Software is Good Again

AI is the solution to enshittification.

The cost of creating new software has dropped drastically¹.

At the same time, existing software is rapidly getting worse².

So: I'm making new software, and so should everyone else. This is guaranteed to be on my side (increasingly rare in both software and operating systems), and to do exactly what I need.

So far:

• I've replaced Strava with my own tool. It's so much better.
• I'm replacing Google Drive and iCloud with my own Seafile installation³. Functionally better (sync is time-based rather than vibes-based), more reliable (can't get locked out without recourse), and as a nice bonus, it's free.
• As of this morning, I'm replacing iPhoto/Photos.app with my own photo management tool. Unlike Photos.app, it will support both captions and search⁴. (It appears that I am the only person on Earth who thinks that those are important features in a photo app - but the beautiful thing is that that no longer matters.)

I haven't even bothered to figure out the distribution story for these, or how to get them past the Apple/Microsoft/Google gatekeepers, because I'm the only one who'll run them.

They used to be called "Personal Computers". Now they can be again.

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Footnotes

1. As long as it's relatively simple. My experience has been that, the more complex the software system, the more human intervention is required. ↩

2. I think this is largely self-evident. But consider: popup ads, dark patterns, subscriptions, forced updates, "helpful" AI everywhere, and constantly-increasing intrusiveness and privacy breaches. Nobody seems to care about the user experience any more because, as they say, the user isn't the customer, they're the product being sold. ↩

3. I didn't write Seafile, but I did have Cursor install it on my homelab for me, which made it trivial to experiment with. I also customised it - I think the default UI is generally great, except that the search box is tiny and very limited, so my fork is much better for my needs. It's open source that makes all of this possible - the magic is that it's now easier to find, deploy, and customise, so it's very easy to file off the sharp edges. ↩

4. Photos.app traps captions in a tiny box, and there's a focus-stealing bug that makes them hard to edit. Search became broken when they started jamming AI into everything; words in the caption are ignored if the AI thinks it knows better. ↩