A band name from Shibuya,
now a place to write.
Tokyo · Established 2026 — A journal by Cats and Dogs
The Japanese play-by-play came through fine. But the moment an English comment began, the transcript collapsed into "Wel actaltlysputure…" — a string that looks like English and isn't. A transcription model can only listen in one language at a time. So I decided to have two of them listen to the same audio.
Take notes, and you stop hearing the conversation. Listen properly, and nothing gets written down. I spent years going back and forth between the two. Unlike a photo, a conversation has no second take. Darkroom Notes Season 5 is about STIL.NOTE, the voice app — starting, as always, with why I built it.
Open a Mac file from the iPhone. Run it, and the log says "ok." But on the Mac's screen, nothing happens. The hunt for the culprit ended somewhere unexpected — an app that had been left running for fourteen days. And the real lesson wasn't about the culprit. It was about the "ok."
The family so far has been tools that keep your data from leaving. STIL.HUB carries the opposite kind of danger: this tool can operate your Mac. So this time, "nothing goes out" wasn't enough — I had to design "nothing gets in." A six-digit passphrase, and a conversation that never leaves the room.
Fifteen minutes of recording, gone. I pressed stop, and while waiting for the summary I went back to the home screen. That's all it took. The cause was my own design: saving sat at the end of the pipeline. A conversation has no second take, I wrote in the first post. My design hadn't caught up with my own words.
One button at my hand, and the Mac's dictation wakes up — that was the whole plan. But no matter how I asked, the Mac wouldn't listen. After enough stubbornness, I stopped asking. Don't make the Mac listen; let the iPhone do it. At the end of the detour sits my favorite feature in the app.
A recording of nothing but the word "Yes." came back with a full meeting summary attached — decisions, to-dos, the lot. Summarize a 14-minute conversation and you'd get "28 decisions." The real number was zero. The AI was saying more than it had heard, again. What I fixed wasn't the model. It was how I was asking.
Enroll a voice, and that person's lines get their name — that was the feature, supposedly. Except recordings of people I had never enrolled were coming back labeled with enrolled names. Digging in, I found the model had no mechanism for matching voices at all. The name was a sticky note on a seat. The most surprising story of this series.
Move a companion into the Mac, exchange a six-digit passphrase, lay out the buttons. Everything this season has covered joins up between two machines on one desk. To finish, I trace the flow start to end, tell the story of the family's first-ever "free," and close Darkroom Notes Season 6.
Record, transcribe, sort, shape, export. Everything this season has covered, one post at a time, joins up over a single recording. To finish, I trace that flow from start to end, write down what building a fifth tool taught me, and close Darkroom Notes Season 5.
The first subtitle read "Control your Mac from iPhone." App Review's objection was the way it used the word iPhone. Just swap the words — except the same words were living in the site's headline, in the social-share image, and in the opening seconds of the very video I'd filmed for review. Changing words, it turned out, was not a matter of fixing one place.
Every year at tax time, I'd wrestle with the pile of receipts stuffed in drawers and my wallet. Date, amount, store, tax rate — type each one in by hand, or leave them and cry about it later. The person it troubled most was me. Darkroom Notes, Season 4: my receipt app, STIL.RECEIPT, starting with why I made it.
A discount line vanishes entirely. A payment made with iD gets recorded as cash. With something as endlessly varied as receipts, fixing one may be breaking another. So I decided to turn every receipt that tripped me up on a real device into a test, on the spot. The story of how the receipt that troubled me becomes a guard.
A receipt's line items run name on the left, amount on the right. To the human eye, it's clearly one row. But text recognition sometimes returned that name and amount as separate fragments. What looked like one row split into two — and that "table" was the part of this app I struggled with most.
Capture, read, sort, verify, turn into an expense. The pieces I've written one by one come together on a single receipt. To close, I trace that flow from start to finish, write what I came to think after building a fourth tool, and end Darkroom Notes Season 4.
The "10% taxable" field would end up holding the tax amount instead of the taxable amount. AI and rules alike mix it up when similar numbers sit nearby. And worse, the wrong number really does exist somewhere on the receipt. What rescued it wasn't a clever reader, but one unmoving fact — the total.
