Log Book: the Mac app I built to run my side work
I mentioned on the about page that 2026 has me building apps again. Time to introduce the first one properly: it’s called Log Book, it lives on my Mac, and it exists because of a spreadsheet I grew to hate.
The itch
Alongside the day job I’ve always had side work: client sites, builds, ongoing support. And the admin around it was scattered everywhere. What did I actually do for a client this month? Some of it was in a note, some in email, some purely in my head. Then invoice time would roll around and I’d spend an evening reconstructing the month from memory before fighting a spreadsheet template into a PDF.
Classic developer move: spend considerably longer building a tool than the problem ever cost me. No regrets.
What it does
Log Book does two things, and deliberately not a third.
It logs work. Every entry is a client, a date, a description and time spent. The friction is near zero, which is the whole point: if logging a piece of work takes more than a few seconds, you stop doing it, and the log becomes fiction.
It raises invoices. When it’s time to bill, I pick a client and a date range, and everything logged in that window becomes the line items on an invoice. What used to be an evening of reconstruction is now about a minute, and nothing gets forgotten, which in practice means I was almost certainly under-billing before.
It doesn’t do everything else. No timers running in my menu bar making me feel watched, no projects-within-projects, no team features for a team of one. It’s a log book, as the name suggests. The scope is the feature.
Building for the Mac in 2026
This is also the story of me getting back on the native-app horse. I taught myself iOS during the 2020 lockdowns and shipped two apps, then life got in the way for a while. Coming back to Swift in 2026 after years of Rails has been genuinely refreshing: different muscles, same instincts. And building a small tool for an audience of exactly one is the most enjoyable kind of software there is. Every decision is just “what do I want?”
It also scratches the same itch as rebuilding this site in plain CSS: owning the whole thing, keeping it small enough to hold in your head, and having nothing in it you don’t understand.
What’s next
For now, Log Book is mine. If it keeps earning its place in my dock, tidying it up for other freelancers and small side-hustlers is the obvious next step, and there are a couple of other apps on the bench behind it. More on those when they’re further along.