A small independent studio

Everything here began as something I needed.

Big Tree Publications is one person. I am a therapist in Berkeley who kept running into the same problems and building my own way out of them: two Mac apps I use every single day, and a book about what I keep seeing happen to families. All of it made by hand, for people, not for scale.

Julian Redwood

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.
Shrinky, the terra-cotta mascot of Shrink Books, wearing a gold monocle and a red bow tie