While DigTek focuses on iOS apps for thoughtful technology, there's another story happening in the background: a collection of macOS apps built purely for personal productivity. These aren't polished App Store releases—they're experimental tools that solve specific problems in my daily workflow.

Unlike the constraint-focused iOS apps that define DigTek's public face, these macOS tools embrace complexity when it serves a purpose. They're built with one user in mind: me. And that changes everything about the design process.

The Philosophy of Personal Tools

When you build for yourself, different rules apply:

  • Skip unnecessary scalability - Hardcode what works for your specific workflow
  • Embrace perfect execution over broad appeal - Three features that work flawlessly beat fifteen mediocre ones
  • Respect existing tool investments - Enhance what you already use instead of replacing it
  • Document learnings for future tools - Each app teaches something about productivity and design

This approach has produced several macOS apps that I use daily or weekly, each solving a different aspect of knowledge work.

AppStorm: The Meta-App That Manages Everything

The most recursive project in my portfolio: an app that manages all my other app development projects.

The Problem: Resuming any app development after having had a break.

The Solution: An app that tracks project status and provides intelligent templates for new projects. When I open AppStorm, I see my entire portfolio at a glance—which projects are active, which need attention, and which are ready for the next phase.

But AppStorm goes deeper than project management. It includes a template system with platform intelligence: choose iOS and get SwiftUI + Core Data guidance, choose web and get React + TypeScript patterns. The templates adapt to provide exactly the context I need for development.

WorkLogger: Automatic Work Intelligence

Traditional work logging requires manual input: "What did I do today? How many meetings? What needs follow-up?" WorkLogger semi-automates this.

The Core Innovation: Combined with custom prompts and natural language parsing of daily entries, WorkLogger automatically extracts:

  • Meeting count and duration analysis
  • Outstanding TODOs accumulated across days and weeks
  • Time spent in meetings as percentage of work week
  • Full weekly summaries and monthly reports for client billing

The calendar-first navigation feels natural—you think "what did I do Tuesday?" not "what's in document #47?" The automatic parsing means I can focus on documenting work instead of categorizing it. The tool respects how I naturally document work while providing the structure clients expect.

WorkAssistant: The Practical Clipboard Manager with Attention Insights

WorkAssistant started as a simple need: "I copy things throughout the day and lose track of important snippets." It evolved into something more sophisticated.

Primary Function: Multi-day clipboard management with search, favorites, and tagging. Build a personal snippets archive as a natural part of workflow—code blocks, email templates, research notes, meeting links.

Secondary Insight: Clipboard history reveals attention patterns. When you're context-switching heavily, your clipboard shows it: random URLs, partial sentences, fragments of different tasks. When you're in deep work, clipboard entries cluster around related topics.

The attention wellness aspect emerged from usage patterns. Seeing your scattered daily activities made visible creates awareness of fragmentation costs. Not revolutionary, but practically useful for recognizing when your day has become too scattered.

The keyboard-first design supports flow state. No mouse required. The tool disappears into workflow while preserving everything you might need later.

SuperBear: Ecosystem Tools for Bear Notes Power Users

Bear is excellent for note-taking but lacks analysis tools. Instead of building a Bear replacement, I built Bear enhancers.

The Approach: With Bear integration, SuperBear provides specialized analysis and workflow shortcuts. Track personal data in Bear's comfortable interface, analyze patterns in a specialized tool.

Key Features:

  • Quick navigation to frequently-used notes and tags
  • Parsing of specialized data tables for quantified self tracking
  • Correlation analysis of tracked activities and outcomes
  • Export workflows that respect Bear's organization

The insight: Don't compete with tools people love. Enhance them. As a Bear user I already had comfortable workflows—SuperBear adds capabilities without disrupting established habits.

SeasonalPlanner: Family Coordination That Follows Natural Rhythms

Planning family activities across seasons revealed a UI challenge: how do you design for both "5 activities" and "100+ activities" without compromising either experience?

The Solution: Adaptive responsive design with automatic season detection.

The interface starts simple—current season automatically selected, clean grid layout for activities. As you add more, it gracefully scales: search appears when helpful, pagination when beneficial, column count adapts to window width.

Bear Integration: Activities export as properly formatted Bear notes for external editing. Family members can collaborate in Bear, then import back to SeasonalPlanner. The tool respects existing family workflows while providing visual organization.

