pablin.me

Games & apps · Quito

Every shape is real.

pablin.me is a one-person studio making games and apps for Apple devices, one at a time.

New Lodemate: chess, with magnets under the board →

Games

iPhone & iPad · iOS 17 · Free on the App Store

Lodemate

Chess, with magnets under the board. Chess puzzles where magnets move the pieces: 59 proved puzzles in 12 worlds, a new one every day, and whole games against the engine or a friend. One purchase opens everything. iPad · iOS 17 · US$4.99 on the App Store

Back on the Air

Mend it. Tune it in. Put it back on the air. A tube-radio repair game, across the street from Tick Again. Sixteen radios nobody came back for, six real circuits, and a station to hear when you are done. iPhone & iPad · iOS 17 · Free on the App Store

Nectar

Grow flowers. Jar the honey. A beekeeping garden. Plant flowers for your bees, harvest the honey by hand into jars the colour of what they visited, and trade them in a town that shares one sky. iPhone & iPad · iOS 17 · US$4.99 on the App Store

Tick Again

Open it. Mend it. Hear it run. A watch-repair game. Eighteen watches nobody came back for, eight real calibers from an English fusee to a hi-beat automatic, and every part where a watchmaker would find it. iPhone & iPad · iOS 17 · Free on the App Store

Escapement

Build the gears. Let Milo out. A gear puzzle. Set gears on the pegs, let the mainspring turn the crank, and every dial has to stop exactly where the level asks — then the door opens for Milo. iPhone & iPad · iOS 26 · Free on the App Store

Milo Builder

The run is written. Build the level. A puzzle game with the runner turned round. The tape presses the one button and never changes; you place the pieces so the run gets through.

Apps

iPhone, iPad & Mac · iOS 26 · Free on the App Store

Hola PDF

Paper in, clean PDF out. Scan a page straight and clean, search the text of everything you have scanned, then mark documents up, sign them and lock them with a password. Hola PDF Pro is one purchase, no subscription. iPhone, iPad & Apple Watch · iOS 18 · Free on the App Store

Hindcast

How sure is the forecast? A weather app that says how sure it is: one plain sentence, the temperature and three tally marks, with the reason one tap deeper. Forecasts from Apple Weather. iPhone & iPad · iOS 26 · Free on the App Store

Tally

Every number stays yours. Expenses, subscriptions, debt, and goals — tracked and narrated entirely on your device. iPhone & iPad · iOS 26 · Free on the App Store in Ecuador

Mullu

Qué paga cada banco por tu dinero. What Ecuador's banks and cooperativas pay on your savings, ranked from most to least. Every rate is read by hand from the institution's own rate sheet, dated, and linked to the document. In Spanish. iPhone & iPad · iOS 27 · Free on the App Store

Sharp

Many shots. One picture. Six tools for photographs shot more than once: stack the focus, average the noise away, clear the crowd out of a square, build star trails, blend an exposure bracket, or keep the sharpest frame of a burst. iPhone & iPad · iOS 26 · Free on the App Store

Replay Breakdown

Shoot it. Step through every frame. Frame-by-frame video for coaches: step through every frame of the clip you just shot, measure angles, heights and speeds, compare two attempts, talk it through, and send it back slowed down. Mac · macOS 15 · Free on the Mac App Store

Chinagraph

Everything around the edit. Everything around the edit, on the Mac: copy a card to two drives and check every file, cull RAWs at the speed of the keys, merge focus brackets, night skies and Live Photos, then geotag, caption and export. iPhone & iPad · iOS 17 · Free on the App Store

Rake Plus

Change the photo after the shot. Light, air and focus, after the shot. Rake Plus reads how far away everything in a photo is, then clears haze, relights with real shadows, adds fog and shafts of light, and moves the focus.

Hola PDF, in the browser

Hola PDF on the web

holapdf.app does the PDF work on any computer, with nothing to install: merge, split, organize, sign, fill in forms, compress, and turn images into PDFs and back. Your files are read and changed in the browser and never uploaded. Hola PDF Pro on the web, US$20 once, adds redaction, editing text, comparing versions, OCR and passwords.

