Kinopio
Kinopio is a spatial thinking tool for capturing and connecting ideas freely on an open canvas. It combines the feel of whiteboarding with the structure of note-taking, helping people think visually, make connections, and stay engaged without getting overwhelmed by lists or rigid systems. Designed for speed, clarity, and creativity, it works offline, no sign-up required.
Get to know Kinopio
Who’s behind Kinopio?
Hey, I’m Piri. Before starting Kinopio, I worked at a company called Fog Creek. You might know them as the folks behind Trello and Stack Overflow. While I was there, I co-created a product called Glitch – a web development platform that’s still around and well-loved today, which is super cool to see.
About five or six years ago, I left to start working on my own things – tools that felt more personal, more intuitive. That’s how Kinopio started. But I guess if you zoom out a bit, my path to building something like Kinopio goes even further back.
I started out as an illustrator. I did some design work, eventually moved into what people now call “design engineering,” and somewhere along the way, I realized I wanted to build things end-to-end. I’d always been kind of obsessed with the internet – making web pages, running blogs on GeoCities back in the day, that sort of thing.
I also studied biology in school and took some classes in urban planning and architecture. That probably explains why I love thinking in spatial ways – and why I find the mix of organic and technological aesthetics so interesting. You’ll see that influence in Kinopio: it’s meant to feel open and natural, not boxed in like a lot of tools today.
So yeah, I guess you could say Kinopio grew out of that combination – design, engineering, illustration, spatial thinking – and a desire to make a tool that doesn’t just look nice, but actually helps you think better.
What’s Kinopio and what’s so cool about it?
Kinopio is a whiteboarding, note-taking, spatial thinking tool. The idea came from my time as a design director at Glitch. I was doing a lot of mockups, a lot of design work in tools like Sketch and Figma. But I started using the text tool to leave little notes next to my mockups – about why I designed something a certain way, what I was thinking, the goals behind it. Then I’d copy those into documents to share with others.
But I realized the act of placing text wherever I wanted on a canvas really opened up my brain. It helped me make connections I wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. I remembered things better. That spatial freedom just changed the way I thought. And I wanted to bring that to people who aren’t necessarily designers using design tools – because those tools aren’t really made for that kind of thing.
So Kinopio started with the question: what’s the fastest way to get an idea down spatially on a canvas – without even thinking about it? That’s why there’s no toolbars. If it’s an image, or you drag in an image, it just becomes part of the canvas.
From there, I started thinking: how do you connect cards together in the simplest way? I got inspired by modular synthesizers – you know, those racks with audio cables that you plug in between components. I imagined something similar for Kinopio. You take a little “patch cable” and plug one idea into another. It’s like forming your own personal instrument for thinking. You don’t need to be familiar with synths for it to make sense – it just feels good to use.
The visual and spatial layout of information also solves some problems I’ve always had with to-do apps and productivity tools. Those tend to become this infinite vortex of lists – completely overwhelming. You either burn out or abandon them and jump to the next tool. There’s no structure that nudges you to actually engage with the information.
Kinopio is different. It’s like having a board in front of you in real life. You see everything. There’s nowhere for the information to hide. That creates natural boundaries and shapes, which helps with memory and understanding. I found out later it’s not just intuitive – it’s also backed by science. That mix of right-brain and left-brain processing is powerful.
Tool Stack of Kinopio
What’s under Kinopio’s hood? Which technologies were used and why did you chose them?
Kinopio’s architecture is split into two halves. The client side is a Vue.js app – that’s what loads when you visit kinopio.club. It talks to a server running Postgres and Node.js. There are standard API requests, but I also have this concept of “operations” – bundled requests for saving and updating data that are faster and more efficient.
One thing I care a lot about is performance and perceived speed, so I built in a local cache layer that stores everything on your device. That way, the app works offline, and even when you’re online, the initial load feels faster since it’s pulling from local data while syncing in the background.
The client is hosted on Netlify. It’s not the cheapest – it’s basically a wrapper over AWS – but the convenience is worth it. The server side is on Heroku, mostly for legacy reasons. Kinopio’s been around for a while – about six years – and I haven’t had a huge reason to move it yet, though I’ve been thinking about switching to Railway.
For emails – transactional stuff like signups and notifications – I use Postmark. I also use Linode object storage, which is basically like S3 but way cheaper. And KeyCDN handles image and asset delivery, so those load quickly around the world.
There are some extra services that support Kinopio too. URLBox is what I use to generate PDFs of spaces for people who want to download their boards. Iframely is what fetches preview images and metadata when you paste in a URL – it makes cards look richer and more useful.
