Successful Software

Stop Publishing Garbage Data, It’s Embarrassing

Andy Brice — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 15:52:57 +0000

Twice this week, I have come across embarrassingly bad data.

The first instance is the UK government’s fuel finder data. This is a downloadable CSV file of fuel station locations and prices from around the UK. A potentially very useful database, especially during the current conflict in the Middle East. A customer suggested it as a possible practice dataset for my data wrangling and visualization software, Easy Data Transform . So I had a quick look and spotted some glaring errors within a few minutes.

A quick plot of the latitude and longitude shows some clear outliers:

On further investigation, some of these UK fuel stations are apparently located in the Indian and South Atlantic oceans. In at least one case, it looks like they got the latitude and longitude the wrong way around.

A quick look at the fuel price columns also shows some major issues:

The ratio between the most expensive and cheapest fuel (per litre) is 1538:1. Clearly wrong.

Shown as a histogram with a logarithmic Y axis:

I am guessing that the reason for this bad data is that the fuel stations are submitting their own data and, humans being humans, they make mistakes. But then the government is publishing the data without even the most basic checks. That just isn’t good enough.

I reported the problem on 22-Mar-2026. They acknowledge my email on 24-Mar-2026 (“Thank you for sharing this, we have passed this on to the technical team to have a look at.”). The CSV file published on 29-Mar-2026 still has the garbage data.

The second instance is a report on electric cars from UK motoring organization, the RAC. The first graph in the article is this:

Did the number of Battery Electric Vehicles on the UK’s roads suddeny drop from ~1.4 million in 2024 to ~0.0017 million in 2025? What happened to those ~1.4 million vehicles? I’m guessing that someone got their thousands and millions mixed up. But then they published the report with this glaring error. Did anyone mathematically literate even check this graph?

Lousy data undermines trust in institutions and can lead to bad decisions. I fear we are heading for a future where LLMs generate data, which people don’t bother to properly check. This data is then used train LLMs. The error is then much harder to spot once it is served back without the original source by LLMs. A slop-apocalypse.

Authors should have their work proof read, programmers should test their code and data people should do basic data validation. Let’s take some pride in our work.

Transform Messy Data into Insights with Easy Data Transform Advanced Edition

Andy Brice — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 11:45:44 +0000

My data wrangling product, Easy Data Transform, got a major upgrade yesterday, with the addition of data visualization capabilities. Here are some examples of what it can produce in a few clicks:

You can see this new visualization feature in action in the video below:

(Likes and subscribes help me with the YouTube algorithm and are much appreciated)

Human brains are highly developed for visual processing. But data is often messy and in the wrong form for visualization. So data wrangling and visualization, tightly integrated together, is a powerful combination. It was a lot of work, but it makes Easy Data Transform a much more complete, end-to-end, solution. No more pasting data into Excel to get a chart!

At the same time, I have segmented Easy Data Transform into 2 products: Easy Data Transform Core Edition (data wrangling, one-time fee $99) and Easy Data Transform Advanced Edition (data wrangling+visualization, one-time fee $198). The Advanced Edition is a paid upgrade from the original product. Optional, of course. I sweetened the deal with a time-limited discount for existing customers who want to upgrade to Advanced Edition. The response from Easy Data Transform customers has been very positive.

Have you got some messy data, you want to turn into insights? Why not give Easy Data Transform Advanced Edition a try? It:

Runs natively on Windows and Mac.
Is drag and drop (no syntax to remember).
Does not store your precious data on someone else’s server.
Is deterministic and will not hallucinate!
Can process millions of rows in seconds.
Can create re-usable templates for repeatable processes.

You can download a free trial here. And you can get 15% off Easy Data Transform Advanced Edition until 17-Jul-2026 using this discount link.

Is the golden age of Indie software over?

Andy Brice — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 21:03:02 +0000

The concept of shareware appeared in the 1980s. Developers would use relatively primitive tools to create their software, then promote it via fanzines, user groups and bulletin boards to a niche audience of shareware fans. If you wanted to try the software, you would have to get hold of a floppy disk with it on. And, if you wanted to buy a licence, you would generally have to post a physical cheque to the developer. This was being an Indie developer in hard mode. A few people made a lot of money, but most vendors made modest returns on their efforts.

