What this is
The summer update is four weeks old and the workshop has been loud. One finished game, one app in public preview, two projects being built, three Odoo modules in the official app store — plus updates for two desktop apps and a piece of infrastructure you only notice when it's missing.
The new stuff first, then the workshop.
New: Chessplosion 1.0 — chess, and whoever captures gets to throw
Chess is a solved problem. There are a thousand apps for it and most differ only in the board. So Chessplosion has a second mode that tips the game without touching the rules: capture a piece and you get to throw it back onto the board from your own edge, in the same turn. Anything that topples counts as captured — your own pieces included. There's no ammo store: skip the throw and you lose the right to it, otherwise whoever's ahead hoards projectiles and the game tips for good.
You throw from well behind your own back rank. That's exactly where the difficulty comes from — the same small angle error lands much further off over that distance. The three difficulty levels don't change a number, they change how much you see: the full arc, half of it, or only the release direction — and the hardest level adds crosswind. A toppled king ends the game.
Prefer it straight? Leave the mode off: complete chess with castling, en passant, promotion and draw rules, two people on one device or against a homegrown AI in three strengths — alpha-beta search rather than an off-the-shelf engine, because Stockfish is GPL and collides with App Store terms. On the lower levels it misses on purpose sometimes; that feels more human than an engine making the same mistake every time. It aims its throws, too.
Everything runs on-device, no account, no server. Version 1.0 for macOS is available as a signed and notarised download; Windows, iOS and Android follow.
New in public preview: BalaneDisk
The machine gets slow, the disk fills up, something is chattering in the background — and all the system says about it is a bar labelled "Other: 214 GB". BalaneDisk makes the inside visible. The sonar shows every running process as a mark on a radar, split into sectors by origin, distance from the centre is memory. The disk view measures where the space went — including the hidden volumes Finder never shows, and stating openly what could not be attributed. A world map shows which countries your programs talk to, with the country, operator and tracker databases held entirely inside the app: checking where your machine sends data never reveals where you are.
One principle runs through all of it: BalaneDisk deletes nothing. It measures, it recommends, you decide. The only thing it ever does to a file is move it to the trash on your confirmation, with every path in front of you.
Six preview builds have shipped since 23 July, most recently 0.1.5. What landed:
- →BalaneDisk now tells you. A disk that will be full on Thursday is worth knowing about on Monday. The notifications are deliberately quiet: nothing between 10pm and 8am, never the same kind twice in a day, at most one every four hours — and none at all while the window is open.
- →The record speaks. Days of watching now add up to something: a folder that has been growing for nine days, gigabytes that went while the machine was asleep, a week of steady loss with a date on the end. Recorded for everyone from now on, so subscribing later still tells you about last week.
- →The storage map measures with length, not colour. Twenty gigabytes and eight megabytes used to look nearly the same. Entries are now sorted rows whose bar length is the measurement, and the long tail is summed into one line you can open rather than drawn as slivers.
- →Start hidden at login so the recording has no gaps. Closing the window returns BalaneDisk to the menu bar instead of quitting it.
Every finding stays free — including the warning before the disk fills. The subscription doesn't unlock a feature, it buys memory: two hours of history without it, the whole day and further back with it, €4.99 a month or €24.99 a year. Runs on macOS and Windows.
Being built: Balane Desk and usable.software
Balane Desk restores complete window setups. You build your desk once for real — the right apps open, every window where you need it — and hit "Capture". From then on one click launches the apps and moves every window into place, one profile per working context. No config file, no rules editor: you set it up by arranging windows. Unplug a monitor and no window ends up in the void — whatever lived there is brought onto the screens you have. And the app reports how many windows were actually placed, not how many should have been. For macOS and Windows, currently in development.
usable.software is a size up: business software you rent, cancellable monthly. Nothing is developed and nothing is generated — you pick your vertical and click the modules your business actually needs: sites, scheduling, measuring, site diary, defects, equipment, team chat. The configurator prices it live and a branded preview shows your system before you order. Every user gets the interface and their tasks in their own language, and chat messages are translated automatically — that's the point where the crew and the site manager finally hold the same information. Hosted at your own address or as a container on your infrastructure, data exportable at any time.
Three Odoo modules, free under LGPL-3
All three are listed on the official Odoo App Store for Odoo 19. We built them for ourselves and use them daily.
CRM Direct Email fixes a small thing that hurts every day: in Odoo Community the To field stays empty when you write from a lead — the mail composer only knows followers. So you add the contact as a follower, reopen the composer, and only then write. On every single lead. The module resolves the linked contact and fills them in as the recipient. One Python file, nothing to configure, no database changes.
Cold Email & Follow-up Automation builds the missing outbound workflow into the CRM: campaigns composed from multiple templates, each step with its own delay, and a native Odoo activity for every follow-up in the responsible rep's feed. Everyone sends from their own address, own signature, own SMTP server — the recipient sees a person rather than an info@ mailbox. Replies are detected automatically: the sequence stops, the status flips to Replied. Plus 30+ placeholders with a pre-send check for fields that would come out blank, Do Not Contact on three levels cascading from a company to all its contacts, and a queue a cron job works through one email per minute. Replaces Lemlist, Apollo Sequences or Outreach.io — no second tool, no sync, no addresses leaving your Odoo.
Apollo Connector moves Apollo.io contacts into Odoo cleanly, by CSV on any plan or by API from Professional up, syncing hourly, daily or weekly. Every field lands where it belongs — including the enrichment you paid for: seniority, departments, keywords, technologies, revenue, funding rounds. Companies are created as parent records with contacts linked underneath. Duplicates are detected by Apollo ID or email, and you're asked before anything is written.
The workshop: what got updated
WindowNote 0.9.0 and 0.9.1. The first public build shipped on 22 July, the second the same evening — and that one closes the real gap: on Windows the notes appear for the first time at all. Before, they were created, saved, and displayed nowhere. Plus a tray icon with a menu, closing the window hides it instead of quitting, and "Start with Windows". On the Mac a tab note now remembers the window and its position in the tab strip rather than just the title — following a link no longer costs you the note, not even across a restart. "Pause" actually pauses now, and Settings → Copy diagnostics prints which windows WindowNote currently sees. Why the app exists at all is here.
FlowVisual 1.0.1 through 1.0.3. Three maintenance releases since 22 July, macOS signed and notarised, a Windows installer alongside each. Plus a new icon. The rest of the story is in the summer update.
Icons. GridBar wears a new graphite/teal design as of 1.4.1, SendGuard a new one as well.
Under the hood. The download buttons now always point at the latest version instead of a pinned release — link it once and it stays current. Downloaded apps ask for the current version number once at launch and show a note in the menu if something newer exists. No account, no measurement, no automatic install behind your back.
To close
A game, a diagnostic tool, two operating systems, three Odoo modules — the thread is the same as always: runs locally, no forced account, no data we mine. And for everything that measures, the BalaneDisk rule holds: measure, explain, leave the deciding to you.
