Blog on Expressed

The Mac is here

Sun, 18 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Expressed is on the Mac.

Woohoo - it’s arrived! You can download it from the website — Apple silicon, macOS 15 or later, free, same as Windows.

The drawing works. Tablet in one hand, ink on the desktop you are already sharing, the other person installs nothing. That is the part I will not make a joke out of.

Could Expressed make this workflow fun and fast?

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Neil is building a web-based animated island. We can easily one-shot something like this in “insert your favourite AI tool/model here” - it’s almost a standard benchmark these days.

But how do you test it, iterate on it, add waves, anyone like seagulls?, what about getting those palm leaves to move just the way you want it? wait, what?! there’s no palm trees!

Visual explanations make things simpler

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Carlos runs some complex software on his home computer — that John (me) helped to build. When this stuff needs an upgrade — it’s meticulous work, involves Git and PowerShell and updates have to be done in the right order.

We used Expressed to make the process significantly easier.

Secure relays

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Your laptop is behind NAT, a firewall, maybe a VPN, possibly all three at once - oh and let’s not forget your tablet is connected to your mobile phone, because IT won’t allow BYOD (bring your own disaster) devices onto the corporate network.

The (networking) fun just never stops.

Nobody is opening a port. Nobody is reading an IP address out loud. And yet the tablet in your other hand — or in another country — still needs to draw on that screen.

PWA QR Code Scanner - available today!

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

To join an Expressed session - I’d typically fire up the camera on my surface tablet and wait for it to recognize the QR code, then tap the URL that appears at the bottom of the UI.

Building in the Open: Fixing the Toolbar on Mobile

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It’s time to clean up - one thing I’ve wanted was that the drawing toolbar can collapse on a phone (hamburger only), and snap to an edge so rotate doesn’t lose it, and nudge back on-screen if expanding would clip. Quality of life type stuff here.

My original prompt was precisely:

Web client. There are two overlays, one is red when recording and contains the users name. The other is the main controls. 
1. When a double-tap the main controls (contains drawing tools); I want that toolbar to collapse, showing ONLY the hamburger icon (left most).
ANYTIME when I move the toolbar via the hamburger icon, I want it to "snap to the edge"; such that if I rotate the phone, that toolbar always stays locked onto the edge. 
IF I expand the toolbar, and its expansion would cause any part of that toolbar to be off the screen and or not visible, nudge the toolbar into position so that its always visible.
all this work will go into branch feature/mobile-life-improvement

Cursor went and did it’s thing… eager to please, it finished some bunch of seconds later - with no questions asked.

A High-Quality AI Dev Workflow

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you keep running into “AI writes slop” on social media — I have news for you.

It works. Really works. Not as a magic button (very darn close though), and not without guardrails — but yeah, it sure does work well when you use it with a plan, small slices, and tests that say when you’re done.

I built Expressed that way — reviewed it, re-architected it, iterated on it. A real product: desktop capture, a drawing overlay, live sharing into a browser, a recording pipeline, a listing in the Windows Store. Not a todo app. Not a weekend clone of something that already exists. I wrote this website the same way.

How to Collect Feature Requests — Fast

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted a way to collect feature requests. Not a mailbox of “have you thought about…”. A list people could see, vote on, and add to — so I would stop guessing what to build next.

I did not want to make it myself. Expressed already has enough surface area. Auth, a database, a queue, and a vote that cannot be stuffed is a weekend I do not have. This is not highly complex development job with AI . That needed a developer - this is more “I wanna collect features, have it look the same as the main website, but not really touch JS/infra/second site/etc - yeah I’m lazy - and?”.

The Long Campaign

Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Two days ago — Monday, the 10th of August — I launched Expressed on Product Hunt.

Aside from having a production product (great!) and having finished (also great!) there is the naggy doubt: will anyone else use this thing?. I had done interviews back in November ‘25 - but I reckon I could have massively shortened my journey - building in the open would have done that.

In retrospect, that was a weakness of the whole plan.

Free and Useful — On Purpose

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every indie product eventually hits the same fork: freemium or premium? Cap the free tier so people have to upgrade — or give enough away that the product is genuinely useful without a credit card? And when you do that after having spent months of your time working on something - only to GIVE IT AWAY - you have other people looking at you saying, and I paraphrase here: “huh?, why?”.