The one thing I missed was typing

I expected to miss a lot of things when I went to a flip phone. Maps. The camera. Maybe even the games I never actually played.

What I actually missed was typing.

T9 is a time machine, and not in a good way

If you’re too young to remember T9: every text key has three or four letters on it, and you tap to cycle through them. “Hello” is 4-4-3-3-5-5-5-5-5-5-6-6-6. It was a marvel in 2001. It is agony when you’re trying to answer a work message with three sentences and a phone number in it.

I didn’t want a smartphone back. I wanted my keyboard. I’m at a Mac most of the day anyway. The text is right there arriving on a phone three feet away, and I’m hunting-and-pecking it out on a numpad like it’s the Clinton administration.

The idea

What if the phone stayed dumb, but the typing happened on my Mac?

The flip phone keeps the SIM, the number, the cell connection — all the things that make it a phone. The Mac just becomes a nicer keyboard and screen for the messages flowing through it. Send, receive, pictures, group threads. Type with ten fingers, send from the flip.

That’s dumbsms. A little macOS tool that talks to the phone over a cable (or Wi-Fi) and lets me message like an adult without giving up the dumb phone.

The rules I gave myself

1. The phone stays the source of truth. Messages live on the phone; the Mac is just a better window into them.
2. No cloud, no account, no telemetry. It’s personal software. It runs on my machine and talks to my phone. That’s it.
3. The dumb phone stays dumb. Nothing about this puts a feed back in my pocket. The whole point is that the distracting screen never comes back.

The funny part is how I built it — which, for a former engineer, was its own surprise. That’s the next post.