For the desktop apps – Mac, Windows, and Linux – I use a service called ToDesktop. I’ve also been curious about Tauri, which is more native – though I’ve heard it has some issues with Linux. So ToDesktop has been great. It takes care of all the OS-specific signing stuff, especially for Windows, which is notoriously annoying to deal with. I’ve talked to the creator a few times – cool guy.
For community and feedback, there’s a Discord server for chat, and a Discourse forum for more structured discussion. The forum is hosted on Linode as well. It’s not super fun to maintain – I only touch it every couple years if I really have to – but it works. It’s a better place for keeping context-rich conversations and feature requests than something like Discord, which tends to lose things in the stream.
Do you use any other tools to run the business?
For design, I still use Sketch – mostly to draw icons. I know it’s kind of heavy just for that, the file is like 100MB, but it does what I need it to do, and I’ve been using it forever. I also write a lot of blog posts, which has been great not just for reflecting on what I’m building, but for helping people discover Kinopio. A good post can bring in a surprising amount of traffic.
Outside of that, I try to keep things light and simple. I don’t have a huge marketing machine or anything. I’ll share progress updates and sneak peeks on social media – short screencasts, sketches, that kind of thing. It’s a nice way to collect feedback while I’m still figuring things out.
And of course, I use the forum and Discord not just for community, but also to understand how people are using Kinopio, what’s missing, what’s confusing, and what’s exciting. That stuff shapes the product as much as anything else I do.
What’s your personal stack? Which apps do you and your team love?
I’ve been building up my setup over a lot of years. Some of the tools I use every day are ones I discovered in college – and they’re still going strong.
The two tools I probably use the most are Sublime Text and Sublime Merge. I’ve been using Sublime Text for over 10 years now. One of my mentors early on showed me multiple cursors and Command+D to select matching items, and it kind of just clicked. Nowadays, a lot of editors have those features, but there’s something about how Sublime handles keyboard shortcuts that just works for me – my brain moves fast in it.
Sublime Merge is my go-to for Git. If you already know how to use Git from the command line, but don’t always want to be in the terminal, it’s perfect. I stash a lot, I cherry-pick from stashes, and Merge makes all of that easy – way easier than most GUIs, which usually hide those features. It’s a bit of a nerdy tool, but I love it.
I use Fantastical for my calendar – it’s clean and fast. ColorSnapper comes in handy sometimes too, mostly when I need to sample colors on screen (Command+Shift+C, boom, grab a hex code).
Then there are these tiny little Mac utilities that I can’t live without. Jumpcut is a clipboard manager – it lives in the menu bar and lets me see everything I’ve copied recently. Pure Paste strips formatting from anything you copy. So if I copy text from the web, it just pastes as plain text – no fonts, no weird line breaks. I honestly don’t know why that isn’t the default everywhere.
For screencasts and quick screen recordings, I use CleanShot. It lets me record fast, trim the edges, and that’s usually all I need. When I’m writing blog posts or other longer content, I use iA Writer. It’s simple, focused, and feels good to type in.
For email, I use Fastmail – I like that it’s private, not ad-driven, and built on open standards. For web search, I use Kagi instead of Google. It’s a paid search engine, but the results are so much better. As someone who searches the internet constantly – as a developer, writer, and professional internet person – it’s more than worth it.
My main browser is Firefox. I used to use Safari, but it kept invalidating local storage every few days – which meant I was always being logged out of things. Chrome has great dev tools, but I actually prefer Firefox’s now. I really hope they keep making Firefox – it’s full-featured and stable, even if it doesn’t have the biggest market share.
Anything else you’d like to share?
If you’re interested in Kinopio, my advice is simple: just try it out. It’s probably more powerful than you think – especially considering it’s made by just one person. And there’s no sign-up required. You can start using pretty much every feature right away. It’s local-first, works offline, and you can just open it up and start thinking.
Over the years, I’ve realized the value of using fewer, better things – software, hardware, everything. I’m still using tools I discovered in college, and even the same keyboard I’ve had for 12 years. It’s that classic idea, applied to tech: buy fewer things, but make sure they’re really good, so you can use them for a long time.
That’s how I think about the tools I use – and the kind of tool I want Kinopio to be.
Now, discover Kinopio for yourself
Huge thanks to Piri for sharing the story and the philosophy behind Kinopio and the details on the building blocks that make it such a great and unique tool. Now test it out yourself and discover all the powerful things you can do with it.