Essays and studio notes from Skriv, Saga, Skue, and Vern—gathered in one place to share how the applications are made and the ideas behind them.
Studio and application notes, each with its own voice and one shared home.
Strong file encryption, without making the archive depend on the app.
Vern is a free Mac utility for one small job: drop in files or folders, choose a password, and receive one protected Apple Encrypted Archive beside them.
The important part is what happens later. Double-click the archive, enter its password in macOS Archive Utility, and the contents come back—even when Vern is not installed.
Protection should not become another kind of lock-in.
Due dates bring the right note back without turning Skriv into a task manager.
Some notes are meant to wait. Skriv can now mark one due today, tomorrow, or on a date you choose, then gather every dated note in a new Reminders view.
The list stays in due-date order, while the date itself travels with the ordinary Markdown file. It is just enough structure to bring an important note back at the right time.
The first public release brings a private reading library home to the Mac.
Saga began with a simple wish: to see books and audiobooks together without handing ownership of a personal reading history to another service. Version 1.0 turns that idea into a native Mac app ready to share.
The shelf stays visually quiet, while each title can hold ratings, status, notes, dates, summaries, and edition details. Insights gives the year a shape through reading progress, frequency, authors, and format patterns.
Goodreads and Audible can add titles, artwork, and useful facts. They can advance an appropriate reading status, but they cannot erase a record, replace a note, or lower a personal rating already stored in Saga. Manual book and audiobook entry remains available for anything the catalogs do not know.
The database can stay in Application Support or move to any accessible folder, including a locally synchronized Dropbox, iCloud Drive, Google Drive, or another cloud service. Careful single-writer locking helps two Macs share the same library without pretending a live database is an ordinary document.
Backups have their own schedule and retention limit. Publishing is optional and exists primarily to keep a simple, current reading list available to an AI when that is useful.
A quiet shelf, a durable record, and no account required.
Saga 1.0 is signed with Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple for Apple silicon Macs. Its installer can replace an earlier version without replacing the library or settings, then move itself to Trash after opening Saga.
The new Dock icons for Saga, Skriv, and Skue share a Nordic sensibility without losing their own identities.
The Dock is a small stage. An icon has to be recognizable at a glance, hold together at small sizes, and still feel at home beside the applications around it.
I wanted the icons for Saga, Skriv, and Skue to look related without turning them into three variations of the same mark. Each application does something different. Its icon should say so.
Saga is cool and glass-like, with four quiet lines that suggest a reading list and the history behind it. Skriv turns a simple writing card into a tactile object, pairing a fjord-blue cover with the familiar rhythm of text. Skue is the most literal of the three: a bright camera eye built around a deep blue lens.
The forms are different, but the materials and color connect them. Each uses depth without becoming glossy for its own sake, quiet blue instead of loud color, and enough texture to feel like an object rather than a flat logo.
Equal canvas dimensions do not create equal presence. Transparent margins, rounded silhouettes, and the amount of visual weight inside each square all change how large an icon feels. The three icons were balanced by eye so that none disappears and none shouts when they sit together.
Three icons. One family.
They belong to different tools, but they now share the same visual home: tactile depth, quiet color, and a little of the Nordic clarity that runs through Verkheim.
Your notes should belong to you—not to an app, an account, or a subscription.
I created Skriv because I was tired of note-taking software asking me to make a permanent commitment just to keep access to my own writing.
Subscriptions have become the default for nearly everything. Some services genuinely need recurring payments because they run expensive servers or provide an ongoing online service. But a notes app should not automatically require a monthly fee simply to let me write, organize, and revisit words stored on my own computer.
I do not want to rent access to my thoughts.
I especially dislike the feeling that if I stop paying for an app, something as personal and basic as my notes may become limited, harder to use, or trapped behind an export process. A company may have designed the interface, but the ideas, lists, drafts, research, and memories inside it are mine. Access to them should not depend on maintaining an account or keeping another subscription active forever.
Many note-taking apps store everything inside a proprietary database. That can make the app feel fast and polished, but it also creates a dependency: the app becomes the only practical doorway into the notes.
