Projects

Read Me! (reading app)

This started as an easy-access RSVP speed reader for web articles and EPUBs on my desktop. I actually paid for a speed reader app back in the day but wanted some UX changes, like showing the full page of text for context and being able to paste in URLs. Eventually, I spun off a full iOS app that makes two creative contributions: (1) Speechify-style text-to-speech for web articles and EPUBs in the same app as an RSVP reader, combining all forms of digitally assisted reading; and (2) finger-scrubbing through the full-page context in the RSVP reader, as if scrubbing through a video, but with text instead. This substantially improves my RSVP comprehension, and you can see it in action in the second half of the demo video. Watch the demo.

Unidex

Unidex is a Pokedex inspired field guide for real life flora and fauna. You take pictures through the app, it IDs and catalogs them, and there's also a quiz mode where you are shown photos you took and you have to pick the correct species name. It's fun and educational! Watch the demo.

Cliff

I basically live in the terminal so this was meant to be an easy way to see if any new TUI's or CLI's were hitting the scene. It tracks new GitHub stars in a given time frame, so you can see what's gotten a lot of attention recently, then install immediately if it looks useful. And you never leave the shell.

Language Inc.

Back in the mid-2010s, my most rampant polyglot days, I got a lot of mileage out of call-and-response language-learning tapes. Now LLMs have gotten good enough that they can generate this kind of Socratic language-teaching curriculum on the fly. I recommend trying the “Hands-Free” mode while doing dishes or something. Watch the demo.

Blurbs

If twitter were an AI journaling app. The ability to easily copy swaths of blurbs into a prompt format makes it useful for AI assisted therapy or coaching as well.

Stacks

I've found that almost every photo I take on my phone falls into some pre-existing category based on one of my interests. For instance, I take a lot of photos of bicycles that I think look cool. This trend is so strong that it makes sense for my photo roll to cluster these photos automatically and make the cluster view the default when I open my photos. However, iPhone does this sort of thing only for people's faces, which is not something I photograph very often. Stacks is a simple UI experiment in automatic photo clustering with a cluster-forward view.

See-Through Map

This is me trying to imagine what it would be like to use a maps app while wearing display glasses. More broadly, this is a first foray into a newish area of interest of mine: transparent UIs designed to be seen through. I am still bullish on display glasses (even after all these years, post-Google Glass and post-Apple Vision Pro) and would like to see more design work done in this area.

Calendar

I dislike gcal's liberal use of popups so I use this instead. For my uses it's simpler and faster.