 solves this issue like this: If Flyleaf can’t access an article by itself, it will open the respective web page in an in-app browser instead, allowing you to add the currently loaded page contents to Flyleaf with one tap. This works extremely reliably and as an added bonus can also be used to solve captchas or to sign in to accounts to get through paywalls.³

To put a bow on it, I have integrated this new feature, along with all other ways of downloading articles, into a new “Fix content issues” action which gives you easy access to the tools to solve a variety of issues around missing article contents.

Also new and dear to my heart is the introduction of a proper full-screen mode on macOS 26 (and on iOS when pagination is disabled). In full-screen mode, the article toolbar will be completely hidden except for a small progress indicator. On tap, it reveals article details and controls.

Another small thing which nonetheless became my favorite way to read in Flyleaf is the new “Night” reading theme for dark mode. It replaces the slightly garish “Nightvision” theme, and offers a pleasant orange glow which is great for reading in the dark. I also tweaked a few other theme colors.

Also of note is the new multi-window support. This is especially noticeable with the new windowing mode on iPadOS 26. Previously, multiple Flyleaf windows would simply all display the same content, which was not very useful. It took some re-engineering, but in Flyleaf 2.5 this now works exactly as you would expect: Multiple Flyleaf windows work independently from another, and there is a new context menu action to directly open an article in a new window.

As always, Flyleaf is a free download on the App Store. I would really appreciate it if you gave it a spin, and if you like it, please leave a nice review on the App Store or purchase the optional subscription. It really helps!

Free Download for
iPhone, iPad and Mac

Flyleaf 2.5 Change Log

In Flyleaf 2.5, I also fixed so many little bugs and added small improvements. Here comes the full list of everything thats new or changed in this update:

New Features

Widgets in all variants: You can now place your current reading list on your Home Screen or Desktop.
Multi-window support: On macOS and iPadOS, you can now open multiple independent Flyleaf windows at once. There is also a new context menu option to open an article in a new window (or Command-click on macOS).
Full-screen reading everywhere: Hiding the article toolbar is now always possible, even on macOS or when pagination is disabled.
New “Fix Content Issues” action: All redownload-related actions have been consolidated into this new action, making it much easier to understand what to do if Flyleaf can’t display an article properly.
New “Download via Browser” action: More and more pages now use scraping protections that affect the Flyleaf downloader. In those cases, Flyleaf can pop up a small browser window where you can interactively confirm what to download (and even solve captchas if necessary). Requires iOS/macOS 26.
When viewing an image in an article, you can now zoom and pan freely.
Icon quick actions: Quickly access frequent functions right from the Flyleaf icon on your Dock or Home Screen.
New option to configure pagination tap areas, so you can tap anywhere to go to the next page if you prefer.
New simple dialog when adding the next page of a multi-page article, making it more convenient to archive the current page and proceed to the next one.
New Shortcuts action to fetch a tag by its name.

Improvements

The search function is now accessible with one tap on smaller devices.
Search now searches everywhere by default instead of only in “Unread”.
“Download from archive.today” can now handle the required captcha, but is available only on macOS/iOS 26 or later.
Article images are now cached on-device. Note that cached images are not synced between devices.
Reading view swipe gestures on iOS are now smoother and more reliable.
Tweaked several theme colors: The “Nightvision” theme is now called “Night” and is much more pleasant.
Added the correct Settings menu bar shortcut for iOS 26.
Updated the “Archive” and “Delete” keyboard shortcuts to avoid conflicts with “Minimize Window.”
Various performance improvements (for real).
Various small design tweaks throughout the app.
Various small improvements to the article parser.

Bug Fixes

The “Remember my choice” toggle in the share sheet and the related “Always open in app” option now work as expected.
YouTube videos in articles now appear correctly again.
Long tag names are no longer unnecessarily truncated.
The “Add to Flyleaf” action in the article view context menu is now more reliable.
The reading view on iPad is no longer displayed too small after switching back from another app.
The tab bar now always shows the expected number of items.
Removed a duplicate close button in the iPad Settings dialog.
Fixed a crash when saving an image from an article to your Photos library.
Fixed a rare crash when downloading images.
Fixed several search field focus issues.

