We’ve built apps to make it easier to do complex work.
Our goal: Create tools that make it easy for anyone to get the power in their work that programmers enjoy every day.
Here’s what we mean: As programmers we’ve been able to access extraordinary tools that empower our work, and we believe these tools are fundamental to the success that software has had in the last two decades. Chief among these tools: GitHub, Git, and VS Code.
But these tools haven’t been available outside of programming before. So when it’s come time to do non-programming work, we’ve been frustrated by the significant friction that arises at each step.
We wanted to change that, by making the power of the programmer’s workflow easily accessible to non-programmers.
We’ve built three apps: the Projects App, the Experimenter, and the Navigator. Details below, and you can click on each app’s title in blue text for more.
The Projects App
Create powerful projects where your team can collaborate on complex work.
Inspired by the repository structure and pull-request workflow of places like GitHub and GitLab.
Details:
Get the power of a full website for your project in 30 seconds, with your work automatically organized in a way that makes collaboration easier.
How? Instead of having everyone edit a doc at once or send around scattered edits over email (like in google docs, microsoft sharepoint, etc…), your projects have a single, updated version of work, with proposed edits and discussion about those edits linked in a single, organized spot.
We’ve used the Projects App for the pages you’re reading right now. It’s also the tool we use to track insights in the Founders Project. And here’s a simple example of a project for creating music together: A place to share a song in progress, and an organized place to track edits.
Built on top of Discourse with JavaScript, Ember.js, and Ruby on Rails.
The Experimenter
Version control for any file type.
Inspired by Git.
Details:
A lot of apps don’t have an easy way to save versions of your work. Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Photoshop, Logic Pro, and many more: They either have no way to view prior versions at all, or they provide version history only if you use their browser-based versions.
As a result, it’s hard to experiment and try new things in your work. As programmers, we’d never put up with this. We’ve had a brilliant tool for over 15 years called “Git” for version control. But Git is technical and geared toward programmers. So we took the power of Git and made it accessible to non-programmers too.
With just a few clicks, the Experimenter makes it easy to save a version of any file and enter notes about it, so you can always go back and access what you’ve done before.
Built with JavaScript, Node.js, Electron, and AWS (Lambda and DynamoDB).
The Navigator
Navigate across your work by seeing everything open on your desktop - all chrome tabs, apps, and docs - in one spot.
Inspired by the navigation pane in VS Code, Sublime Text, and Atom.
Details:
Mac’s built-in tools (spotlight search, mission control, and the dock) don’t show you everything that’s open on your computer in one easy-to-see place. As a result, it can feel like your open apps, documents, and tabs are hidden.
The Navigator fixes that. It shows you everything open on your computer–every app, window, and Chrome tab–in one spot. Just click what you want to bring it to the front of your screen.
Built with JavaScript, Node.js, Electron, AWS (Lambda and DynamoDB), and AppleScript.