Writing

Three apps in three weeks, and what each one leaves out

· 2 min read

Three apps in three weeks, and what each one leaves out

I’m building three desktop apps at the same time: Genvas, Kadr and Herdtrude. For each one, the decision that shaped it was something I left out.

Genvas has no chat box

Genvas is a node canvas for image, video and audio. The agent builds the graph, wires the nodes and runs them, the way it works with Paper. Mid-September a design agent started adding chat to the app, and I stopped it:

any llm interface inside the app its all via mcp same as paper

So there are no threads and no LLM interface inside the app. The agent is the interface, over MCP. There’s an LLM node on the canvas for plain text, and no chat panel. Version 1.3.2 added a Connect button that sets up the MCP tools and a prompting skill for Claude Code and Codex.

The Genvas landing page attacked you

The public beta went out on October 1, as 1.3.0. Then I opened the landing page and couldn’t tell what was going on. It hits you with a lot of stuff, and the padding between elements was broken. I made the screen smaller and put the coding agent and the download in the first screen. The copy has one rule: no made up numbers, everything real.

The price is $99 once, or $79 as a founder. No trial. I want it as secure as possible against free use. I’m sending 12 copies to friends so it’s real. It’s at 1.3.4 now.

Three small boxes on a table

Kadr is meant to be invisible

Kadr is a Mac app for screenshots and screen recordings. It exists because of file size. I recorded a three minute video with another screenshot app and got about 800 MB out of it. Annoying enough that I built my own. I also like agent native tools.

The redesign brief on Paper was to make it airier, trim some features, hide others, almost invisible, an app that just does its job. The trim map had 40 rows. I went through it with 14 comments on Paper: 8 cut, 5 kept, 1 parked, and the parked one was cloud. So no cloud at first. Video gets two actions, Save and Export & Copy, and the video and image editors have to feel like the same app because they are.

The first redesign was kinda close to the app it started from. I wanted personality and something more intuitive across the whole app. The look is glass, with transparency, not a plain white window, and every icon done properly instead of lazily.

Kadr is on 1.0.2. Version 1.0.1 made MP4 the default instead of MOV.

Herdtrude never syncs logins

Herdtrude is the third one, still in development. I designed it on Paper too. The first interface got approved, but the style was too aisloppy and needed some creativity to get away from average AI. A later round looked clean, but I wasn’t sure it fit Apple’s native feel, and it needed fewer shadows because they looked dirty.

The one decision I’ve written down is about accounts. Each machine keeps its own logins, and only the usage report crosses SSH. Claude refresh tokens are single use and rotate, so copying a login to another machine logs the first one out. I have the decision marked open.