Satellite Eyes 2.0

Back in 2012, which can't be more than 5 or 6 years ago, I made an app called Satellite Eyes. It sets your desktop wallpaper to the satellite view of your current location. It's quite popular - lots of people tell me it's the first thing they install on a new machine, which is lovely.

I've just shipped a 2.0 release, which adds an option to rotate through a selection of interesting-to-look-at places from around the world (airports and world heritage sites), as well as fixing a bunch of long standing bugs and niggles.

I've been meaning to add a shuffle feature for a while, but it turned out really great. The database contains about 2,400 places, split roughly 50/50 between airports (which always look great) and World Heritage Sites (e.g. what's that weird thing in the forest?).

This was only possible because I got Claude Code to rewrite the entire app in modern Swift, ported from legacy Objective-C. Previously I couldn't find the energy to touch it, but a couple of prompts later, while I made dinner, and it worked.

Like everyone who makes software, I've been spending a lot of time recently recalibrating what's worth doing now that writing code is cheap.