Somebody should
build this.
We make small, finished software. Usually something we noticed could be better, or thought ought to be there, made because we were curious about it and because we could.
The name
We landed on the moon in 1969. We put wheels on suitcases in 1970.
The wheel is about five and a half thousand years old. Suitcases have been around since the eighteen hundreds. For that entire overlap, people carried heavy luggage past perfectly good wheels.
The upright kind everyone actually uses took until 1987, when a pilot bolted two wheels and a telescoping handle to a case and started selling them to his crew. Nothing had to be invented. It just took somebody to bother.
The world is full of obvious things that do not exist yet. Once you start noticing them, it is hard to stop, and that is mostly how we pick what to make next.
Work
What we’ve made
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Desert Island Draft
Android · iOSA survival game where the entire game is the packing list. You get ten things off a table of seventy-six and about thirty seconds to choose. Then the island reads your list back to you, slowly, for years.
What was overdue: everybody has played this one in their head already. What ten things would you take? It turns out the question gets much better when something is listening, and holds you to the answer for years.
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Get This
In testingA reading app that teaches high school students SAT vocabulary through stories about things they already follow: sports, music, movies. Every story is written for the app, with the words already in it. It tests each word in more than one way, keeps track of the ones you actually have, and the next story gets harder where you are ready for it.
What was overdue: nobody ever learned a word from a list. You pick them up from something you wanted to read anyway, which is a lovely excuse to go and write the things teenagers actually want to read, and let the vocabulary live inside them.
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Worldsworth
AndroidA cosy word game about a trip. You hold a hand of letters and play one word a turn onto a board that keeps everything you put down. Between rounds you are somewhere: Paris in the rain, a market in Bordeaux, lavender, then Venice at dusk, each one drawn in cut paper and scored with its own music.
What was overdue: a word game is a good thing to do with your hands while your mind goes somewhere else. It seemed a shame to let it go nowhere in particular, so this one goes to Paris.
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Decision Day
AndroidA college admissions simulator. You describe yourself: grades, scores, courses, where you are from. Then you choose ten colleges from two hundred, and wait. The letters arrive one at a time. Every decision is drawn at your real odds for that college, worked out from what the college publishes about itself, so the same application can go either way.
What was overdue: the numbers are all public, so the whole thing can be played out before it ever happens to you. It is a strange relief to apply to ten places on a Tuesday and find out what a ten percent chance really feels like, while it is still only a Tuesday.
How we work
- It works without us. Nothing we make needs a server of ours to stay alive. No live service, no subscription, nothing that stops working the day we stop paying a bill.
- No accounts. There is nothing to sign up for. Where a game saves to the cloud it uses the one already on your phone, and the save stays in your account, not ours.
- It never lies. If the game says something happened, it happened, and you can go and read why.
- We finish things. We are small on purpose. One good idea, carried all the way to the end.