"Fully compliant with the invoice system." "Fully compliant with the recordkeeping law." Written in one line, it would probably be strong. Clear, eye-catching. But I didn't write it. Tax is law, and I'm someone who builds apps, not a tax accountant. Holding back the convenient one-liner — a story about wording.
The contents of a business card holder, when you think about it, aren't really yours. The names, companies, phone numbers, emails — they're other people's personal data. Uploading all that to a server just because it's convenient never sat right with me. Darkroom Notes, Season 3: my fourth app, STIL.BIZ, starting with why I made it.
I want to pass on the heat of a moment, just as it was. But this is an age where showing faces takes a little care. My own family is fine — yet a friend, or a stranger who happened to be in the frame, isn't mine to put out into the world. — Darkroom Notes, Season 2. The story of my second app, STIL.TOON, starting with why I made it.
Last time I wrote that STIL.TOON redraws a face rather than erasing it. So how does it find the face, and how does it draw it? Vision finds it; Apple Intelligence draws it. And the first place I tripped was calling the tool the way I assumed it worked, instead of the way it actually did.
The machinery was in place. But scanning several cards in a row, the screen froze around the fifth. Offloading the heavy work, trimming the memory — both were correct improvements. Yet the real way out lay further on. Chasing the bug, I'd ended up rebuilding the way the app captures, without noticing.
STIL.TOON went from kickoff to the App Store in a week. But the thing that stopped review at the end wasn't a bug in the code. A bank account, tax forms, a contract to sign — shipping an app takes preparation that isn't digital at all. Darkroom Notes, Season 2, the finale.
Reading a scanned card and sorting it into name, company, and the rest — that part runs on Apple Intelligence. But that AI only works on newer iPhones. At first I thought, "then make it an app for supported devices only." But cutting along that line left too many people out. So I decided to deliver the same experience to the side where the AI doesn't run.
Right after release, I rebuilt STIL.TOON — account system and all — while almost no one was using it yet. The only time you can rebuild cleanly is before real users arrive. And this wasn't TOON's call alone; it was the whole family turning together.
Turning a face into a drawing — that part worked. The problem was putting the drawing back onto the photo: only the face swapped, the background and clothes left as they were. It didn't come easily. The background doubled, I hit two dead ends, and still cut my way through with only Apple's public APIs — the record of one day.
A perfectly readable card sometimes got dropped with "the focus seems soft." Tracing the cause led to a gate placed before text recognition, and a single number left standing there. "Provisional — tune on device": a number marked that way, and then never touched again.
The heart of a card app is the capture. So I assumed the hardest part would be taking the card in cleanly — fixing the skew, removing the shadow, evening out the brightness. I was even ready to build a custom camera for it. But I didn't. The iPhone already had one.
Capture, read, sort, turn into a contact. The pieces I've written one by one come together on a single card. To close, I trace that flow from start to finish, write what I came to think after building a fourth tool, and end Darkroom Notes Season 3.
If the AI is free for everyone, where does Pro come in? STIL.TOON's answer is a small watermark on export. It's both a doorway to Pro and, every time a free user's image spreads, a way for my name to travel along with it — not a loss, but an acquisition channel.
STIL. has no sign-up. It never asks for your email or a password. Not because that's convenient, but because I decided not to hold your material. What happens when you throw the account away — and how the app still stands without it. The second frame of the series is about privacy.
I build STIL. alone — the planning, the design, the code, the copy. Why not hand it off? And how do I keep running a workload one person can't possibly run? The sixth frame of the series is about a maker's way of working.
STIL. began as an app that pulls one frame from a video, and it's slowly becoming a family. A sibling that turns faces into illustrations; a sibling that organises business cards. What's growing isn't features — it's the same single promise. The close of Season 1 of the series.
Hand it a video and STIL. picks, from hundreds of frames, the one that stands as a photograph. So what is the iPhone looking at when it judges a frame as good? I'll look, as plainly as I can, at the three eyes it measures with — blur, faces, and attention. The fourth frame of the series.