I had feared that something like this could happen when relying on an external service, which is why the archive.today integration was always labeled “Beta” on the Flyleaf homepage. ↩
This feature uses some new APIs exclusive to iOS and macOS 26 and therefore is only available on those latest OSes, for now. This also means that I had to remove the archive.today integration on older OSes, because it was not usable there anymore, anyways. ↩
This new feature builds on the unique advantage of Flyleaf that there is no central server for scraping website contents. Instead, all pages are downloaded and parsed on-device. ↩

Portrait eines Jungen

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m happy to say that even after a relatively long painting hiatus, I managed to complete this small portrait sketch in just one-and-a-half sessions. There are a lot of issues I can see with the results, but I managed to achieve a likeness I’m happy with.

The source photograph had a bit of a fisheye effect which results in a slightly funky perspective. But I’m enjoying it as a little unusual thing in the realm of paintings.

Flyleaf Update 2.4 – The one with Liquid Glass

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last few months, I have been heavy at work to adapt Flyleaf to match the complete redesigns of both macOS and iOS in their 26 versions. This was a significant undertaking, especially since I will not stop supporting any older iOS versions.¹

“Liquid Glass” – what Apple calls the the new design language – fits Flyleaf quite well. My custom tab bar already looked a lot like all tab bars do now in iOS 26. The new transparent toolbars with gradient blurs are something that I always wanted to do, but the system frameworks did not support it. Now these elements in Flyleaf use the new glassy look, which is not a huge change, but does look nice, in my opinion.

I also made everything a little more round. This is especially noticeable when swiping up from the reading view, where the swiped-up view now matches the contours of your device:

Article titles are also fancier now, integrating the article image.

I also refreshed the app icon. I don’t really like where Apple is heading in terms of icon design, but I think managed to keep Flyleaf’s unique style while integrating better into the overall OS:

“Design is how it works”

But I did not only work on how Flyleaf looks. I also fixed various bugs and improved some things.

The most impactful change is that article processing now happens on parallel background threads, which in practice means that adding articles is now many times faster and more reliable than before.

I hope you’ll enjoy this new update – let me know what you think! And als always, if you appreciate what I’m doing with Flyleaf, please consider writing a short review on the App Store, it really does help!

Free Download for
iPhone, iPad and Mac

Flyleaf 2.4 Change Log

New Features

Design refresh with Liquid Glass support on the latest OSes
Refreshed app icon
New “fancy title” design that includes the article image
Article processing is now massively faster and more reliable
Remove articles from ‘Recently read’ via the context menu
New option to exclude archived articles from Favorites and Tag lists

Improvements

Various parser and text rendering improvements

Bug fixes

Popovers now always reliably open as popovers
The “tag” selection in the Discover section customization is no longer reset
Button icons at the ends of articles now correctly reflect the article status

You don’t need to be on iOS or macOS 26 to enjoy this update. Everything except for the glass effects also works on previous OSes. I’m not even sure I can recommend updating to the new OSes right away – it will probably be better to wait a few months until Apple ironed out some of their many bugs. ↩

Flyleaf Update 2.3.3 – Wish Fulfillment ahead of iOS 26

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Like many app developers, I have been living the last couple of weeks in the iOS and iPadOS 26 betas, to get a feel for the new “Liquid Glass” design.

But in terms of Flyleaf development, I have been living in current-OS land and working on an update which I just released today.

The headline of this update is “wish fulfillment”, because I have taken care of some items frequently-requested by Pocket refugees:

Firstly, you can now assign tags directly in the share extension of Flyleaf. If you have some complicated tagging system, this might come in handy.

