Assorted side quests I've shipped, half-shipped, or refuse to take down.
Alphametics, word wheels and a growing set of puzzle types, every one generated live by a constraint solver and proven to have exactly one answer before it reaches you.
The same engine feeds a book factory: print and digital collections, typeset from the generator, so the books are as unique as the site.
Enter a due date and it shows where you are, week by week, in glowing painted art that ripples like it is breathing. Leave the date blank and it plays the whole journey, from the first spark of cells to the last weeks before you meet.
It is a screensaver with a heart: sixty-odd facts and small poems rotate under the art, the chrome fades away when you stop moving, and nothing leaves the browser. Built to be left running on a screen in the house, and to be sent to someone who is expecting.
A theme park floating in space, built on Roblox. Every visitor carries a PlexPad, a handheld computer running cosmOS: an in-world operating system with files, processes, SSH and a firewall. Every ride is a node on the park network.
There is a programming language (cosmicLua), programmable robots, hacking puzzles, STEM labs, capsule racing on the ceiling, and a missing manager named Dale. It is still being built.
Five WebGL ink experiences built on a custom ink engine: blots bloom where you touch, bleed along the paper grain and slowly fade, and what you do in one carries into the others.
Less a game than a place to sit with for a while.
Latchworks is an imprint for puzzle chains: books of ciphers that hand off to each other (keyed Vigenères, keyhole checksums, salted handoffs, XOR meta-locks) until the last one opens the door. The whole dependency graph is generated and then proven solvable before a page is printed.
The Keyholders is the first series: Vol. I, The Application and Vol. II, The Handbook. latch.works is the companion desk, with magnifier, field journal and keyhole, for anyone who wants to work the ciphers online.
Open a room and your guests join from their phones. No app, no accounts. The evidence arrives course by course, you argue it out across the table, and you name the killer.
Fair-play means the golden-age rules: every clue needed to solve the case is on the table before the reveal, and a solver proves it. The Host's Dossier is a printable case kit with the membership code that unlocks a full case for your table.
A browser music toy that kept growing features until it started looking like a DAW. Paused, not abandoned: it comes back out whenever there is a new idea for the sequencer.
ProdoPro is built with the goal of personal growth. How is your precious time being spent? Cards move along a work pipeline, work happens in timed spikes, and every spike lands on a daily, weekly and monthly picture of where the hours went.
Rooms for chat with checklists and replies, a whiteboard you can draw on right through the conversation, friendly competition, and streamlined processes that obviate the need for traditional standups. Small and lean and always improving, with companion apps for Apple Watch, iOS and Android.
Capture Mate lets you record any region of your Mac and export it as a GIF, MP4, or raw frames. Change your recording and export framerate at any time, remove unwanted frames and export selections of frames.
GIFs are universally supported, so you can attach an example of a bug to a ticket, demonstrate functionality to a client, or bring some life to an email.
No longer on the App Store since I stopped maintaining it, but the site stays up for posterity.
appsbynick hosts a collection of iPhone and iPad games released in my own time. Whenever I am in the mood to make a quick little game, I invariably end up working on an iOS game. I have more 90%-finished iOS games than I know what to do with.
It is way, way more fun to prototype games than it is to polish and release them. The apps have since left the App Store; the site is kept for posterity.
Neon Explosion is a fun little HTML5 drawing canvas and full-screen art gallery, created to let my four-year-old safely collect and share her digital art. Rainbow tools, slinkys and fading colour-cycle pens are one tap away.
The current form was built in four days, and during those four days I fell in love with the concept.
Oh, Kanban! is an easy-to-use HTML5 kanban cardwall created for the 2010 48-hour Rails Rumble. We started really late, so it never got every feature I wanted, but it still runs.
Keyboard Concert was an HTML5 keyboard that let you play music for any number of observers, who watched the performance live and rated it. Recordings could be replayed and rated later.
The idea hit me, so I went to work and wrote the app over the course of a day: Rails 3 with HTML5 websockets. The Heroku app it lived on is long gone, but the screenshot survives.
Ten small browser games written between 2006 and 2008 on Prototype.js, before jQuery took over the world. They run today exactly as they did then, and every one shows its source.