Darkroom NotesSeason 3STIL.BIZPart 6 of 6
When a card becomes a contact — a fourth tool, and the end of Darkroom Notes Season 3
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.
So far I've written about the insides of STIL.BIZ piece by piece — capture, read, sort. To finish, I'll trace how all of it comes together on a single card, start to finish. And then write what I came to think after building a fourth tool, and close Season 3.
Capture, read, into a contact
Hold a card up to the scanner, and it finds the rectangle of the paper, straightens the skew and distortion, and takes it in (The camera I didn't build). Text recognition reads the captured card. The pile of recognized text is sorted into name, company, department, title, phone, email, address — by AI on newer devices, by rules on the rest (Past the AI cutoff line).
Then a quick fix on the confirmation screen, and one tap adds it to iOS Contacts. Multiple phone numbers or emails can be kept together. You can add a face photo, separate from the card itself, to tie a face to its card. And all of it finishes inside this iPhone. The card never goes to a server, anywhere.
No sign-up
STIL.BIZ has no account either. This is BIZ catching up with the shift I wrote about with STIL.TOON — "I rebuilt it before anyone came," the family removing accounts one by one. Collect nothing. Hold nothing.
A tool that handles information entrusted to you by others — like business cards — is exactly where this matters. I don't know who you are, nor who you exchanged cards with. And that's fine.
Price, and where the contest is
There are plenty of subscription card apps. STIL.BIZ Pro is priced a little below them (¥300 a month, ¥2,000 a year, ¥3,000 once). It's for syncing several devices over iCloud, exporting and importing with vCard and encrypted backups, and adding face photos.
But price isn't where the contest is, I think. Not "chosen because it's cheap," but chosen because it doesn't leave the device. I set the point of difference on privacy, not price. Even on the free tier, the core — capture, read, sort, turn into a contact — is all there.
A family on the work side too
STIL. (one frame from a video) and STIL.TOON (faces into illustrations) were, if anything, tools for daily life. With BIZ, that family grew its first branch on the work side. A card, into a contact. All inside this iPhone. One idea, spreading little by little, changing its use as it goes.
In closing — Darkroom Notes, Season 3
Darkroom Notes closes Season 3 here. An instant from a video, an illustration of a face, and a business card. What the three tools share is just one thing: your material never leaves the device. Not a flashy thing to have in common. But it's probably the one thing I least want to bend.
What I'll take out next, I haven't decided yet. The family, though, is set to grow a little more.
STIL.BIZ is out on the App Store. If you like, photograph one of those cards piled up on your desk.