Secondly, it is now just as quick to delete articles as archiving them. I’ve gotten rid of the “Are you sure?” confirmation dialog. Instead, there now is a “Recently deleted” section in the app settings where you can restore accidentally deleted articles. I think this solution strikes a better balance between convenience and safety.

I know that there are two other big wishes which are Highlights and Notes. I’ve been working on those features as well, but I’ll release them in a future update when they are fully baked.

Apart from those new features, I also tweaked the design of some parts of the app a little to better match the new direction that Apple is going towards with iOS and macOS 26. But these are just some minor changes to prepare for my next update which will bring a proper “Liquid Glass” facelift (make sure to follow Flyleaf on Mastodon for updates on how that is going).

If you appreciate what I’m doing with Flyleaf, please consider leaving a written review in the App Store, it really helps a lot!

Free Download for
iPhone, iPad and Mac

Flyleaf 2.3.3 Change Log

New Features

Assign tags to newly added articles right from the share sheet
Drag links onto the app icon in the dock or the home screen to quickly add them to your list
Deleting articles is now faster and you can restore recently deleted articles in settings

Improvements

Modernized some pieces of UI in anticipation of future OS updates
Tag lists are now always sorted alphabetically
Added a separate “Search” view
Replaced the clunky ‘Add New Tag’ button in the article context menu with a more helpful ‘Manage Tags’ button
Moved the search bar to the bottom on iPhone and into the toolbar on iPad
The article parser now preserves more kinds of embedded videos
Added more visual indicators when an article was loaded via archive.today
Added ability to reset app preferences through the Settings app in case of issues

Bug fixes

Article images in lists are again updated properly
Removed occasional empty gray boxes at the bottom of article pages
Removed the “System inverted” color scheme option because it was not very useful and caused terrible crashes

Flyleaf 2.3 Feature Overview

Wed, 28 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Flyleaf 2.3 is a big update, it probably includes the most new features since the 2.0 update from last year. In this post, I want to showcase some of the new features.

If you’re coming from Pocket, the most important news first: This update includes a Pocket archive import option, so you can get your whole reading list into Flyleaf with just a few taps.

Overhauled search interface

Flyleaf now includes full-text search. It also now highlights your search terms in articles, which makes searching a lot more useful. In terms of filtering, I added an option to toggle between only searching for the exact search string (which used to be the default behavior) and the new default where Flyleaf searches for individual words instead. And you can now either search everywhere or only in the current list.

As before, all searches in Flyleaf don’t require an internet connection and your search terms never leave your device. Apart from protecting your privacy, this also makes Flyleaf robust against outages and makes sure that features of the app will not stop working if some server component is shut down.

Completely configurable Discover view

The second big feature is that the Discover view is now fully customizable. The point of Discover is to help you find something suitable to read from your reading list. It’s not a recommendation engine that will suggest new articles to you, it will only show items that you already added to Flyleaf.

It lists out brief groups of articles selected by a common factor like short articles, long-reads, videos or items that you have almost finished. The defaults here are generally useful and I like them.

With Flyleaf 2.3, subscribers can now remove, modify, reorder, and add sections in the Discover view. This also includes changing the look and feel of individual sections. To give you more options, I also added several completely new article preview styles.

This is a very flexible system that allows hundreds of different combinations, and I can’t wait to see what you are going to come up with!

I also made these new preview styles available to choose for other lists.

One of the new article preview styles in Flyleaf 2.3

A small but very effective design tweak is that Flyleaf now analyzes article images for their brightness and chooses the appearance of preview cards accordingly to offer the best readability.

Use any installed font as your reading font

Another new subscriber-only feature is that you can now choose any installed font as your reading font. I am currently not able to include many fonts in Flyleaf because their licensing fees are not in proportion to the small amount of revenue that Flyleaf generates, but this should give maximum flexibility for those who want it. (As a side note, the process of adding custom fonts is absolutely awful and confusing on iOS. I’m sorry, but this is something that Apple needs to fix, there’s nothing I can do about it.)

Please don't do this!

