Small, deliberate iPhone, Mac and Vision Pro apps, each built around ideas worth keeping!

---

Liminal — The Atrium

Liminal is a native SwiftUI app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, backed by a small Node server that talks to Anthropic’s Claude. All voices ship inside the app, their writing, their portraits, and about half the games — so it opens instantly and a good deal of it works with no connection at all. When you ask something live, the server assembles that thinker’s character prompt, gives the model room to actually reason before it replies, and streams the answer back a word at a time. Your keepsakes and reflections live on your device and in your iCloud; the server stores only your account and your credits.

Three Tables, Two Graves, and the App I Built to Sit Down Again

There is a table at Café Naderi in Tehran that I have never been able to walk past casually.

Naderi is one of the last of its kind — a European-style café on Jomhouri Avenue that has outlived nearly everything around it. In the 1930s, a small group of writers used to gather there, and their center of gravity was a thin, bespectacled man with a civil servant’s job and a mind full of ruin: Sadegh Hedayat. He wrote The Blind Owl there, or near there, or in the atmosphere that place made possible. Waiters brought coffee. The conversation went where it went. Nobody in that room knew they were sitting inside what would become the founding scene of modern Persian prose.

I have sat at Naderi. I have looked at the chairs. And every time, the same useless, irresistible thought: what would he say?

In July I was in Paris, staying in the 5th, and I went to Père Lachaise to find him.

Hedayat is buried at Père Lachaise, Division 85. The stone is modest. People leave things on it — flowers, sometimes a cigarette, occasionally a copy of the book. There is usually an owl somewhere, left by someone who understood the reference, in the picture if you zoom in, you can see my owl, tiny, that traveled with me from Iran to US to France and now here, nine time zones from Naderi. 

A few days later I walked to Montparnasse, which is a different cemetery with a different weather to it, and found Sartre and Beauvoir. They share a slab. Their names are on the same stone, one above the other, and the marble is covered in métro tickets and lipstick kisses and pebbles — a habit that has followed that grave for decades. Two people who spent years arguing about freedom, ending up in a single plot, permanently annotated by strangers.
I added my other favorite writers and thinkers to Liminal, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Camus, Hunter S Thompson, who’s book I translated to Farsi and many more…

The Oldest Wish in Literature

The wish to talk to them is not original. It may be the least original wish there is, which is exactly why it keeps working.

Dante wanted a guide, so he got Virgil — a poet thirteen centuries in the ground, walking him downhill and explaining things. Midnight in Paris is a man who cannot stop wanting the dinner party he was born too late for …

What Liminal Is

Liminal: The Atrium is an app about that gap.

An atrium is not a room you stay in. It’s the space you pass through on the way somewhere — a threshold, which is what liminal means. That name is the whole argument. You are not being offered a resurrection. You are being offered a doorway, and a bench, and a conversation that lasts as long as you want it to and then ends.

You choose a thinker. You ask them something. What comes back is a response built from, inspired from, how that person actually wrote and argued — their preoccupations, their blind spots, their habits of mind, their bad moods. You can push back. They will push back at you. You can ask Hedayat what he thinks the owl was. You can ask Sartre whether bad faith is a useful category for a person managing a career, or whether it’s just a stylish way of calling someone a coward. You can ask them things you would never ask a person who could be hurt by the question.

The app is free to download. Conversations run on credits, because live model responses cost real money and I would rather charge honestly for compute than run ads against Sadegh Hedayat.

The Part I Refuse to Oversell

Here is what Liminal is not: it is not Hedayat. It is not a channel, a medium, a séance, or a recovery. There is no version of this technology that gives you the man. The man is in Division 85 and he is not coming back, and any product that implies otherwise is selling you something it does not have.

Because the thing I wanted at that table in Naderi was never a ghost. It was the experience of having my question meet resistance. Of saying something to Hedayat and having something come back that was shaped like him and not like me — something I hadn’t already thought, in a voice I couldn’t have produced. That’s not communion. It’s closer to a good argument with a well-read friend who happens to have spent a lot of time in a specific person’s sentences.

