Gravitaz

Silly apps for serious people.

Gravitaz is me, building apps the way I’ve built software for the better part of two decades. Some of the apps aren’t serious. The engineering is.

The apps

Two so far (that are live). Both have real people using them, which still surprises me.

A silly app for serious peoplein the headline right now

Dreambly

Dream casting, together.

Pick a movie, a show, a dinner party, a starting five: anything with slots worth arguing over. Everyone casts in secret, then you gather for a live reveal and vote on the best.

Your picks, secret until the reveal
  • The mastermindA real actor
  • The getaway driverYour cousin
  • The dogThe dog

How a sesh goes

  1. 1.Cast in secretAny name counts. A real actor, your cousin, the dog. Nobody sees anyone else’s picks.
  2. 2.Show up for the revealOnce the host starts it, casting is closed. Then you all find out who picked the dog.
  3. 3.VoteOne heart per role. Not for yourself. Nice try.
A Dreambly sesh for Back to the Future: four roles, all cast, a bar showing 3 of 4 players locked in, and one player still casting.Dreambly notifications: the Stranger Things reveal is live, an invite to Jurassic Park, results for The Princess Bride, and a few badges earned.

Up to 12 per sesh, because 13 opinions about one role is how friendships end.

Visit dreambly.io

A serious app for silly people

Spendoza

Find out where the money went.

A personal and household finance tracker. Upload your bank statements and it sorts your spending into categories, so you can set goals based on what you actually spend.

Illustrative. Your miscellaneous may vary.
  • Groceries
  • Subscriptions you forgot about
  • Miscellaneous

How it works

  1. 1.Upload a statementPDF or CSV. It does the sorting. You argue with it about whether that was ‘dining’ or ‘groceries.’
  2. 2.See where it goesCharts for where it went, what came in, and how much you kept. Brace yourself.
  3. 3.Set goals, alone or togetherBudgets per category and savings targets, with shared dashboards for a household.
The Spendoza dashboard: a bar chart of $4,539 income against $3,583 expenses for the month, and a donut chart of spending by category, led by housing at 50% and groceries at 14%.Spendoza’s recurring expenses, each tagged auto-detected: rent, electric, water, internet, Netflix, Spotify, a gym membership and two insurance premiums, with amount, category, monthly frequency and next due date.

Your statement is deleted once it has been read. Only the transactions are kept.

Visit spendoza.io

On the way

Two more, not out yet.

Coming soon to app stores

Hustlin’

Every mile counts. Even the ones you walked around the house.

Log your runs, walks and bike rides, keep a daily streak going, and chip away at a monthly distance goal. Start a challenge with friends and everyone’s miles go toward one shared goal, so you can’t be the one who slacked.

Syncs with Apple Health, so workouts you already did count without retyping them.

The Hustlin’ Today screen: a 3-day streak, a calendar of October with three logged days, and a ring showing 33.3 of 100 km for the month.

Coming soon to app stores

CharadeFam

Game night for the whole family, from kindergartners to grandparents.

Pick a deck, set a timer and act it out. Easy, Medium, Hard or a mix, plus Little Ones, a deck of pictures for players who can’t read yet. Add players if you want scores, skip it if you want peace.

It’s waiting on App Store review, and an Android version is in the works.

Plays offline, so it works everywhere!

The CharadeFam home screen: deck tiles for Little Ones, Easy, Medium, Hard and Mix, a timer picker set to 60 seconds, and a Let’s play button.

How I build

After twenty years of building software I have opinions. Here are a few of them, written up as architecture decision records (ADRs), which is how engineers write down a decision and why they made it.

  1. ADR-001

    Take the work seriously, not myself.

    The jokes live in the copy. The data model, the auth flow and the backups are not in on them.

    Accepted

  2. ADR-002

    Boring technology for ridiculous ideas.

    A dream-casting party game is novel enough. Its database should be the least interesting thing about it.

    Accepted

  3. ADR-003

    Collect less.

    Spendoza reads your bank statement, keeps the transactions and deletes the file. I don’t want your bank statements. Nobody should want your bank statements.

    Accepted

  4. ADR-004

    If it doesn’t fit on one page, it isn’t designed yet.

    I’ve sat through the forty-slide architecture deck. Nobody remembers slide twelve, including the person presenting it. One page, then build.

    Accepted

  5. ADR-005

    Ship small, and be able to take it back.

    Big-bang releases are how weekends disappear. I ship small things I can undo.

    Accepted

  6. ADR-006

    Put it on a blockchain.

    Considered. I laid down until that feeling passed.

    Rejected

Say hi

Gravitaz LLC is one engineer. I still think the best reason to build something is that it would be funny if it worked.