The spring is here and the days have gotten longer and brighter. With a new month on the horizon, I wanted to try out a new project in which I am trying to redefine how a timer app could look and feel.

The Site 🛠️

After the overhaul in March, April was about polishes. A UI cleanup, a garden preview update, making things responsive where they were not. The kind of work that does not deserve its own section except to say that the site is settling into a shape that feels stable.

LockIn 🍅

I started building a pomodoro timer app in Swift. It is called LockIn.

The idea came from a frustration that every pomodoro app looks the same. The same rounded rectangles, the same countdown circles, the same design language borrowed from the same set of templates. I wanted to make something that felt different, something informed by Dieter Rams and the philosophy that a tool should be honest about what it is without being boring about how it looks.

The design is not locked down yet. I have a home view, a log screen, and UI assets that lean into iOS conventions. I have also been experimenting with the design in Claude to explore directions. But the hard part is not the code, it is deciding what the thing should look like when it is done. I can understand the code. I built most of it with Claude Code. The design conviction is the part that is still forming.

It is not finished, but I am currently in pursuit of how it should feel as an experience. This process is also making me question the tools themselves. How do you use conventional design tools when you are designing something that deliberately rejects convention?

Games 🎮

This was the month of Call of Duty.

I finished Modern Warfare, then Modern Warfare 2, and moved into Warzone. Three games spanning roughly 15 years of the franchise. What struck me was not any single game but the thread running through all of them. The controls are the same. Not similar, the same.

I revisited the controls when I picked up MW after a decade. Moving to MW II, the controls were the same, which felt expected. Same franchise, roughly five years apart. But when I picked up Warzone, that consistency still held, and that is the part that impressed me.

That kind of design consistency across 15 years is remarkable when you think about how much has changed in gaming during that period. Studios, engines, platforms, entire generations of hardware. And yet the fundamental interaction model held. A player who learned the language in 2009 can still speak it fluently in 2026. That consistency becomes even more meaningful when you consider that Warzone is PvP, not PvE. Every second matters, and knowing I did not have to relearn the controls meant I could focus on what actually mattered.

That being said, Warzone did not fail to innovate either. They followed the principle of if it is not broken, do not fix it. And when they found a new area of improvement, they provided gyro based aiming through the PS controller, disabled by default, allowing power users to decide whether they want the addition or not.

Outside of COD, FC is doing something interesting on the business side. They are giving away free Legendary Footballers Packs (internally called Icon Packs) to all existing PS Plus customers, a clear move to keep the user base excited ahead of the upcoming World Cup season.