This Flyleaf update is the first one where substantial new features are only available to subscribers. But I made sure that those are about advanced usage and customization, not about the core experience of using Flyleaf. It’s important to me that Flyleaf continues to make sense as a free app and is not a compromised experience when you decide not to pay for it. (In fact, I myself still spend much of my time in Flyleaf in an unsubscribed state, because I feel that experience is often good enough.)

If you haven’t yet, please give Flyleaf a try!

Free Download for
iPhone, iPad and Mac

Full release notes

For reference, here are the full release notes:

New Features

Overhauled search interface with additional options and results highlighting
Full-text search (subscription-only)
Completely configurable Discover view (subscription-only)
Use any installed font as reading font (subscription-only)
Allow changing article preview styles in lists (subscription-only)
Pocket archive import
Optionally disable the page turn animation
New “System Inverted” color scheme option

Improvements

More robust handling of PDF and YouTube links
Improve PDF parsing line break handling
Respect the ‘Reduced motion’ system accessibility setting
Allow sorting article lists by “last opened”
Remove tracking codes from URLs
Improved performance and stability of article lists
RSS feeds are now copied to the clipboard instead of opened directly
Website parser improvements
Design tweaks and fixes

Bug fixes

Fix article list sometimes staying empty when sorting by publication
Don’t dismiss the current article when unarchiving it
Fix some cases of missing or duplicated images in articles

One year of Flyleaf

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Exactly one year ago, I launched the first version of Flyleaf on the iOS and Mac App Store. I built Flyleaf because I wanted a read-later app that offers book-like pagination that isn’t just an afterthought and that also works great on macOS. Back then, I wrote a short blog post which went into more detail.

Free Download for
iPhone, iPad and Mac

Now, it’s been a year. Time for a small retrospective.

Over the last year, I managed to publish 12 updates, at a steady pace of about one update per month. Most of these were essentially bug fixing and fine-tuning, but I also shipped some substantial feature additions, like the Discover view and the gesture-driven reading interface.

The worst time developing Flyleaf was undoubtedly shortly before the release of iOS 18. There were many bugs in the iOS 18 betas which caused crashes and issues in Flyleaf. It was a lot of work to find workarounds as I was scrambling to get Flyleaf running more or less stable on iOS 18. I found it very stressful to be at the mercy of Apple’s development cycle like that. I hope that I will manage this better this year.

What has been awesome is the feedback from users. I get about one email a week from someone who uses and loves Flyleaf and wants to report a bug or ask for some feature. I know this will not be sustainable forever, but for now I have been enjoying these emails a lot and reply to all of them. It’s nice to know that I did not only build Flyleaf for myself, but to hear that other people enjoy and care about it, too.

Another way this enjoyment manifests is, of course, subscriptions. Over the last year, I managed to convince over 130 people to support Flyleaf with their hard-earned money. Thats not a life-changing, cancel-your-day-job amount, but it greatly surpassed my expectations and it’s a big motivation to continue working on Flyleaf.

Overall, I’m glad I decided to go with a subscription model with Flyleaf, even though I know many people are annoyed by subscription apps. With a pay-once model, I constantly would have to think about ways to acquire new customers. Thanks to the subscriptions, I can think of ways to make the app better for existing users instead, which is much less stressful for me. It also makes the app easier to sustain with it’s small user-base.

In general, it’s difficult to get a small-time indie app noticed on the App Store. I now get between 5 and 10 organic downloads per day, which is not a lot. I only saw brief changes in the download numbers when someone recommended Flyleaf. By far my biggest bump in downloads came when Justin Pot wrote a generous article about Flyleaf on LifeHacker in September, which made a huge difference.

My only piece of advice here is to actually get in touch with individual journalists and bloggers. Sending press releases to big outlets is pretty much pointless; contacting individual authors and editors is a little more effective in my experience.

So, what are my plans for the future?

