About Stardate

Hi, I’m Dean!

Stardate is a small passion project I have been working on during a break from regular work. The first iteration of the product is a seamless note taking application for Apple Watch and iOS– “Tap, talk, done”.

The full application is designed to help you collect genuine in-situ context when you’re relaxed that can then make AI tools useful in a way that is deeply meaningful to you.

Why make this?

When I got my puppy, the training manuals suggested that I needed to keep a log of everything she did– when she got up at night, when (and where) she went to potty, how much and when she ate. But I didn’t really think keeping track on paper or a standard app would be effective for me. As a data nerd, I also wanted more analysis power than that.

To collect that data consistently I needed a seamless system, using the tools I already had, and put into a format I could make use of. I figured if I solved the data collection problem, an LLM could process the unstructured data.

My initial prototype was an Apple Shortcut on my watch, a Whisper script on the Mac, and ChatGPT to process the data and make a table. Quickly I had reports on how potty training was going, charts of my puppy’s weight as she grew, and a sense that I was on to something.

As my first iOS app Stardate is fairly ambitious. Few apps handle transcription locally yet, but I felt it was important both for my users’ privacy and to keep things “Dean-sized”.

I hope you find this as interesting as I do! Come along for the ride 😁