The Atrium is open. Come ask them something.

⸻

All other Apps:

---

Futures Study

Built around core strategic frameworks like the Cone of Possibility and STEEP horizon scanning, Futures Study brings the power of strategic foresight directly to leaders, strategists, and everyday decision-makers. Rather than relying on rigid, traditional forecasting, the app empowers users to systematically evaluate possible, plausible, probable, and preferred futures. Operating on the core framework to “Predict. Resolve. Calibrate.”, Futures Study helps you uncover hidden blind spots, stress-test long-term strategies against unexpected disruptions, and make value-aligned, resilient choices in an unpredictable world.

You can read more about this topic in my blog here:

The Cone of Possibility

---

One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy!

Two apps, two mountains, and the question of what a day is for

The inbox refills. The dishes come back. The laundry basket is never done being a laundry basket!

I built two apps this year that live on either side of that sentence. One of them is about the work that returns no matter what you do. The other is about the work that never returns — the single day, unrepeatable, that you either fill with something or don’t.

They come from two different civilizations and two different centuries. They’re solving the same problem.

The absurd, briefly

Albert Camus published Le Mythe de Sisyphe in 1942, in occupied France.

The absurd, for Camus, is not a property of the universe. It’s a relationship. On one side, a human being who demands that things make sense. On the other, a world that is silent about it. Neither is absurd alone. The absurd is the gap — the friction of a meaning-seeking creature living in a meaning-indifferent world.

He rules out two escapes. You can’t kill yourself, because that abolishes one side of the relationship and settles nothing. And you can’t take the leap into a system — religious, ideological, political — that dissolves the gap by decree, because that’s what he calls philosophical suicide: buying peace with the one thing you actually own, which is your clear sight.

What’s left is the third option: live in the gap, with your eyes open. Camus calls this revolt. Not rebellion against anything in particular — just the refusal to stop looking.

Sisyphus is the figure he chooses for it. Condemned by the gods to roll a stone up a hill forever, watching it roll back every time. The gods had reasoned, Camus notes, that futile and hopeless labor is the worst punishment available. They may have been right about the labor. They were wrong about the man.

Sisyphus’s happiness is not granted by the gods, deserved by the work, or waiting at the top. It’s the position he takes toward a fate he can’t change. His scorn — Camus’s word — is what turns the sentence into a life.

Why this is a productivity problem

So the standard productivity app quietly teaches you that your actual life — the recurring, returning, never-finished part of it, which is most of it — is a failure state. A backlog. Something you’d be free of if you were only better organized. That’s not a scheduling problem. That’s a metaphysics problem, and it’s the wrong metaphysics, and you feel the wrongness every evening at eleven o’clock.

Camus’s move is to refuse the premise instead of optimizing inside it. Don’t get better at finishing. Change what the repetition means.

That’s what Sisyphus: Push Gladly is.

⸻

Sisyphus: Push Gladly

You name your boulders — the pieces of your work that always come back. You push them up the mountain each day. You reach the summit by evening. At midnight you lose everything, and tomorrow you come back and do it again.

That’s the whole app. The design decisions all follow from taking Camus seriously rather than decoratively.

Pushing costs something. You don’t tap a checkbox; you hold the stone. A ring fills, a rumble builds under your finger, stone grinds on stone, and the push lands with a thud. Effort should feel like effort. A checkbox is a lie about labor.

The mountain is alive and it is yours. The scene is drawn in code, not stock art. The sky follows your real clock — dawn breaks, dusk burns, stars wheel past a crescent moon. The seasons follow your calendar: snow in January, wildflowers in April, amber leaves in October. And the man with the rock stands exactly as far up the slope as your day’s labor has taken him.

The mountain remembers, even though the day doesn’t. Every forty pushes raises a cairn beside the trail. The path itself wears deeper over your first two months. A year in, your mountain looks lived-on, and nobody else’s looks like yours. This is the honest form of progress in a life of recurrence: not a finish line, but a landscape shaped by having been walked.