Now that the first year is over, it will be time for my yearly subscribers to renew their subscriptions. This is a little bit scary. I really hope I managed to convince people that Flyleaf is a project which makes sense to support in the long term, but time will tell how my subscriber numbers will develop.

But for now, Flyleaf remains a hobby I work on in the evenings once the kids are asleep. I still use the app myself every day, so I’m motivated to keep improving it. I hope to continue the pace of updates and actually ship some substantial features people have been asking for. But more about that later.

To keep up with the latest developments, you can follow my very occasional posts on Mastodon. If you are interested in joining the TestFlight, feel free to get in touch. Thanks for reading and thanks for your continued support!

Flyleaf Update 2.2

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Free Download for
iPhone, iPad and Mac

While preparing the just-released 2.2.2 update for Flyleaf, my read-later app for iOS and macOS, I was reminded that I didn’t write anything here about any of the 2.2 patches. So let’s do that now.

Flyleaf 2.2.0

The main reason I pushed out the 2.2.0 update when I did was that a change in the HTML markup of the New York Times website triggered a fatal bug in Flyleaf which would send the app into a continuous crash-on-launch loop. Suffice it to say I heard about this issues from a lot of my users. Apart from that, Flyleaf 2.2.0 introduced a completely overhauled font picker along with some new premium fonts.

Flyleaf 2.2.1

2.2.1 was a very small update which merely fixed an issue with the new font selector and was released just a day or two later.

Flyleaf 2.2.2

Today, Flyleaf 2.2.2 (hopefully) concludes this series of updates by finalizing the new font picker, adding even more fonts, and sanding off even more rough edges in the app’s UI and website parser.

Migrating the Flyleaf App Group name on macOS

I would have released 2.2.2 quite a bit earlier if I wasn’t forced by Apple to change the name of the App Group on macOS. Let me explain: Up until now, Flyleaf on macOS followed the iOS convention of starting the App Group name with “group”. With the release of Sequoia, Apple decided that it would prefer if App Group names on macOS started with the “team ID” of the app’s publisher. And since a couple of weeks ago, App Store Connect would no longer accept macOS builds using an iOS-style App Group name at all. So I had to do something.

The problem is that the App Group contains the app’s list of user preferences as well as the local database holding all added articles and tags. When I change the name of the App Group, Flyleaf loses access to this data. This is not a huge deal since the articles and tags can be re-synched from iCloud (as long as synching is enabled and up to date). But I wanted a more seamless transition.

So I built a little migration flow for the macOS version which uses the system file picker to circumvent the app sandbox to temporarily access the previous App Group directory and move over all the files. This is a little bit scary because it’s difficult to make sure this works as expected in production, but I’m confident I found a good solution. Let’s hope everything goes smoothly and we can forget about this whole thing soon.

Frequently Asked Questions

I have also taken the time to compile a little FAQ page for Flyleaf. I pretty much just went through my emails and put together a list of my generally-applicable answers.

Overall, I feel like Flyleaf is now in a pretty good place in terms of stability and feature offerings. But I still have lots of cool stuff on my roadmap, which I will talk more about at a later time.

If you haven’t yet, you can grab Flyleaf 2.2.2 from the App Store right now. If you appreciate what I’m doing, you can help me a lot by leaving a review on the App Store.

Free Download for
iPhone, iPad and Mac

My Neighbor Totoro

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This painting is a study of that famous scene from the fantastic Studio Ghibli film “My Neighbor Totoro”. Since the original is itself a kind of painting, not much could go wrong here.

Nordseestrand #1

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I managed to paint another painting in between Flyleaf releases! This one is based on a photo from a recent vacation to the dutch north see. Callantsoog, to be exact.

The drawing is a little wonky, but the values and colors are quite successful, I think. And I’m very happy that I managed to finish this painting in a single three-hour session. It’s nice not to mess around with the same painting for multiple days.

Flyleaf Update 2.1

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hot off the presses, today I pushed the button to release Flyleaf 2.1.