If the company changes direction, raises its price, removes a feature, ends support, or disappears, the user is left hoping that an export tool still works. Even when an export exists, the result may lose folder structure, links, dates, formatting, or attachments. A collection of notes built over years should not become a hostage to one application’s internal storage format.
I wanted Skriv to take the opposite approach.
Skriv stores notes as ordinary Markdown files in a folder you choose. Markdown is readable text. You can open it in another editor, inspect it in Finder, copy it, move it, search it with other tools, or keep working without Skriv.
That distinction is the foundation of the app: Skriv is a helpful interface around your notes, not the owner of them.
The application can add organization, tags, folders, links, attachments, search, versions, and a calm writing environment. But underneath that interface, your writing remains made of files you can reach outside the app. If Skriv vanished tomorrow, the notes would still be there.
That is how personal software should work.
Accessible files also make backups more understandable. You can include the library in Time Machine, Dropbox, another backup system, or a simple copy to another drive. Skriv can create verified ZIP backups, but it does not require a special Skriv service to make your data portable.
A backup should not merely preserve a mysterious application database that only one program understands. It should preserve the actual notes and attachments in a form that remains useful.
The goal is not to discourage people from using Skriv. The goal is to make sure no one is forced to keep using it.
Skriv was inspired by the Scandinavian word for “write.” That name reflects what I wanted the application to feel like: simple, clean, focused, and calm.
There is no account required. There is no subscription. There is no Skriv cloud holding the notes. The app is designed to help you write and organize without placing itself between you and your own work.
I believe good software should earn its place by being useful—not by making it difficult to leave.
Your notes should remain accessible. Your backups should make sense. Your files should still be yours when the app is closed.
That is why I created Skriv.
Why a personal reading history deserves a quiet, durable home.
A list can tell you what you own. A library can remind you where you were when you read it, which voice carried the audiobook, why you stopped halfway through, and which author kept appearing during a particular year.
That difference is the reason for Saga. The cover grid is deliberately simple, but the database beneath it is personal: your rating, your status, your notes, your history. Catalogs are useful for filling in facts. They should not become the owner of the record.
Saga therefore treats outside sources as contributors. Goodreads can supply a missing book. Audible can identify titles already in the Mac app. Neither should lower a rating you chose, erase a note, or remove a record because two systems disagree.
The quiet shelf is the surface. The enduring personal record is the point.
A tool small enough to disappear behind its purpose.
Camera software usually wants to become a control center. It gathers grids, recordings, alerts, timelines, users, permissions, settings, and every administrative task into one place. Those systems are useful—but they are not always what you need.
Sometimes the question is simply: what is happening in that room, at that door, or beyond that window? Skue begins and ends with that moment. Open a view, resize it around the rest of the desktop, switch cameras if needed, and keep working.
Staying small is not the absence of design. It is the design decision. The controls remain visible without becoming a toolbar. Settings make names and addresses yours without turning into administration. The window can stay above other work, but it never asks to become the work.
A useful glance should not require a dashboard.
Skue draws from an Old Norse and Norwegian root meaning to look at, behold, or observe. It fits the utility because it describes an action, not a platform—and then leaves the rest alone.
The little camera window is ready to leave the workbench.
Skue began as a very specific answer to a very small annoyance: checking one camera should not require opening an entire camera-management system.
The first public release keeps that answer intact. The video fills the window. The camera chooser, pin, focus control, and close button appear when the pointer arrives and fade away when attention returns elsewhere. Draw any part of a camera to keep only that region in view, or right-click for a larger look at the available screen.
Preparing Skue for other Macs also meant separating it from the private video runtime used during development. The release now carries an independently built, dynamically linked LGPL-compatible mpv and FFmpeg runtime. Its licenses, source revisions, and build options travel with the app, while Skue itself remains the same focused native utility.
Public does not have to mean bigger. It can simply mean ready to share.
Skue 1.1 is signed, notarized, and available for Apple silicon Macs running macOS 15 or later. It still asks for no account, sends no camera information to Verkheim, and stores its camera list on the Mac.