#on-device
9 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
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.
- 3 min
The iPhone turns a face into a drawing — Vision finds it, Apple Intelligence draws 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.
- 2 min
The camera I didn't build — leaving it to VisionKit
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.
- 3 min
I decided not to hold your data — how I removed the account itself
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.
- 2 min
From one app to a family — closing Season 1
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.
- 3 min
How does the iPhone know which frame is good — inside best-frame extraction
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.
- 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.