Welcome to Luminary Apps

Welcome to the Luminary Apps blog!

I know, these "welcome" posts aren't terribly useful, but they're customary.  So, since you're here, let me tell you a bit about who we are and what we do.

Luminary Apps is a small software company located in Tucson, Arizona.

Our business is built on two cornerstones:

  1. Custom software written on a contract basis for our clients.
  2. Consumer products written directly for our users.

We love both kinds of work.  Consulting work tends to have a lot of variety, and present some really interesting challenges we can sink our teeth into.  Consumer products tend to be less business-oriented and more whimsical.

For example, we currently have two products for iOS: Newbie Chess and InkPaint.  Newbie Chess was inspired by my own five-year-old, who was showing an interest in Chess, but needed a little more support than standard chess apps provide.  So we wrote one that is easy and fun to play, and contains some really innovative visualization features to help new players see what is going on.

InkPaint's inspiration was similar: some of us were doing some digital drawing/painting using the standard (and not cheap!) software, and found we had to spend a lot of brain juice setting up the layers properly, remembering to draw in the right layer, etc.  It was also a nuisance to paint carefully within the lines of the ink layer.  So we designed a system that does all that busywork for you, making drawing/painting a lot easier and fun.  And then, because we want to help newbies with this app too, we added integrated drawing tutorials that show you step by step how to draw various things.  People are amazed how well they can draw and paint with this kind of support.

And that's our goal: to take innovative approaches to common problems, helping people do things easier and better than they ever could before.

We have more products like this in the pipeline, and if you stay tuned to this blog, you'll be the first to hear about them.  And if it so happens that your business needs some custom software to improve your bottom line or delight your own customers, contact us — we'll apply the same creativity and quality to that as we do to our own products.