A one-person software company
Software built to fit everyone ends up fitting no one in particular. These are the other kind: small, sharp tools made to solve a problem.
or write to tom@prettygoodsoftware.llc
Two apps
01For people who count what they eat
An iPhone app for logging meals. Type what you ate the way you would say it. Tally finds each food in trusted nutrition data, guesses the portion, and asks when a guess could change your day. Your balance is a rolling seven-day total.
02For physical therapists
An iPhone app for reviewing how a client moves. Step through a clip one frame at a time, measure joint angles directly on the video, or switch on the skeleton and let it follow the joints for you, and record your analysis out loud while you point at what matters. When you're finished, the app puts it together as a PDF report the client can take home. It all happens on the phone that recorded the clip.
No accounts, no cloud sync, no analytics. Clips, notes, and the reports you make from them stay on the phone that recorded them. There is no server for them to go to.
Because the boring work wasn't going to automate itself.
That's how I started programming, and it's still the motive. My day job is tech lead on a back-office and accounting application. I'm Thomas Horn, I design these apps, write the code, and answer the email.
Not a market segment
Every app here starts as one particular problem that someone actually has. If that problem is yours, the app will fit.
The only costs in a company like this are building and maintaining the apps. There is no ad spend to recoup and no growth target to hit. So I choose what to work on by whether the problem is interesting and worth solving properly, not by the size of the audience.
Software engineer in Raleigh, North Carolina
Tally · How it's built
The app sends the meal as typed. The API asks a Claude model what was eaten, looks each food up in trusted nutrition sources, and keeps the log in Postgres.
Tally · What it remembers
Memory is checked before any model runs. A meal you have had before comes back the way you left it, and uses no lookup.
Things you can say
Whose amount wins
The top one wins. Every amount on a card says which one it came from.
Tally · The hard part
Problem
A food log only helps if its numbers are believable and repeatable. The same meal should land on the same number, and a guess should say it is a guess.
Confidence
Consistency
How a guess becomes yours
Tally · In progress
What testers hit
Balsamic was offered in grams. “Olive oil dressing” found nothing.
What's changing
Blind test on 161 real searches
Searches that found the right food
Video Coaching · How it's built
Clips are copied into the app's own storage and never leave the phone. Every screen talks to one storage interface, so a server could slot in later without rewriting them.
Video Coaching · The hard part
Problem
By default, AVPlayer seeks to the nearest keyframe, which can land several frames off. Reviewing a squat one frame at a time is the whole job.
Fix
item.step(byCount: 1) player.seek(to: t, toleranceBefore: .zero, toleranceAfter: .zero)
Drawings are vectors pinned to a frame and drawn live over the video, so they stay editable and never get burned in.
Asking for frame 9
Snaps back to the nearest keyframe, three frames early.
Decodes forward from the keyframe and stops on frame 9.
Keyframe Frame asked for
Thomas Horn
Questions about how any of it works are welcome.
tom@prettygoodsoftware.llc