Work that is going on right now. No dates here: deadlines are the most common lie in software, and we do not write them. Only what is being worked on, and why it matters.

Signing the builds

For macOS the Apple developer account is paid for; what remains is to build signing and notarisation into the release so the system stops asking permission on first launch. That is the next release.

For Windows we are not buying a certificate yet. The reason is stated plainly on the page “Why the installer is not signed”: it is an annual fee, and for now that money goes into development.

Universal macOS image

There are two images today, Apple Silicon and Intel. The universal one is built and every machine file inside it checked, but the arm half has never run on real Apple Silicon. Until it has, we do not publish it: building for an architecture and not testing it is the same as not building it.

Subscription limits

The decision is made and written down before the building: several brokers come with a subscription, and statistics are counted for the selected one only. The free tier gets one broker, four drawing tools per idea, three indicators per chart, one gigabyte of storage.

The point of the storage limit is not thrift — storage is cheap. It is a stop valve against someone uploading video. The gigabyte comes from a measurement rather than a guess: an active person spends about 0.4 MB a day, so a gigabyte covers six years of daily work.

Storage is bought separately from the plan: someone who ran out of a gigabyte should not be told to buy an expensive plan for nine gigabytes they never asked for.

One home for the device identity

The device name, its public key and its private key are one bundle, and today they live in three different places. That already cost nine days of lost trade history: the device signature did not match, the server rejected the upload, and the terminal carried on in silence.

The broken bundle is being brought together. The same case produced a law that now holds: a silent return is not error handling, it is hiding the error.

Messenger

Work has begun on a P2P messenger: conversations are not stored on a server, and the connection runs straight between the people talking. One messenger for the phone, the site and the terminal — both as a standalone app and built into the terminal.

Phase zero is under way: architecture, technology choices, the security model and a prototype client. After that come private chat, files with a distributed cache, voice and video, and public rooms.

Interactive Brokers

The letter is sent and we are waiting for an answer. The work is not on the sign-in but on the seam: IBKR offers two incompatible ways to reach an account, and the difference between them is not authorisation but transport and data format.

So the seam is drawn in our own terms — account, position, order, execution, commission, candle. Then replacing a local gateway with OAuth costs one layer, not a rewrite of the terminal.