North Island Technologies
01
hyperglyph
A considered way to learn a language, built around the films you watch and the conversations you wish you could have.
Most language apps optimise for streaks and daily minutes. hyperglyph is built for the opposite temperament: the learner who would rather sit with one film, one conversation, or one phrase they keep failing to remember.
The material comes from what you are already watching and the things you actually want to be able to say, rather than a fixed syllabus.
02
cloudtown
A browsing-first way to put art on the things you wear: part shop, part art-history lesson.
An app for ordering custom printed goods, starting with t-shirts, built around browsing rather than searching. You spend your time in a feed of art (rating it, commenting on it) and can put any image onto a shirt and order it.
The direction it is being pushed is educational: artist and movement context alongside the browse-and-remix loop, so the time spent is spent learning something.
03
river of light
Tools for curating and reflecting on what you listen to: some agency back from the algorithm.
A set of tools for managing your relationship with your music streaming service: discovering, organising, curating and reflecting on what you listen to.
The premise is that streaming services are built to keep you listening rather than to give you any insight into your own taste, and that the listener should get more agency over both.
04
peachie
A credit card points and perks manager that tells you plainly whether the annual fee is worth it.
Premium cards come with statement credits, points and perks that are individually small, separately administered, and easy to forget until they expire. peachie keeps them in one place and answers the only question that matters: given what you have actually used this year, is the annual fee worth paying?
It is read-only by design. It reads balances and credits; it never moves money.
05
firn
Custom air-quality sensors reporting to a cloud API and a home monitoring app. Hardware, firmware and all.
An end-to-end smart-home system built from the sensor up: custom air-quality monitoring hardware, firmware, a Go cloud API, and a Flutter app for monitoring and control.
The full software pipeline is live. What remains is hardware bring-up: flashing, provisioning and registering a real device end to end.
06
hirameki
Tools for scientists: generating research ideas and managing the literature behind them.
Generates new research ideas and helps manage the literature behind them, using semantic search over a corpus of papers to find connections a keyword search would miss. The oldest surviving app on the platform.
Its source directory is gone, leaving only a compiled image pinned by digest so it can never drift or be overwritten. Named for 閃き, hirameki: the flash of insight, the instant before an idea becomes anything, the whole point of a tool built to help find one.
07
bonsai
A second brain for career work, agent-accessible, so Claude Code can read and act on it directly.
A goals tree and notes system built to improve one career (mine) with the explicit instruction that evolving the system itself is in scope rather than a distraction from the work.
It is private, and listed here because it is the tool the rest of this index is planned in.