Not Boring Software
Not Boring Software is a studio reimagining everyday apps like weather, timers, calculators, and cameras by blending product design with video game design. Each app takes something ordinary and makes it feel fun and alive – with playful 3D graphics, sound, and haptics that turn basic tools into experiences you actually want to use.
Get to know Not Boring Software
Who’s behind Not Boring?
Hey I'm Andy, the designer behind Not Boring Software. I grew up in a small fishing village in Alaska wanting to be a filmmaker. I loved telling stories and learned that you could tell stories through products too. I started in graphic design, but that desire to tell richer stories and build more immersive experiences eventually led me into software design which over the years has gone by about twenty different titles. These days I call myself a Software Designer – it feels like the most honest way to describe it.
Next year will be twenty years I’ve been in this field. I’ve worked at agencies, inside big tech companies, and I’ve started and sold my own VC-funded startup. My first company was a creative tools company called FiftyThree created when the iPad came out. Back then it was being pitched as a consumption device – Steve Jobs sitting on a couch reading books and watching movies. But we saw it as an amazing tool for creativity and expression. We built Paper, a natural-feeling drawing app, and our own hardware stylus called Pencil (the prototype for Apple’s Pencil).
Now I’m at my happiest, running a super tiny studio with my long-time collaborator, Mark. It’s just the two of us. We didn’t set out to start a company. It started as a question: Can you create design-differentiated software? In cars, furniture, and clothing design plays a huge role. But software is valued almost entirely for its functionality and utility. We thought there was room for something more playful, more beautiful, more expressive. So we gave it a try, and that’s how Not Boring was born.
What’s Not Boring Software and what’s so cool about it?
Not Boring is a collection of everyday apps – things you already use all the time, like a weather app, timer, calculator, habit tracker, music player, and now a camera. Our internal roadmap is the iPhone 1 home screen. We’ve checked off weather, calculator, camera, and we’re just slowly picking off the core, essential utilities that people need every day.
The goal isn’t to reinvent these tools into some bloated “everything app” or add a hundred new tabs just for the sake of it. It’s about doing the basics really well, in a way that feels beautiful, playful, and expressive. You open it, and it’s not just functional. It actually makes you want to use it.
In every other product categories like cars, furniture, and clothing, design plays a huge role in why you choose something. But in software, it’s still mostly treated as purely functional. We think that’s a mistake especially when the future is likely going to include more software, whether that’s on phones, wearables, or embedded around us. If everything is designed to be purely functional, that’s going to be a cold, sterile world. We want to make software that feels alive and has personality.
That’s why we take so much inspiration from video games. When we started five years ago, games were pretty much the only place you could find truly rich, experimental digital experiences. So we thought, what if we built our apps more like a game? We use real-time 3D scenes, dynamic lighting, sound, and haptics to give everything a tactile, immersive feel. Even a calculator can have magic in it.
When we launched, we didn’t expect much. We made it for ourselves and a handful of friends. But the apps struck a chord with more people than we imagined, across all kinds of backgrounds. It turns out, aesthetics matter to a lot of folks. Enough that this little design experiment turned into a real business. But it’s still just two creators at a kitchen table, making stuff we love.
Tool Stack of Not Boring Software
What’s under the hood of Not Boring Software? Which technologies were used and why did you chose them?
From the start, we knew we wanted to build our apps differently, more like a video game, so we looked at using actual game engines like Unity, Unreal, or Godot. They’re amazing for real-time 3D, sound, haptics – all the stuff we care about. But they also come with big frameworks and long load times. In a game, waiting ten seconds while you see the Unity logo is fine. When you just want to check the weather, that’s a dealbreaker.
Thankfully, Apple has its own 3D rendering engine called SceneKit. It’s a bit more primitive than Unity, but it had everything we need, and it plays nicely with the rest of Apple’s frameworks. That means we can blend a SceneKit 3D scene in the background with SwiftUI or UIKit elements on top. It layers together seamlessly.
On the design side, I do a lot of 3D modeling in Blender. It’s free, super capable, and can handle everything from quick sketches to final assets. Often I use it to figure out how something should move or feel before building it in code. We’ve had “happy accidents” along the way, like a texture failing to load and showing a bare wireframe. It looked so good we turned it into its own app skin. That became part of a whole “Debug Series” of designs inspired by the 3D debug views you see in dev tools.
Because we’re building inside SceneKit, working on these apps really does feel like designing a game – we’re playing with materials, lighting, camera angles, shaders. We can go as deep as we want with our own shaders and gesture logic. My partner and I cross over into each other’s domains – I dabble with some of the UI work, and he brings just as many design ideas as I do.
We work small and fast. Figma is great for quick sketches when paper isn’t enough. The goal is to get things into Xcode as soon as possible so we can actually feel them in the product. You don’t really know if something works until you interact with it. That’s where the magic happens – adjusting a spring animation, changing the lighting, or finding that one little detail that makes it click.
Do you use any other tools to run the business?
We’re pretty minimal when it comes to tools. Being such a small studio means we don’t need all the heavy task-tracking and productivity stacks you see in bigger teams. Most of our planning happens in a simple message thread, and a lot of my ideas start out sketched on paper.
We try not to linger too long in “thinking tools.” The magic happens in the work itself, so the quicker we get into working in code on the actual piece, the better. We try to have a very minimalist workflow.
What’s your personal stack? Which apps do you and your team love?
Email and calendar aren’t a huge part of my day. If anything, I want to be in them less. I try to keep it very minimal. TextEdit gets a surprising amount of use for quick notes, to-dos, and planning. It’s bare bones and distraction-free.
I gravitate toward the simplest tools that help me focus, not ones that add extra layers. There’s so much “productivity hacking” culture out there chasing the latest tools. Few realize how much of those supposed gains are wasted researching new methods and learning new tools. I’ve found I’m most productive when I keep it simple. You can get a lot done with just a personal scratch pad and a message thread.
For focus, I listen to a lot of ambient music – Steve Reich, Joe Hisaishi, Austin Wintory, and our own focus music app, Vibes.
Anything else you’d like to share?
We just launched our newest app (Not Boring) Camera. It’s probably our most unique app yet, and it pushes some of our ideas even further, maybe to their ultimate extreme. It’s been in the works for about four years, on and off, and it’s easily the most fun we’ve had building something.
Most default camera apps are fine, but I’ve never really loved any of them – not the way I love holding a physical camera, with the feel of the controls and the experience of using it. So the question for us was: what if you actually loved your camera app? What if it felt good, and it felt like yours? So we set out to try and build a camera app you could fall in love with.
At the end of the day, that’s really what we’re after with Not Boring, making software that’s not just functional, but expressive and fun. Software is the most powerful medium humanity has ever built, and we think it should reflect the rich, multitudinous world we live in.
Now, discover Not Boring Software for yourself
Huge thanks to Andy for sharing the story behind Not Borting Software and the details on the building blocks that make Not Boring apps so unique and truly fun. Now, go check them out for yourself!