The film colours inside STIL. weren't chosen by market research. They're colours I actually love and have chased for years. The softness of Portra, the night of Cinestill, the 90s of VHS. Less a feature than a crystallisation of obsession — the third frame of the series is about the film looks.
The best expression usually slips away between shutter presses. But if you were filming, that instant is still right there. — Starting today, alongside From the Shelf, I'm beginning a second series about the app I build myself: STIL. The first frame is the simplest question — why I made it.
STIL. was rejected three times by App Store review. Permissions, payments, and finally the robustness of the app itself. Each time: deflate a little, fix the cause, submit again. The grittiest record of finally getting through on the fourth try. The fifth frame of the series.
A beautiful voice and shimmering guitars. The needle dropped and, in an instant, I was caught. I found it around the age of twenty, back when I had a job writing music reviews. The sleeve was the kind I'd normally pass over — yet somehow my fingers reached for it. Of all the records by women-fronted bands from abroad, this is the one I've loved and played most. A word about track three, "Can't Be Sure," and the sound that lives on now in Pale Waves.
Look at that sleeve — that was reason enough to pull it off the shelf, and it's still the reason it goes back on. I found it in my vocational-school days, working along the racks at Disk Union in Shibuya until my hand stopped. Supergrass's fourth album: not their biggest seller, but a record full of four distinct characters. A word about my love of drummer Danny Goffey, and about track ten, "La Song," the one I can never stop humming.
In 2009, holed up in a tiny Futako-Tamagawa apartment helping a friend's band record, this was the album always playing. A band with a boy's heart, suddenly wearing a grown-up face. Plus the story of a photographer I met — which began, of all places, on this very blog. Favourite track: number eight, "Shadows."
Close my eyes and it's spring — new green, the first stir of life. This album always takes me back to driving the Hakone pass. The night at Fuji Rock that turned me into a fan, and the record Beck released six years after Modern Guilt: his other acoustic one. I won't walk you through the tracks. Just play it — ideally on a green mountain road.
The Verve's frontman, on his own. My definition of a charismatic vocalist has always pointed to Richard Ashcroft before Liam Gallagher. Track five — You on My Mind in My Sleep — brings tears every single time, and I still can't fully explain why.
I still remember the day In My Place climbed the Billboard chart on MTV — I was in high school, watching on cable TV at home. I picked up the album not long after. A few years later, at FUJI ROCK FESTIVAL '05, I cried at a live show for the first time in my life.
An album that found me in middle school, through my older brother's love of Clapton. The song I copied night after night was “Tears in Heaven,” and the story behind it I only really understood once I became a father myself. Thirty years on for the album, thirty years on for us.
The third album from the Welsh three-piece Stereophonics. A record I picked up around the time I was starting my own band — the one that simply made me think “cool,” and got me to buy a Gibson SG. A band that stands by sheer presence.
John Squire, guitarist of The Stone Roses, made his first solo album in 2002. The man who let his frontman carry the band's voice for years finally sang in his own. This is one of those records you don't want to over-explain.
Bulky, no place for them, but impossible to throw away. The CDs that sat in cardboard boxes for years, and the day I finally went through them. The slim case I landed on, the 100-yen-shop box that holds them all, and the new series I'm starting — a slow tour through the music I once owned.
“Even if we're gone, the music remains here…” — that's the line printed on the obi strip wrapping my copy of Travis's The Man Who. It's also the album that made me notice producers as people, after Nigel Godrich shaped the band's sound for the first time on this record.
Just past the Atami Pass tollgate at the north end of the Izu Skyline. A small viewpoint where, on a clear day, you can see Mt. Fuji, Suruga Bay, and the hot-spring town of Atami all in one frame — easy to miss from the road.
An unplanned stop on a Golden Week drive through Izu — Kanade no Mori Resort, at the foot of Mt. Omuro. A new resort with a marché, restaurants, glamping, and a public restroom that actually has a nursing room and diaper-changing space. Family-friendly in ways that don't always make it into the guidebooks.
The URL of this blog comes from the name of a band I had in my twenties. The band quietly faded out in 2011. Fifteen years later, I'm bringing the name back — this time as a place to write.