This release gave me a lot of headaches, mostly caused by haphazard changes and bugs introduced by Apple with iOS 18 and macOS 15. With 2.1, I think I am at a point where Flyleaf is as stable on the new Apple OS’s as on the previous ones.

Since I apparently have no self-control, I also added some new features. On iPad, I removed the ability to show a sidebar, in favor of having your library in full-screen. I’m convinced that that is the better way to use Flyleaf (and it also happens to circumvent a crash in iPadOS 15). On the Mac, Flyleaf also uses this new full-screen view when the sidebar is hidden.

Flyleaf 2.1 introduces a new responsive layout where your articles are displayed in a grid on wider displays. This is a nice improvement, but I had to sacrifice the swipe actions in the article lists to make it work. There still is the long-press context-menu to quickly access article actions from the list view.

Free Download for
iPhone, iPad and Mac

Here comes the full change log:

Flyleaf 2.1.0 Change Log

Features

Responsive multi-column design for Discover view and article lists on larger screens
Single column navigation mode for macOS and iPadOS
Manually prioritize articles in the download queue

Improvements

The parser is better at finding the main text of some webpages
Temporarily show the status bar when swiping up while in fullscreen mode
Various smaller UI tweaks

Bug Fixes

Re-enable the “Read now” button in the share sheet on iOS 18
Fix reading position lost when rotating the device or resizing the window
Fix crash when opening certain context menus on macOS 15
Fix settings window layout on macOS 15
Fix crash on Discover view when archiving or deleting the last article on your list

Flyleaf Update 2.0

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today I finally published the big Flyleaf 2.0 update! Pretty much every part of the app has been touched in some way, so there is lots of new stuff. Flyleaf is my “read-later” app that displays saved articles from the web in a meticulously designed reading view, without popups, ads or other distractions.

The most important addition is certainly the new Discover view. This view is not meant to add new articles to your list, but instead to resurface articles that are already in your list. I think this is a really useful addition for the way most people use read-later apps. It also looks pretty.

Another big item is the new full screen reading mode on iOS. It sounds like a simple feature – you just hide the bottom toolbar and that’s it. But I had to invent a whole new gesture interface to make the toolbar still intuitively accessible while in fullscreen.

I’m very happy with the way the new slide-away details view work. I even managed to include a little reference to the good old iOS 6 days with the “stretched linen” background texture.

Because Flyleaf is very much focused on the book-like pagination mode, full screen reading is only available in that mode (for now).

I am also very proud of the new support for right-to-left-script articles. This was quite involved to get working with Flyleaf’s book-like pagination. It’s no wonder that no other read-later app supports this feature as completely as Flyleaf does.

I’m pretty relieved that this huge update is now finished.

I owe big thanks to my beta testers who were actively sending me feedback and helped me to investigate and fix some hard-to-track-down bugs. Especially the RTL mode would not have happened without your support!

Free Download for
iPhone, iPad and Mac

For completeness sake, here comes the full list of all significant changes in Flyleaf 2.0:

New Features

New “Discover” view for finding things to read from your article list
Fullscreen reading view
Swipe up in reading view to discover additional info and actions for the current article
Support for articles in Arabic, Hebrew and other right-to-left languages
Tap images and videos to see them in full screen
Customizable page margins
Archive.today integration (experimental)

Improvements

Refreshed design
Reorganized app settings
Share extension improvements
Better feedback when downloading or processing articles
Tweaks to theme colors
Layout improvements for big iPhones in landscape mode
Toolbar buttons are now easier to tap
Many improvements to the article text parser
Include video and audio attachments from Mastodon threads
Search is now faster and more reliable
Many more small tweaks and improvements

Schlendern in Stralsund

Sun, 23 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I painted this picture mostly to get out of a multi-month rut where I did not paint anything.

It’s a little scene of the old town in Stralsund in northern Germany – another holiday photo turned into a painting.

What inspired me about the scene were the interesting color contrasts between the different parts of the image. Also, there are a whole bunch of interesting lines that lead the viewer into the center of the painting.

