YOKOHAMA (Señor Tomato) – The scorching summer is on hold for the past few days. The highest temperature is expected to be 30° C today in the Tokyo-Yokohama metropolitan area. That’s not terribly bad, is it?

These days, I often go to a free website for checking English sentences for spelling and grammar mistakes. I don’t have a problem to see on-site ads. But there are a few things that I definitely don’t like.

1. If you end a sentence with two white space characters, they will correct it with one white space character.
2. In the English grammar, use of a comma is followed by one white space character. But they place this white space character before the comma.
3. If you have ‘And’ at the beginning of a sentence, they’ll remove it.

If you are a typewriter generation, you know that each English sentence must be followed by two white space characters, not one. For me, that’s not something that I could compromise. But they’ll correct it without user options, and I find it quite disturbing.

So I’ve decided to develop a new desktop application free of this unnecessary grammar correction. Well, if you are ready to hear it, this new release is called Textriptor.

Textriptor is a desktop application that allows you correct your sentences spelling and grammar-wise. It’s powered by LanguageTool, an open-source, AI-powered writing assistant. Textriptor displays your original text string under the left pane. You click on the toolbar button, and it will then show the correction result under the right pane. Furthermore, Textriptor will highlight corrected words in different colors. If a word is highlighted in red, that means it’s a spelling correction. Currently, Textriptor supports nearly two dozen languages including English, French, and Spanish. Note that use of this application requires Internet connection.

The spelling and grammar correction performance of Textriptor is up to LanguageTool. It definitely doesn’t do an exceptional job. We may offer an add-on feature for use of GPT-5.5 API, which should increase Textriptor drastically. But this add-on will not be available as free distribution. Somebody has to pay the bill, and it will not be us. And it won’t be cheap. One rough idea is a non-consumable (one-time payment) IAP with some limitations like 10 calls max per hour. Another path is a non-consumable IAP with Use Your Own Key expansion for about $4.99 where you need to use your own ChatGPT key. If you are interested in this add-on, let us know with a comment below.   Continue reading →

YOKOHAMA (Señor Tomato) – When my hard disk drive died on the 14th of July, 2026, I wasn’t prepared for the consequences of lost files. There were several hundred SwiftUI sample projects that could never be replaced on top of another few hundred Xcode projects. Although I was eventually able to recover a majority of files from it using its two brother HD at the end of the month, I’m convinced more than ever that I need to regularly back up files. And I know what I need. I need a desktop application that lets me accumulate files to back up so that I can regularly save them in a separate storage system. Well, I actually had a desktop project like that 16 or 17 years ago. So here comes HomeSync 2, which I submitted to Mac App Store a while ago.

HomeSync 2 lets you create multiple groups to house files and folders that you need to back up with the click of a button. Select a group and then just drag and drop files and folders onto the application window. Now, all you have to do is just click on the Backup toolbar button.

You have options of saving the selected backup group as a plain folder containing files and folders or a Zip archive. Additionally, you have options of protecting or not protecting a Zip archive with a password.

HomeSync 2 isn’t a regular file backup application. You can reserve seats for unknown files that don’t exist yet but you want to include in the future. When they are available, you can just replace these reserved seats with actual file items. So these reserved seats remind you that you need to include important files before clicking on the Backup button.  Continue reading →

YOKOHAMA (Señor Tomato) – I have been using a Silicon Power Stream S03 USB 3.2 1TB, an external 2.5-inch external hard disk drive for probably a decade or longer. To my dismay, my Mac mini stopped reading data from this HD on the 14th of this month. I have it store all my Xcode projects and sample Xcode projects. That really hurts. Is the data all gone? I thought it was. Wait, it’s one of the twin brothers. I have another HD from Silicon Power that I purchased right at the same time. So what if I take the HD out of the dead external device and put that HD in the good guy? A major issue was how do I crack-open these external HD cases? I’ve searched the Interent, but there are no videos or tutorials.  Continue reading →

YOKOHAMA (Señor Tomato) – Hot, hot, hot! The summer is here. It’s a scary thought that we have to endure this scorching heat for the next 60 days or so. I heard that it’s been quite hot in France and that some people have passed away because the French don’t use air conditioning.

Do you remember that Apple, Inc. used to have iTunes (.app) with which we could listen to streaming music from the Internet radio stations for free? Music (.app) replaced it in October, 2019. So there is no more free streaming music from the Internet radio.

Radio Crazy is a desktop application for which I only spent some 15 hours in developing. Radio Crazy lets you listen to streaming music from your favorite Internet radio stations. It supports several music genres, each of which is further divided into smaller groups. Select one. If you find an interesting station, click on the Play button to test-play it. Then click on the + button to save the station.

Some Internet radio stations broadcast the music title that they are currently playing. Radio Crazy will scroll it from right to left slowly. If you want to capture it, you can simply click on the Copy button.   Continue reading →

YOKOHAMA (Señor Tomato) – I don’t know when they started it, but Apple, Inc. allows us to upload a video to showcase our software. However, there are several specifications that our videos must meet. If you record a video on your iPhone or iPad while testing the app and then upload it as it is without changing anything, it won’t be accepted. To add to the insult, you will be forced to wait as long as an hour or two just to find out that they won’t accept the video you have uploaded. If you want to know why Apple, Inc makes video-showcasing software so difficult, help is on its way.

Mock Video is a desktop application for which I only spent 36 hours developing it. In fact, I am one of those who tried to upload a Preview Video at iTunes Connect back in March or April (2026) and ended up wasting my valuable time. Oh, yeah, I even took Gemini’s advice and used iMovie to create a Preview Video. But it didn’t work. So what makes me think that iTunes Connect will accept a video from this application? Just as shown in the lower row of the screenshot table below, I have been able to upload them for an iPhone app and a desktop application there successfully. And I have learned a lot of lessons while working on Quick Sub 2 and Quick Sub Mobile, which has given me a lot of confidence in developing Mock Video. At the very moment when I had the idea of developing this application, I was certain that I could do it although I never succeeded in uploading Preview Videos to iTunes Connect earlier.

Señor Tomato

Señor Tomato

Señor Tomato

Señor Tomato

Mock Video alleviates the cumbersome task of making your recorded video comply with Apple’s Preview Video specifications. All you have to do is drag and drop a video into the drop box, adjust the final duration, and then click on the Export toolbar button. Mock Video does an excellent job of exporting your final videos without distorting the original content while meeting the size specifications.

Mock Video doesn’t just support mobile phone models but all devices, including all tablet models, desktops, the TV device, and the Vision device. Moreover, you have the option of selecting the Portrait or Landscape orientation.   Continue reading →