Building Camaïeu in public

I make iOS apps on my own — design, code, everything — and I avoid social media almost completely. So naturally I've entered a hackathon whose second-biggest prize is for building in public.

This is the devlog. Here's the deal I'm making with myself: three short posts a week through September, and no performing. Questions I actually haven't answered, clips of things actually moving, and honest notes on what shipped and what broke. If that sounds bearable to you too, follow along.

The app

Camaïeu is a generative ambient art app for iPhone. You open it and something is alive on screen — a composition built from hand-tuned shape families, each seed a little different, nothing random enough to be ugly. You can shuffle it, recolor it, and let it run: free-running, paced to your breathing, or as a quiet focus timer. That's the whole app. No feed, no streaks, no cloud.

The name is the French term for painting in tones of a single hue, and it's also literally how the app works: everything renders in grayscale, and color is applied at the last moment through a gradient map. Geometry never knows what color it is. One consequence I like a lot: recoloring a living composition costs nothing — the shapes never stop moving.

Why this app

Motion is a throughline of my work. A long time ago I built Squirmy Puzzle in Flash; more recently Tessera, a puzzle app whose animated tiles I made in After Effects. Tessera's loops are hand-crafted and frozen — every player sees the same motion I rendered. Camaïeu is what happens when that motion comes alive: generated on the device, in real time, never quite the same twice. The shape math actually started life as After Effects scripts before I ported it to Swift and Metal.

Where it stands

The engine came together in an intense sprint in July, while I had the time: two shape families on a shared Metal renderer, the palette system, the session modes, shareable favorites, export to Live Photo and video. Now my day job is back, and what's left is the part you can see — the real interface, the paywall, the App Store — built in mornings, on trains, and on weekends. In public, apparently.

The plan is deliberately small: ship a finished Camaïeu this month, then keep improving it in the open — a third shape family is already designed and queued for after launch. Shipping early beats polishing in private, and App Store review times are the one thing I can't control, so buffer is part of the plan.

What's coming here

Mondays I'll post a real open decision — first up: the app will have a free tier that never cripples the experience, and I haven't decided which shape family it gets. Wednesdays, a few seconds of motion. Fridays, what shipped and what broke.

If you have opinions — on the art, the free tier, or ambient apps in general — I'd honestly like to hear them, in the form below or on Bluesky. What changes because of your feedback will be credited, by name, when this ends.

Next post Friday: a tour of what exists so far.

Camaïeu is built for RevenueCat's Shipaton 2026. #Shipaton #BuildInPublic