State of the Studio: February 2026

Time for a transparent look at where everything stands. No spin, no hype — just what's real.

The Portfolio at a Glance

Tree City Design currently has 11 apps in various stages. Here's the honest status of each:

Shipping Soon

Voice Crumbs — Private voice journal with on-device encryption. In App Store review. This is the furthest along and the first app that will go live on the new Tree City Design website. Landing page, blog, and download links are ready to flip the moment Apple approves.

AI Workout Timer — AI voice workout timer with coach personas. Also in review. The five coach voices (Ace, Guardian, Lass, Samurai, Siren) are working well in testing. This is the app I'm most excited about from a "does this actually solve a problem" standpoint.

In Review

Hey Kitchen — Voice-powered kitchen assistant. Submitted and waiting. This was one of the first apps built but hasn't had the identity doc treatment yet. Landing page will be minimal until the identity doc is complete.

Voice PDF Extractor (PDF Pages) — Extract text from PDFs using voice commands. In review. Utility app, straightforward value proposition.

Sound Levels — Decibel meter and noise monitoring. In review. Another utility — simple but useful.

In Development

Journeyman Voice Calcs — Voice-first contractor math calculator. Early development. Speak measurements naturally, get tape-measure-ready answers in fractions. 155 trade formulas across 18 categories.

HomeCOO — Home management assistant. Concept stage. This one came from my own frustration with tracking home maintenance, groceries, and family schedules across five different apps.

WTHooperAI — AI basketball training. Early prototype. Using AI to create adaptive basketball drills based on your skill level and position.

ScreenPact — Family screen time management. Concept stage. The differentiator here is building trust instead of control — kids and parents agree on limits together.

Headroom — Departure reminders for elderly users. Concept stage. My grandmother inspired this one. Simple reminders that account for prep time, not just appointment time.

Vibe — Internal portfolio dashboard. This is the meta-app: tracking all the other apps from one place. Not planned for public release.

What I Learned This Month

Building in public is slow. Setting up the distribution engine (this website, the content pipeline, the SEO infrastructure) has taken longer than I expected. But it's the kind of work that compounds — once it's running, every new app gets a landing page, blog posts, and social content semi-automatically.

Identity docs are worth the investment. Writing a full APP-IDENTITY.md for Voice Crumbs and AI Workout Timer forced me to articulate things I'd been hand-waving. The marketing angles section alone surfaced three pain points I hadn't been addressing in the App Store listing.

The hardest part isn't building apps. It's everything around the app: the website, the content, the SEO, the social presence, the email capture. The distribution engine is my attempt to systematize that "everything else" so I can focus on building.

What's Next

March priorities:

1. Get Voice Crumbs and AI Workout Timer live on the App Store
2. Launch this website with full landing pages for both apps
3. Start the content pipeline: blog posts, social derivatives, email capture
4. Begin identity docs for Hey Kitchen and Sound Levels

If you want to follow along, there's an email signup on the homepage. No spam — just monthly updates like this one and launch announcements.

Thanks for reading. Back to building.