One Person, A Lot Of Hours

I write software on my own, most of the day, most days. Tanooki Studios is the name that work goes out under — a small studio making apps for Mac, iPhone, and whatever desktop the job actually calls for.

I started it because I kept installing things and being quietly annoyed. An app that wants an account to do a job that needs no account. A menu bar tool that ships an analytics SDK. A note-taking app that syncs to a server it never mentions, and which will one day be switched off. None of that is necessary. Most of it isn't even easier to build — it's just what everyone does, so it's what gets done.

So the rule here is boring and it doesn't bend: if the work can happen on your machine, it happens on your machine. Transcribbler transcribes on your Mac. Blabbler does speech recognition on your Mac. Kirby talks to Google directly and keeps nothing in the middle. When something genuinely needs a network — a health record you want on your phone, a restaurant search — I say so on the page, in words, before you tap it. And privacy protections ship switched on. You can turn them off if you want to. You should never have to go and find them.

How Things Get Made Here

Slowly, and one at a time. A one-person studio can't fake a roadmap, so I don't: the Apps page lists everything, including the parts that aren't close to done and the names that are still placeholders. When something is a working title, it says so.

I'd rather ship a small thing that does one job properly than a big thing that does six badly. Some of these will take a long time. A couple probably won't make it at all. That seems like a fair trade for not shipping something I wouldn't install myself.

Talking To Me

There's no support desk and no ticket queue — messages come to me directly. If you've found a bug, have an idea, or want to argue with a decision I've made, the contact form is the way, and it genuinely is read. If you'd like to break things before everyone else does, the beta list is open.

Madilyn Thomas

Founder, Tanooki Studios