Daniel Jalkut

A studio of one, built to outlast trends

Open MarsEdit today and you are using software that a single person has been refining since 2007. No growth team, no venture round, no roadmap committee. Just Daniel Jalkut, working from home in front of a microphone and a code editor, shipping a desktop blog editor for an internet that keeps declaring blogging dead and keeps being wrong.

Red Sweater Software is his company, and the headcount is him. He writes the code, designs the icons' fate, answers the support tickets, and signs the releases. The catalog is deliberately small: MarsEdit for writing and publishing, FastScripts for automating the Mac with a keystroke, Black Ink for crossword fans, Quotes and a handful of utilities. None of it chases scale. All of it is meant to last.

When John Gruber linked to Jalkut's thoughts on AI on Daring Fireball in May 2026, it was the kind of nod that the Apple developer world treats as a quiet stamp of authority. Jalkut has spent more than twenty years earning it the slow way, one considered release and one honest blog post at a time.

The Apple years, and the browser before Safari

He started at Apple in 1995 as a software quality engineer, which is a polite term for the person who finds out where everything is broken. That was never the plan. He let management know he wanted to write Mac code, and a department director, charmed by the nerve of it, assigned a staff developer to mentor him. He moved up to senior system software engineer and put his hands on Mac OS itself, versions 7.6 through 10.2, including the Carbon APIs and the Code Fragment Manager that a generation of Mac apps quietly depended on.

The detail that lingers: he was put in charge of a custom, Apple-made web browser meant to run on Mac OS 9, years before Safari was a thing. It is one of those forgotten side roads of computing history, and Jalkut was driving down it.

Those seven years left a mark on how he builds. He learned the system from the inside, the frameworks other developers treat as immovable bedrock, the corners where performance is won or lost, the discipline of code that millions of machines will run without a chance to patch it twice. When he later went independent, he carried that engineer's caution into a one-person shop, where there is no QA team to catch what you miss. The habits formed at 1 Infinite Loop never really left him.

He quit to study music

Then he did the unexpected. He left Apple and enrolled at San Francisco State to earn a second bachelor's degree, this one in music history and theory, finishing in 2005. He already held a computer science degree from UC Santa Cruz. The two halves of that resume tell you most of what you need to know about how he approaches a build: part systems engineer, part person who cares how the thing feels.

Sixteen years behind one microphone

In 2008 Jalkut teamed up with Manton Reece, the founder of Micro.blog, to start Core Intuition, a podcast about the craft and business of independent Apple software. It ran for 16 years and roughly 580 episodes before the two retired it, a fixture that taught a whole community how to think about going solo. He edits his own audio in Logic Pro, the music degree quietly paying rent. Two friends, no co-hosts to spare, talking shop every couple of weeks for the better part of two decades, until they decided the run was complete and let it go on their own terms.

He also runs Bitsplitting, a long-form interview show he modeled, by his own account, on Terry Gross and Fresh Air. The idea was to skip the spec-sheet talk and trace the philosophical arc of a guest's life and choices. A tech podcast that wants to know who you are, not just what you shipped.

The texture of an independent life

The small things are revealing. He bought an Aeron chair in 2000; when it broke in 2006, Herman Miller replaced it free, and he still tells the story, a man who notices and rewards good craft because he is trying to make some himself. His handle is the same everywhere, danielpunkass, a fragment of identity carried from forum to Mastodon to Bluesky without a rebrand in sight.

He has watched the open web fracture and reassemble, and he has stayed loyal to its independent corners, posting on his own micro.blog, cross-posting to Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads, never quite surrendering to any one platform. It is the same instinct that keeps Red Sweater a studio of one: own your tools, own your output, answer to your readers and no one else.

The deal that defined a career

MarsEdit did not start as Jalkut's. It began as a component buried inside NetNewsWire, Brent Simmons's famous Mac news reader, and was sold off as a standalone product. In February 2007 Jalkut bought it outright and took over development. It was a bet on a category most people assumed was already shrinking, desktop tools for writing to the web, made by someone who believed the people who write seriously still want to write offline, in an app that respects them, and publish on their own terms.

Nearly two decades later the bet looks shrewd. MarsEdit speaks to WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, Movable Type and the rest, and it has outlived plenty of the platforms it once supported. The app's longevity is itself an argument: that a careful, opinionated tool maintained by one stubborn person can beat a venture-backed competitor that burned bright and vanished. Jalkut has never tried to make MarsEdit huge. He has only tried to keep it good.

A voice the Apple community listens to

Inside the Apple developer world, Jalkut occupies a particular seat. He is the practitioner who also explains, the engineer who can write a clear paragraph about why a thing is hard. Through Core Intuition, Bitsplitting and a steady stream of blog posts, he became one of the people newer indies read to understand the trade: how to price, how to support customers, how to survive an OS transition, how to keep going when the App Store rules change underneath you. When he weighed in on AI in 2026 and Gruber linked it, it was less a surprise than a confirmation of a reputation built post by post.

His technical range is broad for a solo developer. He works in Swift and Objective-C across Cocoa and UIKit, drops into JavaScript, Python and C++ when a problem demands it, and has a reputation for the kind of deep debugging that comes from years spent inside an operating system rather than merely on top of one. Earlier clients have included names like Fog Creek Software, Hewlett-Packard and Corbis, contract work that funded the independence that followed.

The long game

There is a temptation, with someone like Jalkut, to frame him as a holdout, a man clinging to an older idea of software. That misreads him. He is not nostalgic so much as durable. He picked a small set of tools to care about, picked a community to be useful to, and then simply kept showing up, year after year, release after release, episode after episode. The handle stays the same. The company stays one person. The work stays careful.

Most software is built to be acquired, scaled or abandoned. Jalkut built something to be kept. Twenty-plus years into Red Sweater Software, the most radical thing about him is that he is still here, still shipping, still answering his own email.