I started selling my first software product in 2005. This was a good time to start up as an independent software vendor. High quality compilers, IDEs, debuggers, version control systems and web servers were widely available and mostly free. The market for software was growing, as more and more people purchased PCs and Macs. Payment processors were starting to streamline online payments. But the real revolution was being able to distribute your software worldwide via an increasingly ubiquitous Internet. And getting noticed by potential customers, while never easy, was generally achievable through writing content for search engines to find, paid online ads (such as Google Adwords pay per click), download sites or even ads in physical magazines. With a lot of hard work and a bit of luck, it was quite possible to make a decent living.

Things have continued evolving at a rapid pace over the 20 years I have been selling software. Development tools have continued to improve. Mobile and web-based software has become mainstream. App stores have appeared. Outsourcing became a thing. Subscription payment models are increasingly common. Mostly these changes haven’t affected my business too much. But recently things have begun to feel noticeably harder.

LLMs have made a major impact. While I don’t worry that LLMs will do a better job than my seating planner software, data wrangling software or visual planning software any time soon (my main competitor remains Excel), everyone is noticing that their web traffic is falling. People increasingly read LLM summaries rather than clicking on search engine links or the accompanying ads. Maybe the LLM will include a link to the website that they ripped off the content from, but probably they won’t. So writing content in the hope of traffic from search engines is becoming less and less of a viable strategy to get noticed.

Other promotional channels are getting squeezed as well. Online ads are increasingly expensive and rife with click fraud. This makes it hard to get any chance of a return, unless lifetime customer value is hundreds of dollars. Google Adwords is a case in point. In the early days, I could get lots of targeted clicks at an affordable price. But Google have done everything they can to raise bid prices and generally enshittify Adwords, so they can grab more and more of the value in every transaction. I now get barely any clicks at bid prices I am prepared to pay.

One of the few useful promotional channels left is YouTube. But it is very time-consuming to produce videos and the amount of competition is huge. I fully expect generative AI to erode its value over time, as AI slop floods the channel.

Typically promotional channels start off great for vendors and become less great over time (the law of shitty clickthrus). But then new promotional channels appear and the dance starts again. But there just doesn’t seem to be much in the way of viable new channels appearing for Indie vendors like myself. My experiment with advertising on Reddit did not go well.

LLMs potentially also make software easier to write, which is a double-edged sword. It might help you code features faster, but it also lowers the barrier, so that more people can compete. Even if your new competition is bug riddled garbage, ‘vibe coded’ by someone who doesn’t know what they are doing, it still makes it harder for your product to get noticed.

The general cost of living crisis hasn’t helped either. The super-rich are making out like bandits, but everyone else has less disposable income. And that is only going to get worse when the current AI funding circle-jerk implodes.

Each of the different software platforms also have their own issues.

Downloadable software has fallen out of fashion and the market is shrinking as increasingly people expect software to be web-based. People are also wary about downloading software onto their computers, in case it contains malware.

Web-based software is more of a service than a product and is expected to be available 24×7. Expect to get lots of very unhappy emails if your server falls over. And woe betide you if your customer data is hacked. Disappearing off somewhere for a few days without an Internet connection is not really viable, unless you have employees.

Mobile-based software is expected to be free or, at best, very cheap. So requires huge scale to make any decent return. And that is tough when there are some 2 million apps in the iPhone app store. You are also at the mercy of app store owners, who really don’t have your best interest at heart.

The new wave of AI tools must be creating new opportunities, but it seems these opportunities are mostly there for big companies, not for Indie developers. And it is very risky to build your product as a thin layer on top of someone else’s platform. Ask people who built tools and services on top of Twitter.

It feels that it is getting harder for small software vendors, like myself, to make a living. Of course, this could be just the ramblings of a 50-something-year-old, looking back through his rose-tinted varifocals. What do you think? Has it got harder?

If you want to show indie software vendors some love, check out all the great indie software for Mac and Windows (including my own Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan) on sale at Winterfest.

