I made Alyx as a caffeine playground for iOS 26. It's actually been on my phone for a few years, but I decided to pretty it up and ship it. If you're keen on iOS 26, these are some things I am proud of:
- Visual Look Up: You can scan coffee and it'll use AI to figure out the contents. This was a new API that iOS 26 brought and I thought this was kinda fun.
- Logging with AI: Apple shipped Foundation Models on iOS 26, and while they are far less capable that flagship models, they are great for bite sized tasks. Plus, they support tool calling - which means they can fire up tools that you give them when they are generating responses. So, I feed it caffeine data and people can type in what they're drinking, and it'll give you a reasonable estimation of how much caffeine is in it.
- Tons of Siri stuff: If you're into automation, every single thing in the app works as an action in Shortcuts. This was a lot of work, but was a goal from the start. Even small things, like changing the app's theme, can be done in Shortcuts.
It turned out pretty good I think! Excited that some people seem to dig it too. I never know how to make these Show HN things super interesting, but if you like caffeine logging and have iOS, I think you'll like this.
Stuff like this hurts to read. I don't have any DRM stuff for my ebooks so people can avoid any hassles, but at the same time it totally sucks when I come across is being pirated.
- Visual Look Up: You can scan coffee and it'll use AI to figure out the contents. This was a new API that iOS 26 brought and I thought this was kinda fun.
- Logging with AI: Apple shipped Foundation Models on iOS 26, and while they are far less capable that flagship models, they are great for bite sized tasks. Plus, they support tool calling - which means they can fire up tools that you give them when they are generating responses. So, I feed it caffeine data and people can type in what they're drinking, and it'll give you a reasonable estimation of how much caffeine is in it.
- Tons of Siri stuff: If you're into automation, every single thing in the app works as an action in Shortcuts. This was a lot of work, but was a goal from the start. Even small things, like changing the app's theme, can be done in Shortcuts.
It turned out pretty good I think! Excited that some people seem to dig it too. I never know how to make these Show HN things super interesting, but if you like caffeine logging and have iOS, I think you'll like this.