Open holapdf.app How it stays private
holapdf.app in a browser: Every PDF tool, in your browser, a Choose files button, and cards for the free tools and the Pro ones
holapdf.app · every tool in the browser

Sharp, in the browser

Sharp on the web

sharpmerge.com puts several shots of the same scene together into one, on any computer, with nothing to install: focus stacks sharp from front to back, bursts averaged clean, passers-by taken out, light trails kept, exposure brackets blended, and the sharpest shot of a burst picked. Sharp Pro for the web, US$15 once, lifts the 12-frame limit and adds the retouch brush and 16-bit TIFFs.

Open sharpmerge.com How it works
sharpmerge.com in a browser: Many shots, one picture, with cards for Focus, Clean, Vanish, Trails, Blend and Pick above a Choose photos button
sharpmerge.com · six merges in the browser

Mathematics and physics, on the web

ConvergerLab

Twenty courses in the browser, from geometry and calculus to complex analysis. Every lesson has a lab beside it: drag a point, slide a parameter, predict what happens, then check. Answers are graded as mathematics, and practice comes back when it is due.

convergerlab.com The courses
The ConvergerLab home page: a calculus preview where dragging an orange number moves a secant line toward the tangent of x squared
Calculus preview · drag the secant

A shader series

Ray Kiln

A new Metal shader in every episode. A short video on its page builds it from nothing, beside the full source, every parameter explained, and the sound it makes, which the shader generates too.

raykiln.dev
Kaleidoscope, Ray Kiln shader 4: glowing beads and shapes repeated and mirrored around the centre in a spiral, in the colours of a kiln
Shader 04 · Kaleidoscope

What we won't trade away

Practice

Four commitments every project here is built on — decided before a single feature, not adjusted for one.

Prop. I

Privacy by default

Where an app uses AI, it runs on-device through Apple's own Foundation Models, next to the data it reads.

Prop. II

Build the real thing

We draw interfaces from actual shapes and native components, not pictures of them. If it's on screen, it's the same geometry the code collides against.

Prop. III

Own the whole stack

We write Swift, SwiftUI, and Apple's own frameworks end to end. No cross-platform runtime stands between an app and the OS it ships on.

Prop. IV

Earn every dependency

We treat a third-party package as a liability until it proves otherwise — one more thing a user trusts with their data without ever agreeing to it.

Series

Longer technical write-ups, grouped by topic.

Shot More Than Once

How Sharp 1.2 was built and measured: the first runs on a real iPad, rotation in the aligner, choosing the detail size by eye, exposure blending, stacking in slabs, and retouches that can be reopened.

1 posts · Swift

Keeping Time

How Tick Again runs a mechanical watch: the gear train, the escapement stepping beat by beat, the three sounds in every tick, the timegrapher, winding, the order a movement comes apart, and faults as physics.

7 posts · Swift

Depth & Light

How relighting a photograph works: the depth a Portrait photo carries, turning it into surfaces, and lighting them with three lights that cast real shadows.

7 posts · Photography & rendering

Finance Core

The calculation engine behind Tally: running balances, savings rate, runway, recurring projections, debt payoff, and goal pacing.

7 posts · Swift

Multithreading

Five small C# programs from 2019 on making threads work together: signals, a parallel search, matrix products, a producer and its consumers, and prioritised groups.

5 posts · C#

Parallel Computing

OpenCL and OpenMP from a first kernel to an LU decomposition, then the same decomposition with SSE intrinsics, each version timed.

7 posts · OpenCL · OpenMP

Simulation & Statistics

Twelve C# and Windows Forms programs from 2020: random events, Poisson and Wiener processes, Markov chains, the chi-square test and a bank simulated event by event.

12 posts · C#

The person behind it

Hello, I'm Pablo.

A software engineer based in Quito, Ecuador, working mostly in Swift and C#. pablin.me is where that work ships. Outside of it: books, music, and more podcasts than is reasonable.

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