Updating application icons for macOS 26 Tahoe and Liquid Glass

Andy Brice — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 16:06:35 +0000

The application icon for my data wrangling software looks like this on a Mac up to macOS 15.x:

However, Apple has once again nuked everything from orbit. Now it looks like this in macOS 26 Tahoe when the application is inactive or if you choose any Icon & widget style apart from Default:

Thanks Apple. It is such a joy to develop for Mac.

With some help from a designer and hours of going around in circles, I have finally managed to fix things to support the new ‘liquid glass’ look. This is how it should look in the next release, depending on the setting in Appearance>Icon & widget style:

Default

Dark

Clear/Light

Clear/Dark

Tinted

I’m not convinced it is an improvement in terms of usability. But, at least my app icon doesn’t look like shit.

What you need to know

The new macOS 26 icon format is .icon. It is a folder full of various resources and is totally different to the old .icns format.

The .icon file can be created by Apple Icon Composer. I used a freelancer on Fiverr who did a good job of converting my existing vector artwork and was very cheap. The .icon file should contain a maximum of 4 groups (which seem to be like layers) other it won’t compile to a resource properly.

Note that macOS hide the extension of .icon folders by default, which was a source of some confusion.

The .icon file then has to be processed into an Assets.car file using actool. For example:

xcrun actool application.icon --compile ./icons/macosx --output-format human-readable-text --notices --warnings --errors --output-partial-info-plist temp.plist --app-icon Icon --include-all-app-icons --enable-on-demand-resources NO --development-region en --target-device mac --minimum-deployment-target 26.0 --platform macosx

You will need to change the bold parts above, as appropriate.

I had to update my Mac laptop to macOS 26, Xcode 26 and the macOS 26 SDK for the above to work.

You can check the Assets.car file using assetutil to create a .json file listing the contents:

xcrun --sdk macosx assetutil --info ./icons/macosx/Assets.car > ./icons/macosx/temp.json

You will need to change the bold parts above, as appropriate.

Then you need to reference the new icon in your existing application .plist file. For example, add at the same level as CFBundleGetInfoString:

<key>CFBundleIconName</key>
<string>application</string>

You will need to change the bold part above, as appropriate. I believe the string value if based on the file stem of the original .icon file. But I’m not 100% sure about that. Look at the .json file produced by assetutil for clues. Mine contained this:

The temp.plist file generated by actool is apparently supposed to give you a .plist file that refers to the icon resource. It didn’t and was completely useless.

Then place both Assets.car and your old .icns file in the Resource folder of your application (before you sign it). That way it should look ok on both macOS 26 and earlier OSes.

If you develop using XCode, it will probably do some of the above for you. I develop in C++/Qt using Qt Creator, so I had to do it all manually.

I was able to generate the Assets.car on macOS 26 and then incorporate it into the build on my macOS 12 development machine.

I hope the above saves someone a few hours. Now I need to repeat the process for PerfectTablePlan.

You might also find this post useful (where I got some of the information):

https://www.hendrik-erz.de/post/supporting-liquid-glass-icons-in-apps-without-xcode

How many elephants?

Andy Brice — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 15:47:41 +0000

When people are trying to convey a quantity, they will generally try to compare it to something that they think people already have a feel for. For example, ‘weighing as much as 10 elephants’ or ‘twice the area of a tennis court’. But people often come up with terrible comparisons, and this grates on my nerves. So I have done a little side project to generate comparisons for you. I named it ‘How many elephants’ as elephants (and Jumbo jets) seem to figure a lot in these comparisons.

It allows you to create comparisons for:

Length/Height

Area

Volume

Mass/Weight

Time

Velocity/Speed

Energy

I might add more dimensions, such as force, acceleration and pressure, later on.

You can try it at http://howmanyelephants.co.uk/ .

It is just a single page of HTML + CSS + JQuery. I used Microsoft Copilot to generate the image and, as a sort of turbocharged Stackoverflow, to help me with the coding.

Did I miss a good comparison or make a mistake? Feel free to give some feedback in the comments.