ThinkBud + Foundation Models: What I Shipped On-Device, and the Wall That Sent Me Back to the Server
Day 10 of the 30-day iOS series, the build-in-public finale of AI week. I took the on-device Foundation Models stack from Days 8 and 9 and bolted it into ThinkBud, an app I actually ship. Here's the honest field report: the bounded tasks the on-device model nailed for free and offline, the context-window wall a 100K-character textbook import smashed into, and the exact line of code where I gave up and routed to a server. Plus the one decision that's pure Swift — so it gets a real test.
ThinkBud Just Got 5 Stars from Educational App Store
An independent panel of educators reviewed ThinkBud, gave it a 5/5 rating, and certified it. Here's what they said, what they didn't love, and what it means for the app.
Swift 6.3 on Android, Three Weeks In: What Actually Broke and What Surprised Me
When Apple shipped Swift 6.3 with first-class Android support last month, I bet a Saturday on porting a piece of ThinkBud's sync engine to Android. Three weeks of usage later — here's what stuck, what didn't, and the one bug that taught me more than a year of Swift Concurrency reading.
I Was Failing an Exam on a Tram. So I Built an App.
The story of how a panicked study session on public transit led to ThinkBud — an iOS app that turns any link, PDF, image, or audio into brain maps, flash cards, quizzes, and exportable presentations. Now available on the App Store.