// FIELD NOTES · 2025 — 2026

Latest from the studio lab.

Engineering deep-dives, generative design research, privacy audits, release announcements, and notes from the team. We publish only when there is something precise to share.

The zhenjieco app matrix shown on mobile devices
The App Matrix · Local-first iOS & iPadOS
Privacy-first architecture

Why we removed every third-party analytics SDK from our matrix.

A retrospective on the decision to drop Crashlytics, Amplitude, Mixpanel, and Segment in favour of Apple's built-in OSLog and MetricKit — and what changed in our crash-free sessions.

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Generative audio research

Composing ambient soundscapes that respect attention.

How our timbre model blends filtered noise, breath-like envelopes, and tonal anchors — without crossing into the attention-stealing patterns of consumer streaming.

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Visual systems research

A field manual for restraint — typography, motion, and the art of doing less.

Our internal guidelines for what never makes it into a screen. A short essay on negative space, predictable timing curves, and the discipline of subtraction.

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Engineering under the hood

CRDT in the wild: a deep dive into Automerge 2.0.

How we wired Automerge's CRDT into our sync framework so two devices can edit a 50 MB local-first database and converge deterministically — offline or online.

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Data sovereignty

The cost of feeling safe: a post-mortem of encrypted vault UX.

Encryption is easy. Trust is hard. We rewrote our vault onboarding three times — here is what finally worked, and what we measured to prove it.

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Roadmap

What we're shipping in Q1 2026.

A peek at two flagship apps entering TestFlight, the inception of our macOS companion line, and the privacy-preserving research initiative for 2026.

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Release notes

Riverflow 4.2 — procedural scripting for offline power users.

The latest release adds webhooks that run on-device, deterministic replay engine, and a brand-new Tasker-compatible bridge — all without syncing to any server.

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Generative aesthetics

Lumen · Inspiration Capture — generative gardens case study.

We built a knowledge garden that procedurally arranges captured notes as botanical specimens. Here is how the visualisation grew from a whiteboard sketch to a shipping feature.

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Encryption engineering

AES-256-GCM at rest, in your pocket, on the App Store.

A practical tour of the cryptographic choices behind our encrypted document vault — including why we chose GCM over CBC, where the key comes from, and how we deal with recovery codes.

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