Rest is part of the practice. No streak-shaming. Declare a rest day and the mountain rests with you.

⸻

Pendar-e Nik

Three thousand years ago, in the language that would become mine, Zarathustra folded an entire ethic into three words:

Pendar-e Nik. Goftar-e Nik. Kerdar-e Nik. 

Good thoughts. Good words. Good deeds.

It’s a practice — a daily accounting in three columns, thought, speech, action, with no way to substitute one for another. You can’t think your way out of owing a deed. You can’t do good works and skip what you said.

And it takes seriously something modern productivity tools have no vocabulary for at all: that a well-kept mind and an honest sentence are work, and they count.

So Pendar-e Nik asks you for all three, once a day. Write one good thought you kept, one good word you spoke, one good deed your hands did. That’s it. Three lines.

→ Pendar-e Nik on the App Store

One of my own favorite apps has become Pendar-e Nik

Pendar-e Nik

This app idea first came to me during a visit to the Fire Temple of Yazd. Years later, technologies like Vision Pro and augmented reality (AR) finally made it possible to bring that vision to life. While the app is also available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, my personal inspiration was simple: to be able to return to that place whenever I wanted, to walk through it, reflect, meditate, and experience its atmosphere again.

Yazd, a UNESCO World Heritage city, is a remarkable testament to our shared human heritage. Its architecture, culture, and history offer a glimpse into the traditions, beliefs, and values that have shaped civilizations over centuries. It is a place that encourages reflection and helps us better understand the enduring connections between people, culture, and time. That is also why I chose to make this app completely free—forever.

You ca read more about the App HERE.

My hope is that anyone, anywhere in the world, can visit, explore, reflect, and enjoy this extraordinary place, regardless of where they live or what device they use.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the Fire Temple of Yazd is that the sacred fire is older than the building itself. The temple’s fire has been continuously burning since around 470 AD, preserved and cared for across generations for more than 1,500 years. It stands as a powerful symbol of continuity, resilience, and humanity’s enduring ability to preserve its heritage, values, and traditions across the centuries.

The fire is kept behind a glass enclosure to protect it. In this photo, you can see my reflection in the glass as I captured the image!

Vision Pro

The visionOS app was my second AR project, following a simpler app called Theseus — Plank by Plank. While it isn’t fully interactive, it offers an immersive way to experience and explore the environment firsthand.

The cat you see is my cat, Pirooz!
You can walk through the courtyard and into the sanctum, where you can view the sacred fire.

How to make a day unique

Put the two side by side and you get something neither has alone.

Sisyphus handles the boulders. It takes the recurring, unfinishable mass of your obligations and stops treating it as a backlog you’re failing to clear. It’s the part of the day that is the same, held well.

Pendar-e Nik handles the margin. Three offerings that were not on anyone’s list, that no one assigned, that recur only in form and never in content. It’s the part of the day that is only today.

Do that for a year and you have something no analytics dashboard can give you: not a record of what you completed, but a record of what you were, three hundred and sixty-five times, in your own words.

Push gladly. Tend well.

Again tomorrow.

⸻

3D Prints:

If you are interested in more tangible physical items here are my designs available to download and Print on any 3D printer: Makers world

---

The Games

Dezh

Coming soon!

Dezh (The Citadel) is a Persian-themed tower-defense game inspired by Ferdowsi’s epic poem, the Shāhnāmeh, where players defend a winding road against hordes of dark creatures (Dīvs) using specialized towers and legendary champions like Rostam, Ārash, and Kāveh. Across a 17-chapter story campaign, endless modes, and roguelite campaigns, players manage resources, brand towers with masteries and runes, and even play historic mini-games like Shatranj/Chess and Nard between sieges.

Uniquely crafted with zero external image files or art assets, generating all of its visual design procedurally through code, the game offers an ad-free, cross-platform experience across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

---