#iPhone
13 posts- 3 min
A deck on my desk — Darkroom Notes, Season 6, and STIL.HUB
That little machine on a streamer's desk, rows of buttons across its face — I'd always been a bit envious of it. Your everyday actions, sitting there as physical buttons. Then it struck me: there was already an iPhone on my desk. Darkroom Notes Season 6 is about STIL.HUB, the app that turns an iPhone into a control deck for your Mac.
- 3 min
No second take — Darkroom Notes, Season 5, and STIL.NOTE
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.
- 3 min
Save the audio first — after losing fifteen minutes
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.
- 3 min
The talk becomes a note — a fifth tool, and the end of Darkroom Notes Season 5
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.
- 3 min
I built it for my own taxes — Darkroom Notes, Season 4, and STIL.RECEIPT
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.
- 2 min
Every real bug becomes a test — one receipt stands guard
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.
- 3 min
When a receipt becomes an expense — a fourth tool, and the end of Darkroom Notes Season 4
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.
- 3 min
The cards I didn't want to upload — Darkroom Notes, Season 3, and a fourth app: STIL.BIZ
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.
- 4 min
Hidden in plain sight — Darkroom Notes, Season 2, and a second app: STIL.TOON
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.
- 3 min
It froze on the fifth — when debugging changes the spec
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.
- 2 min
I stopped saying "the focus seems soft" — facing a placeholder number
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.
- 3 min
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.
- 3 min
The moment you missed is still in the video — starting "Darkroom Notes"
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.