Blog
Notes from the workbench
Engineering, tooling, and the occasional build log.
06/23/2026 · Björn Kindler
Mundwerk 1.2 — hands-free dictation and automatic paragraphs
A toggle recording mode means you no longer have to hold a key while you talk — and pauses now turn into spaces and paragraphs on their own. Notes on the 1.1/1.2 updates, and shipping fast enough to break something.
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06/21/2026 · Björn Kindler
RadianceView — a native splat viewer (and editor) for the Mac
RadianceKit trains Gaussian splats; RadianceView is where you open, clean up and export them. A build log: the sort bottleneck I had to fix, the clean-up tools, and why it is its own app.
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06/16/2026 · Björn Kindler
Heightmap — from my laser and UV printer to an app
I am a maker with a laser that engraves relief and a UV flatbed printer. I kept needing clean 16-bit height maps from ordinary photos — so I built the tool I was missing.
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05/09/2026 · Björn Kindler
RadianceKit 1.4 — COLMAP import, Continue Training, and a careful cleanup
The 1.4 update opens RadianceKit up to existing photogrammetry reconstructions, lets you extend a training run, and spends a lot of its effort on the unglamorous parts: storage, memory limits, and over-training.
Read the post →05/06/2026 · Björn Kindler
Shipping Mundwerk 1.0 — Local-First Dictation on macOS
Mundwerk shipped on May 4. Here is what building a fully on-device dictation tool for macOS actually looks like — the tech choices, the friction points, and what did not make it into v1.
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04/17/2026 · Björn Kindler
Building Druckkosten — a print-cost calculator for the Mac, in 13 languages
A Mac app for print shops, copy shops and design agencies. Local-first, SwiftData, PDF quotes — and yes, it really does ship in 13 languages. Here is what went into v1.
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04/05/2026 · Björn Kindler
Quinque — a daily word game I built for my father
My 82-year-old father and I both like the daily five-letter word puzzle. I did not want him wading through ad-choked web versions — so I built one he plays on the iPad and I play on the Mac.
Read the post →03/24/2026 · Björn Kindler
Gaussian Splatting on macOS — a primer for app developers
Radiance fields and Gaussian splatting are no longer just a research demo. Here is the lay of the land for Mac developers — what they actually are, what the rendering looks like, and where RadianceKit fits in.
Read the post →11/16/2023 · Björn Kindler
Building Listen4Me — live captions on-device
Listen4Me started as my first iOS app — a live-caption tool that takes spoken German and prints it onto an iPad or iPhone screen in real time. A small accessibility tool, on-device, German only.
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