Designing Import + Export

Writers are constantly moving text between apps, and rarely do the various apps honor each others’ formatting quirks. We solved this problem in Minimal. Now, when writers share notes between Apple Pages, Google

Minimal’s Conversion Engine

Minimal now supports importing and exporting across Markdown, Rich Text, HTML, PDF, plain text, and our proprietary format MNML. The following essay describes how we accomplished this system in the Swift programming language.

Writing Tools + Apple Intelligence

At Minimal we deliberately took our time to decide how we would integrate generative AI. There is a lot of hype, and we wanted to let the dust settle before building Large Language

60 – 30 – 10

A technique for focusing and optimally allocating effort. The 60 Choose the single-most important goal in life and dedicate 60% of effort to accomplishing that goal. Once it is completed, re-examine

Let's Have Three Abstraction Layers

Let's have three abstraction layers: nature, middle, and human. The Human layer is designed for humans to effortlessly engage. The buttons on a dishwasher, the knobs on a stove. A keyboard.