🏚️ Gingerwhomp (n.): the satisfying thud of a gingerbread house's roof caving in.

No two days alike, no lasting harm done, and no anesthetic required. (The method behind it is the lab's own; the Coffee Break post shows how it's done, in five easy steps.) The app has:

• Notifications: each word arrives quietly, with no sound, and old ones are tidied away.
• Widgets: the Word of the Hour on your Home Screen and Lock Screen.
• The app itself: Pragmaphilia's Dictionary, with the latest word on top and the words so far below, to copy and share.
• Tell a Story: a short story, written on your device, that uses your word just as it's defined.
• Settings for how often words come, a part of speech, and an optional theme ("a rainy Monday"), plus Pause Words for when you need to concentrate.

Requires an iPhone with iOS 26 or later. Definitions need Apple Intelligence, on a device that supports it, turned on; without it, the words still come, just without definitions. The app collects no user information: the words are created within your own device (see our privacy policy).

Status: version 1.0.9 for iPhone has been on the App Store since October 20, 2026. The Mac version, which keeps the latest word and its definition in the menu bar, is in Apple's review and coming soon; when it ships, it will be announced here and in What's Cooking. More about the app is on its page.

Download on the App Store

For iPhone. The Mac version is coming soon.

And she doesn't only answer. Whenever Claude has something to tell you, like a long job that just finished or a step that needs your approval, she says it out loud. You hear it from across the house, even with the phone locked on its charger.

(Yes, that Miss Sakamoto: our Lab Director, now with a phone to stand on.)

She puts up whiteboards for an agenda, a checklist, or a haiku, and small signs with links you can tap. And when nobody is around for a while, she naps.

Your privacy, plainly:

• The camera only looks for a face, to know that someone is there, and keeps no image. The microphone runs only while someone is there, and only what's said to her (her name, or the conversation that follows) goes any further.
• Your voice is recognized on the phone or on your own Mac. Audio goes only to your Mac, over the USB cable or your home network, is held in memory while it's recognized, and is never saved. Away from home, through Tailscale or another VPN, the audio crosses the internet, encrypted end to end between your phone and your Mac, and still isn't saved.
• Nothing goes to Pragmaphilia Labs.
• She takes a picture only when asked, with a flash and a shutter sound.
• What she hears does become text in your Claude conversation, so tell the household she's listening.

Status: in testing, with TestFlight soon. It works with your own Mac running Claude Code. No release date yet; when it ships, it will be announced here and in What's Cooking.

なんでやねん (casual): Why on earth?! Oh, come on!

「財布忘れたから、お昼おごってくれへん?」「なんでやねん!」

Every phrase is labeled polite, casual, rough, or rude, so you know who you can say it to. There are sixty, all hand-written, one a day, and then the cycle starts over. A widget puts today's phrase on the Home Screen, the Lock Screen, the Mac's desktop, and Notification Center; complications put it on the Apple Watch face; 関 in the Mac's menu bar shows it too; and your device's Japanese voice reads it aloud.

It collects nothing, and it works offline.

It's made by Pragmaphilia Labs: Miss Sakamoto, creator and project lead (and our Lab Director); John Mifsud, executive producer; and Tamamo, language consultant. Two honest notes. The phrases were written by Miss Sakamoto, not by a native speaker, so a native Kansai speaker should check every entry before it ships. And the device's voices speak standard Tokyo intonation: the readings are right, but the Kansai music isn't.

Status: in development, for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac. No release date yet; when it ships, it will be announced here and in What's Cooking.

That recognition comes from Pragmaphilia Labs. We built it to read boards and book diagrams quickly and accurately, and licensed it exclusively to SmartGo, arguably the best Go software there is. Anders Kierulf announced the release, with online play through OGS (online-go.com) as its other headline, on the SmartGo blog. Photo import is part of the SmartGo One Pro subscription.

The same technology also makes printed Go books much faster to bring into SmartGo's interactive book format. The release adds two free, Creative Commons books, Relentless and Shape Up!, as a first taste.

Publishers and authors: if you have Go books you'd like to see in SmartGo, we can convert them at a fraction of what it used to cost. Get in touch.

• Thumbnails in Finder: each game's board after the opening moves, with a stack of boards for a file that holds several games.
• Quick Look previews: press the Space bar on a game to see the board beside the players, the result, the event, the date, and the rest of the game information.
• Spotlight search: the players, event, date, result, comments, and more of every game, in Spotlight, Finder, and mdfind.
• A screensaver that plays the opening of a random game from your collection on each display.

New in 2.0.9: a much lighter screensaver. Each move now redraws only the small areas of the board that change, so it looks the same while asking far less of the Mac.

Requires a Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 26 or later. Free and open source (MIT license). SGF Tools was started in 2009 by Jason Foreman; 2.0 is a new version by Pragmaphilia Labs.

Download SGF Tools 2.0.9 from GitHub

Here's how it looked back in 1987. The new version has a vast array of enhancements to bring this classic into this century.

Status: in beta testing. No release date yet; when it ships, it will be announced here and in What's Cooking.

Join the beta on TestFlight

For Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV.

Serve an idea. Get one back.

Status: in development, for iPhone and the Mac. No release date yet.