I Used to Hide My iPhone at Microsoft. Today I Shipped an iOS App.

I’ve been an iPhone user since I had to hide it when I worked at Microsoft.

That’s not a metaphor. I loved the thing — the design, the feel, the way a well-made app could make a small task feel like a small joy. I’ve wanted to build apps like that for as long as I’ve owned one. Today I shipped one. It’s called Comic Scry, and it does something I’d wanted for years and could never find.

A Marvel kid with a box he never sorted

Comics were my thing growing up. I’m a Marvel and X-Men native — that’s where I lived — with some other good stuff mixed in. I still have a lot of those books, the actual ones, from those actual days.

And here’s the problem with a box of comics you’ve carried through your whole life: you have no idea what’s in it. Which ones matter? Which are bulk? Which is the one you should never have left at the bottom of the longbox? Identifying comics and selling comics is genuinely hard right now, and I couldn’t find a tool that made it easy. So I built the one I wanted, and this time I packaged it up as an iOS app to share with everyone else standing over a box they don’t recognize.

Point your phone at any cover. Get a tier — Bulk to Major — and a price you can actually check. Keep it, sell it, or bulk-lot it, then the next book. No account, no comic knowledge required.

The honest pricing part has its own story — the app once tried to tell me a $7 book was worth $200, and fixing that became the whole product. There’s a fuller confession coming on the Comic Scry blog, but the short version: it reads the art, identifies the book, and when it doesn’t actually know what something’s worth, it tells you instead of guessing.

Read art and catalog a million books. That’s my kind of fun. :)

Creative director, AI workforce

Here’s why this is possible now and wasn’t before. I’m not hand-writing every line of this app. I’m the creative director, and AI is the development workforce — Claude and I push on it together, daily. That arrangement is the thing that finally lets me build the apps I’ve had in my head for fifteen years.

And it is fun. All of this happened while WWDC was on and I was eating up every session. Building iOS apps right now is the most fun I’ve had in tech in a long time — it reminds me of the old Windows Phone and Silverlight days, when the platform felt new and a single person could make something that felt magical. I’m enjoying it so much that I’ve been building a second app at the same time. No hints. It’s a little crazy.

This is not a weekend app

I want to be clear about that, because “AI built it in a weekend” is the cheap version of this story and it’s not mine.

Comic Scry has a full roadmap, and Claude and I are pushing straight through it — a new version almost daily right now. The server backend is smoking. The Microsoft for Startups credits are getting eaten alive (thank you, sincerely — they’re covering exactly the kind of work that makes a solo build like this viable). This is a real product I intend to keep making real.

If you’ve got comics you want to triage — or you’ve got a friend who’s a comics person — please share Comic Scry. Five free scans, no signup, and if you want more it’s a one-time $19.99 — no subscription, ever.

Go find what’s hiding in the box.