The adaptive design principles proved valuable beyond family planning—they're now part of my approach to any interface that needs to scale elegantly.

Photo Batch Renamer: Solving My Own Import Chaos

Photography as a hobby generates hundreds of files with terrible camera naming—IMG_0001, DSC_0234, P1080567. I needed organized, searchable filenames for my personal archive and portfolio work.

The Personal Problem: Importing photos from multiple memory cards during a weekend photography trip resulted in inconsistent naming across batches. Traditional batch renamers work per-import, but I think in "sessions"—a landscape trip, a family event, a photography walk.

The Solution: Session-aware workflow that remembers context across multiple imports. Start renaming photos from the first memory card of a weekend trip, and when you import the second card, the app continues the sequence automatically. Simple concept, but no existing tool handled it properly.

This became one of the most-used tools in my photography workflow. The session management feels obvious in retrospect, but it solved a daily frustration that I hadn't seen addressed elsewhere.

Photo Batch Culling: Reviewing Photos Efficiently

Success with batch renaming led to the next workflow bottleneck: reviewing hundreds of photos to decide which ones are worth keeping and processing.

The Daily Reality: Return from a photography outing with several hundred photos, need to cull down to the ones worth developing in post-processing. Professional tools like Photo Mechanic exist but cost $150+ for features I'd use occasionally.

Personal Solution: Clean keyboard-driven interface for rapid photo review with pick/reject flags, star ratings, and seamless Adobe XMP export for Lightroom integration. The multi-status system lets me work however feels natural—sometimes I flag picks, sometimes I rate, sometimes both.

Implementation Details: Sub-1-second photo loading, proper EXIF orientation handling, safe delete operations with detailed reporting.

Integration Value: Works seamlessly with the batch renamer for complete import-to-cull workflow. Two specialized tools that handle the repetitive parts of photography organization, letting me focus on the creative aspects.

The culling app represents evolution from solving one workflow problem to addressing the broader photo management challenge that I face regularly as someone who shoots frequently and needs efficient organization.

Lessons from Building for Yourself

Several months of daily and weekly use with these tools has revealed patterns that apply beyond personal productivity:

Constraint Selection Matters More Than Feature Addition

Each app succeeded by embracing specific limitations. AppStorm shows one project at a time to prevent cognitive overload. WorkLogger enforces one entry per day for focused reflection. WorkAssistant stores everything locally to build trust and simplicity.

Automatic Workflows Beat Manual Configuration

The most-used features are the ones that require no decisions: automatic season detection in SeasonalPlanner, calendar-first navigation in WorkLogger, current project auto-selection in AppStorm, content-type detection in TextPure.

Users appreciate intelligence that eliminates cognitive overhead, not options that create decision fatigue.

External Tool Integration Beats Replacement

SuperBear's success with Bear integration validates a broader principle: enhance what people already use instead of forcing tool migration. The apps that work best in my daily routine are the ones that respect existing workflows while adding missing capabilities.

The Commercial Context

These apps represent hundreds of hours of development time, but they're not products in the traditional sense. They're research and development for understanding how knowledge workers actually use software.

Why Not Commercialize Them?

The value is in the learning, not the licensing. Each app taught something about productivity software design that influences DigTek's iOS development:

  • Constraint as liberation (from AppStorm's template discipline)
  • Automatic intelligence over manual configuration (from seasonal detection)
  • Ecosystem enhancement over replacement (from Bear integration)
  • Adaptive design over fixed layouts (from responsive scaling)

What This Means for DigTek

The hidden macOS apps validate DigTek's constraint philosophy from a different angle. While the iOS apps demonstrate constraint through simplicity, the macOS apps show constraint through focus—each solves exactly one problem excellently.

The Pattern: Whether you're building simple iOS tools or sophisticated macOS utilities, the principle remains the same: Choose your constraints intentionally, then excel within them.

This approach produces both the minimalist beauty of NoteToSelf and the specialized power of WorkAssistant. Different problems, different solutions, same underlying philosophy.

The Future: These personal tools probably won't become commercial products, but the patterns they've validated will influence everything DigTek builds going forward.

Sometimes the most important software development happens in private—tools built for an audience of one that teach lessons valuable to many. The hidden macOS apps represent months of productivity experimentation, each teaching something different about how thoughtful constraint can create powerful solutions.