Chris Banes

Not every agent task needs a plan. Two tasks helped me decide when to go straight to implementation and when planning has something useful to settle. Either way, testing and review stay. chrisbanes.me/posts/not-ev...

Haze 2.0 is here, and it's a big one! 🎉 For Compose Multiplatform: 🫧 Glass with refraction & lighting ⚡ Faster blur 🎛️ Adaptive rendering quality 🎨 Reusable styles 🛠️ Build your own effects chrisbanes.me/posts/haze-2...

Compose now has progressive blur. Do you still need Haze? chrisbanes.me/posts/compos...

Introducing Portico: a native macOS menu-bar app for private HTTPS doorways to services running on your Mac, via your @tailscale.com tailnet localhost:1234 → https://my-service.<tailnet>.ts.net github.com/chrisbanes/p...

Here's a little preview of the new glass effect coming to Haze 2.0 Should be in the next alpha release

🛍️ Shopping isn’t a category I got Hermes Agent to match marketplace orders with my bank transactions, then categorise each item by what I actually bought. Same spending. A much clearer picture of where the money went. chrisbanes.me/posts/shoppi...

🤖 I've just open-sourced a new set of skills, covering Kotlin, Compose and Android development. Very early days, but it covers a lot of things which crop up in code review regularly. github.com/chrisbanes/s...

💠 Haze 2.0-alpha01 is out! This is a big release, splitting Haze up into layers, with the goal of enabling pluggable visual effects. Let me know what you think! chrisbanes.me/posts/haze-2...

✨ ChromaDial is a new #ComposeMultiplatform library that enables you to create beautiful Dials for your #JetpackCompose app Its API is similar to the Slider, but instead works in degrees Just pass in and set the degree state #buildinpublic

After becoming infuriated by Codex (the tool) lately, I've switched to @mariozechner.at's `Pi` and it's like a breathe of fresh air 🧘 All of the stuff I actually use, it's super fast, and most importantly it doesn't constantly ask permission to run `git` shittycodingagent.ai

If your engineering team is 'senior-only' + AI-assisted… where do tomorrow's seniors come from? New blog post on the 'disappearing middle': chrisbanes.me/posts/disapp...

I've been looking into Liquid Glass details (experiment for Haze), and stumbled across this article by @kubekhrm.bsky.social. Simply wow. kube.io/blog/liquid-...

As a little experiment I asked Gemini 2.5 (Pro) to compare itself to ChatGPT-5. It ended up telling me about Gemini 1.5 and that “Google has not announced a Gemini 2.5 model.” I think I’ll be sticking with ChatGPT… g.co/gemini/share...

My team is looking for a new Android + KMP engineer! 🇺🇸/🇨🇦 Looking for someone in Boston, New York, Toronto, Washington DC 📺 Working on Ventura TV OS (www.thetradedesk.com/ventura-stre...) If you have any questions, feel free to ask! 🔗: careers.thetradedesk.com/jobs/4870331...

Looking forward to being back at @droidcon.bsky.social London this year. I spent quite a while on this talk title…

I migrated our entire codebase over to it last week, and we’re now fully on the Metro train. 💺 It has pretty much everything y’all will need, right now.

I don’t know how they expect anyone to know the location of this bar…

What is it with Facebook adding pull-up gestures for the most random actions: Instagram DMs: Pull up to toggle disappearing messages. WhatsApp: Pull up to call. The amount of times I’ve triggered these actions: too many. The amount of times that I’ve meant to perform them: absolutely zero.

I've been trying out @jetbrains.com Junie over the past few few days, and have pretty blown away with it. I've managed to do everything from a complex refactoring of Haze (with follow up tasks), to fairly complex string manipulation (pretty printing data class toString).

💠 Haze 1.6.0 has been released! This is a big release: 🤖 Blurring for all versions of Android 🎨 Foreground (content) blurring 📐 Blurred edge treatment 🔗: github.com/chrisbanes/h...

💠 Haze 1.6.0-beta01 has been released! 🐛: Android 12 is now enabled by default 🤖: Experimental blurring support for all Android versions The video below is recorded on a Pixel 3 running Android 11, but it works back to Android 5. Please give it a try and report back! 🔗: github.com/chrisbanes/h...

Dug out an old Pixel 3 today, to do some testing on earlier Android versions. I forgot how small and light devices used to be. Feels like a feather compared to my iPhone Pro Max 16

Had a little hack getting Haze working on older Android devices. It uses RenderScript, so is never going to be real-time, but the lag isn't too bad. Everything is performed asynchronously, so this isn't jank. I'm undecided whether to keep going with it. Let me know if this would be useful to you.

Focus bugs in Compose are the absolute worst. The system is so opaque and hidden, that trying to deal with them is borderline impossible.

Haze 1.5.0 has been released: 💨 Optimised blur shader implementation (thanks to Kyant) 🖌️ New: HazeProgressive.Brush for custom progressive effects 🐛 Usual load of bugfixes github.com/chrisbanes/h...

🪢 Multiplatform Strings This blog post talks through a solution which we've landed on, using a single file as the source of truth for all strings, across all of our apps. chrisbanes.me/posts/multip...

🚀 Should you use Kotlin Sequences for Performance? I have always thought that using asSequence() was the way to optimize chained operations in Kotlin. But after benchmarking, the results shocked me: Sequences are often slower! 😱 #Kotlin #AndroidDev chrisbanes.me/posts/use-se...

Haze 1.3.0 has been released! 🔵 Radial Progressive (gradient) effects 🖌️ Brush support in tints 🧑‍💻 New samples 📑 New docs courtesy of @markallison.social github.com/chrisbanes/h...

Big +💯 to this However, the same can be said about AndroidX bumping up the compileSdkVersion

💠 Haze 1.2.0 has been released The big change in this release is that it now supports overlapping blurred areas. 🔗: github.com/chrisbanes/h...

I'm thinking about renaming the modifiers in Haze but not quite sure what to use. If you want to help, you can comment here: github.com/chrisbanes/h...