Philosophy
The north star.
Every app here is measured against one idea, and the idea is not a feature list. It is this: software should give you time back, not ask for more of it.
That sounds obvious until you try to hold to it. Holding to it is most of the work.
Where the time actually goes
It is stolen in small pieces.
Not in the work itself. In the hunting around before the work can start.
Looking after spreadsheets
One sheet for the actions, another for the deliveries, a third somebody else keeps. They all hold a version of the same truth, none of them agree, and keeping them lined up is a job nobody was ever given — it just accumulated.
Scrolling through hundreds of photos
You took the picture precisely so you would have it later. Now "later" means thumbing back through four months of camera roll to find the one that proves what the wall looked like in March.
Digging through the economy
Working out where a project actually stands by assembling it by hand — the contract, the variations, what has been invoiced — each time somebody asks. The answer existed. It was just never anywhere you could look it up.
None of that is the job. It is the tax paid for doing the job, and it is paid in the hours you would rather have spent somewhere else. Every one of these apps exists to stop one of those three from happening again.
A star, not a roadmap.
A roadmap tells you what is coming. A star tells you which way is up — and it still works when something unexpected turns up, which is most weeks.
So there is no list of features waiting to be shipped on a date. There is a direction, and every possible addition gets held up against it: does this give the person using it their time back, or does it quietly take more? Most ideas fail that question. They are good ideas. They are not built anyway.
An app you keep, not an app you feed.
Most software starts helpful and ends up as another thing on the list. You fill it in so it stays accurate. You tidy it so it stays useful. Somewhere along the way the tool became the job.
The test for everything here is simple: at the end of a long day, does this make the next ten minutes easier, or does it want something from me first? Anything that only works if you keep feeding it has already failed. Maintenance — the schema, the sync, the backups — is our problem, and it stays invisible.
How you can tell
- No red badges counting the things you have not done.
- Nothing to set up before it is useful. It opens in a useful state.
- Nothing that breaks quietly if you ignore it for a fortnight.
Never the same thing twice.
Write it once. It belongs in four places — so it goes to four places, by itself.
A line in a Libellus note that starts with a star is homework, in the note and in the homework list, at the same time. A meeting recorded in Capture Log becomes the summary, the decisions and the items in the actions tracker, without anyone copying anything across. A finding photographed on site carries its own number, its coordinate and its place in the report.
Re-entering something you already told the computer is not a small annoyance. It is the clearest sign that the software has handed its work back to you.
How you can tell
- Nothing is typed in twice, anywhere.
- No feature stands on its own — what you capture surfaces wherever it is relevant.
- What you write on a phone in the rain is already filed by the time you are back in the van.
Every choice removed is time given back.
Simplicity here is not a visual style. It is arithmetic.
Every option on a screen is a decision someone has to make, and every decision costs a moment and a little attention. Ten options are not ten times richer than one — they are ten small taxes on somebody who was trying to do one thing. So a screen shows what can be used right now, and nothing else. Choices that can be decided sensibly on your behalf are decided on your behalf.
What comes back is not a screenful of saved clicks. It is the evening you were not going to get: the spreadsheet you did not have to reconcile, the four months of photographs you did not have to scroll through, the afternoon you did not spend reassembling the economy by hand. That is the whole point of the exercise — the simpler this gets, and the fewer things you have to decide, the more of your day is left for what you actually wanted to do.
How you can tell
- A screen shows the tools the situation needs, not every tool there is.
- Sensible defaults instead of a settings page you are expected to visit.
- When there is an obvious answer, the app takes it and tells you, rather than asking.
What it costs
Restraint is the expensive part.
Holding to this means shipping later and shipping less. It means saying no to features that would genuinely help somebody, because they would cost everybody else a little attention every day. It means an app arrives when it is finished rather than when it is announced — which is why some of the apps on this site say "in development" and have said so for a while.
It also means your data stays yours, in your own iCloud, with no account to create and no servers of ours in the middle. Not as a privacy feature bolted on at the end, but because anything else would be one more thing for you to manage.
These are built by one person, in the evenings, for the work he actually does — standing on a site with a phone in one hand and a drawing in the other, and later at the kitchen table looking for a receipt. That is a narrow vantage point, and it is the reason the apps are opinionated rather than configurable.
See whether it holds up
The only honest test of any of this is whether the apps actually make your day shorter. Three of them are free to try.