Apptisan #015: Flyleaf

Thu, 30 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I was graciously invited to write about my read-it-later app Flyleaf on Apptisan, a chinese newsletter about indie software:

I originally studied theology at university in Germany. But I shifted to software development when I figured out that this is a more reliable way to feed a family. By day, I currently work as a Java developer for a small product company in Germany. My first small iOS side project was Devotionalium, an app for reading holy scriptures of different world religions. Flyleaf is my first iOS app that will hopefully have broader appeal (and success)

Free Download for
iPhone, iPad and Mac

Flyleaf Update 1.1

Thu, 09 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The 1.1 update of my read-later app Flyleaf is now live on the iOS and macOS AppStore. It includes some nice quality-of-life improvements, so make sure to grab it!

New Stuff

Add PDFs to parse the contents and show them in the Flyleaf reading view
An “unread article count” badge – if you are into that sort of thing
Drag-and-drop support
A new “red” theme
Bug fixes and performance improvements (of course!)

Free Download for
iPhone, iPad and Mac

Creativerly: Read articles like books – with Flyleaf

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to Philipp Temmel at creativerly for writing up this thorough deep-dive on my new app Flyleaf. It’s a very generous summary of the feature set of the initial version of Flyleaf:

Flyleaf is a fully native read-it-later app for iPhone, iPad, and macOS, that gives you the possibility to sync your articles across all your devices through iCloud, features a lovely design and great typography with loads of customization options, does not need an account, and there are no ads or tracking involved.

No matter if you are reading on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, the pagination interaction in combination with a lovely interface makes Flyleaf an incredible beautiful read-it-later app.

MacGeneration: Une nouvelle app de lecture différée affichant les articles en colonnes

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I was very happy to learn hat the first media appearance of my new app Flyleaf was in the french publication MacGeneration, in a short review by Félix Cattafesta.

I appreciate that it’s an honest review which also points out some issues. But at the same time they also understood what makes Flyleaf special:

This first version of Flyleaf is nice, but a little buggy on macOS: I had problems displaying images forcing me to resize my window, or even a few crashes. The interface has not yet been translated into French. This is only V1, and we can imagine that things will improve later. The app seemed more stable to me on iOS, and is very pleasant to use on a touch screen.

While there’s still plenty of room for improvement, Flyleaf is an app to try if you’re looking to replace Pocket. It has the advantage of being native and supporting shortcuts.

(My french knowledge is very rudimentary, so the above excerpt was machine-translated.)

Why I built my own read-later app

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The first iOS device I ever owned was an iPod touch, 2. Generation. I absolutely loved that thing.

The first ever app I remember buying with it was “Instapaper” by indie developer Marco Arment. Instapaper was an app for saving interesting web pages to read later when offline. Even back then, I loved to read articles and blog posts by interesting people. And since the iPod touch did not have any cell connection, offline access was vital.

Instapaper 4.0 screenshot from 2011 from this MacStories review.

The one big issue I had with Instapaper was that it had no macOS version. Instapaper was only available on iPhone, iPad and as a website. The website was okay, but it lacked the feature I liked the most about Instapaper: In the iOS app, you could choose to read your articles not as a vertically scrolling page of text, but instead as a horizontally aligned set of pages, like an ebook.

A couple of years ago, finally, Instapaper for macOS was announced. But it turned out to be just a relatively shoddy port lacking many features, especially the book-like pagination.

Scratching the itch myself

I was and still am convinced that pagination is superior to vertical scrolling for reading longer text on a screen. It must have been around that time that I decided that I would have to scratch that particular itch myself.

I had been playing around with column based web layouts for some time. I build an experimental column layout for “Die Eule”, an online magazine I co-founded in 2017.

Later, I experimented with building a JavaScript plugin that turns any website into a horizontally paginated view. That’s where I began to solve some of the technical problems of splitting text into multiple pages. How to detect that a page is “full”? What to do about changing viewport sizes? How to avoid overflows from unexpected or dynamic page contents?

