Big Tree Publications
Independent studio
I built these for myself first.
Big Tree Publications is one person. I am a therapist in Berkeley who got tired of software that made my days harder instead of easier, so I built my own. Kin Contacts and Shrink Books are tools I use every single day. They worked well enough that it seemed unfair to keep them to myself.
Kin Contacts
Your address book, beautiful. A faster, warmer home for the contacts you already have, working directly with iCloud. Drag-and-drop groups that stick, instant search, duplicate cleanup, and paste-to-add.
Submitted to the Mac App Store
Shrink Books
Bookkeeping built for a therapy practice, not a corporation. Client ledgers, one-click monthly billing, invoices and superbills, calendar sync. Everything stays encrypted on your own Mac.
In private beta
Who is making this
Julian Redwood, LMFT
I am a marriage and family therapist in Berkeley. I am also the person who kept losing an afternoon every month to a bookkeeping spreadsheet, and who could never get a contact into the right group without something silently undoing it later.
So I wrote the tools I wanted. Not a startup, not a roadmap, just two apps built by someone who has to live with the results. When something annoys me on a Tuesday, it usually gets fixed by Thursday. That is the whole business model.
How they work
Local first, quietly.
Both apps run entirely on your Mac. There are no accounts to make, no dashboards to log into, and nothing is uploaded to a server I own. Your contacts stay in your address book. Your practice records stay encrypted in your own home folder. That was not a product decision, it was what I wanted for my own files.
- ✓No accounts. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to cancel.
- ✓No tracking. No analytics, no telemetry, no third-party services.
- ✓Your files, your Mac. Delete the app and the data goes with it.
- ✓Built to be lived in. Keyboard-first, undoable, and quiet.
And books
The publishing half.
Big Tree Publications is also an imprint. The first title is in production. More here when it is ready, and not a moment before.