We build apps that we care about.
Two are out now:
- PaperBrain: Reads handwritten notebooks and creates a second brain.
- Spectra: Turns a phone into a rack of instruments for paranormal investigation.
A third one, BioPace, is in development. It tracks your runs and coaches you while you run.
None of them started as a business plan. We wanted them to exist, so we built them.
PaperBrain
Available now
Ask your handwritten notebooks anything.
Photograph a page and PaperBrain transcribes it, cursive and scratch-outs included, then keeps it in a library you can search. Ask a question in the workspace and the answer comes back with a link to the page it came from.
- Reads real handwriting
- A vision model does the transcription and keeps the page's structure: headers, lists, the line you crossed out.
- Search the whole library
- Full-text search over every page you've added, so finding the lecture or the invoice doesn't mean flipping through anything.
- A workspace that cites its sources
- Ask a question about everything you've captured and the answer points back to the note it came from.
- Yours to take with you
- Collections, tagging that remembers your corrections, and Markdown export by page or by collection.
A mobile app is on the way.
rebrand mtg — Mar 12
keep the old wordmark
new mark, lose the gradient
ask Sam re: type licence
Workspace
What did I decide about the rebrand?
You dropped the old wordmark and went with the new mark, without the gradient.
linkcited: “rebrand mtg — Mar 12”
Spectra
Available now
Keep still to calibrate. Then move slowly and watch the field.
Spectra turns the sensors already in your phone into a full set of investigation instruments. It tracks the magnetic field and the direction it’s coming from, watches pressure and motion, listens for words underneath the room noise, and records every session so you can work back through it later.
- EMF Δ, with a bearing
- The magnetometer learns the room's ambient field, then reports how far each reading climbs above it and which direction is pushing it.
- An ITC channel
- Speech recognition writes down what you say and listens underneath it for anything answering back.
- Pressure and stability together
- Barometric change and motion are tracked side by side, so a spike that only happened because you were walking gets discounted.
- Sessions you can go back to
- Every contact is timestamped and the whole investigation is recorded, so you can work through it again afterwards.
- Keeps reading in the background
- Capture continues when you leave the app, with a picture-in-picture readout while you do something else.
- Native signal processing
- The DSP runs on the device in C++, so the readouts keep up with the sensors in real time instead of lagging behind them.
EMF Δ
24.6µT
RAW 71.2 · BASE 46.6
EMF history
“listen”
Sub band · 62 Hz · 0.9s · intensity 14×
BioPace
In development
It coaches you during the run, while you can still do something about it.
BioPace records your runs with live GPS and reads real heart rate from HealthKit or Health Connect. A coach watches your pace and heart rate as you go and tells you when to adjust. Everything is stored on your phone, so it works without an account.
- Live GPS tracking
- It records your route, distance, and pace as you run. It pauses itself when you stop at a crossing and resumes when you set off again.
- Pace you can trust
- Raw GPS pace jumps around, so BioPace smooths the readings and throws out the spikes before they reach the screen or the coach.
- Real heart rate
- Heart rate streams in from HealthKit on iOS or Health Connect on Android, so you can see your zone during the run and your averages afterwards.
- A coach that speaks up
- The coach tells you to ease off or hold steady while you can still act on it, instead of summarizing what went wrong after you get home.
- Plans that fit the goal
- Tell it what you're training for and it builds out the weeks ahead with easy runs, workouts, and rest.
- Local-first
- Every run is saved in a database on your phone. You don't need an account, and cloud sync can be added later without touching your history.
Coming to iOS and Android.
Pace
8:22/mi
Heart rate
156bpm
Zone 4 · threshold
Coach
You’re running 8 seconds faster than target. Ease off a little and save this heart rate for the last two miles.
The studio
Small on purpose.
The person who writes the code is the person who reads the support mail, so a bug report usually turns into a fix the same week. Both apps get worked on because we use them ourselves.
Before the apps there were write-ups about microcontrollers and building things with your hands. Those are still up, and there will be more.
Read the blogarrow_forward