In early 2023, I temporarily put this plugin into action here on my blog. But I was still not satisfied. After all, I didn’t want to read my own blog, I wanted to read other people’s stuff.

So, in June 2023, motivated by the recent WWDC, I started writing the first lines of SwiftUI under the code name “PageReader” which over the following months turned into a fully featured app called Flyleaf. I adapted the JavaScript logic developed for my blog to power the article pagination in the app.

Video not available

Today, I am incredibly happy to announce that Flyleaf is now available as a 1.0 that you can download right now:

Free Download for
iPhone, iPad and Mac

Flyleaf has – in my opinion – the best horizontal page scrolling of any read-later app that I know of. And it has all the other bells and whistles you would expect from an app in 2024: macOS and iOS versions that sync via iCloud, beautiful and customizable design and typography, tools for sorting, searching and organizing your articles, and much more.

I’m not yet sure if anyone else will care about this as much as I do. But Flyleaf has been my favorite read-later app since the first prototype.

If you, too, like this idea and would like to support the future development of Flyleaf, here is what you can do:

Download Flyleaf from the App Store
Post a (nice) review on the store page
Tell your friends about Flyleaf
Consider becoming a Flyleaf subscriber

Thanks for reading, and keep on reading!

Introducing Flyleaf, a "read later" app for iOS and macOS

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I built a new app. I’s called Flyleaf, and it’s a “read later” app for iPhone, iPad and macOS. You can learn more on the Flyleaf website.

The app is currently in open beta and I would love for you to check it out and give me feedback. The reception to the beta has been more than great, lots of people over on Mastodon have said some very nice things about the app.

I’m excited to continue development and get the app into the App Store later this year.

Saint-Roman-de-Malegarde #2

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Another painting of the evening light in little French town Saint-Roman-de-Malegarde.

I started painting this picture on location en plein air, but I had to make some adjustments back home to make it presentable.

An der Eygues

Sat, 26 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I painted this one “en plein air” on location in Saint-Roman-de-Malegarde, France, while cooling my feet in the river.

Karl-Heine-Kanal #1

Thu, 06 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I took the reference photo for this painting on the Karl-Heine-Kanal in Leipzig-Neulindenau. A very pretty corner of a beautiful town.

Saint-Roman-de-Malegarde #1

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A vacation photo served as reference for this photo.

Small towns in the south of France are made for painting them. This is actually not my first painting of Saint-Roman-de-Malegarde, I previously painted a different corner of that town.

It was interesting to play around with the contrast between dark and light to mark the focal point at the end of the rue. Together will all of the leading lines of perspective, it makes for a pretty strong composition.

Fabienne

Sat, 20 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This portrait is of the character Fabienne as played by Maria de Medeiros in the movie classic Pulp Fiction.

Denkendes Kind

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Katze im Schnee (Rivo Study)

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is a study of “Cat in the snow” by Lena Rivo.

Video not available

Red One Standing By

Sat, 18 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This painting is obviously inspired by Star Wars. I used this lovely render by GrahamTG as a reference.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the most difficult part of this painting was not the two X-Wings, but the clouds in the background. I had to find a balance between believability and abstraction.

You can see me going back and forth a few times with the clouds in this animation of my painting process:

Video not available

If you like this, you may also enjoy my portrait of the Mandalorian and the Child as well as my collection of Star Wars posters.

Driftless Area #2 (Musil study)

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I first painted a study of this painting by Jim Musil pretty much exactly two years ago. Back then I had only been painting for a couple of months and I was amazed that I could at all produce output that had at least a passing resemblance to my reference.

I thought it would be interesting to revisit one of my earliest paintings — one I am not as proud of in hindsight – and see if I had improved over the last two years. There are several glaring issues with my first attempt at this study, most of all the entire sky which I completely mangled back then.

This time, I tried to focus much less on shapes and individual objects, and more on the colors and values of the scene.

Video not available