Toolwise, Salon and Spotters UK

In April I designed and built Toolwise — an honest directory of AI tools, born from watching everyone around me drown in hype. SniffCheck's build carried on throughout the month too, going into closed testing on the Play Console — the precursor to the Play Store, where you upload app bundles, run testing and get everything ready for release. Six months after a seizure ended my driving career, both apps were working their way towards launch.

April also gave me a new project, from an unexpected direction. I wanted to get my mum involved, so I sat her down and asked if she had an idea for an app. She did: planning visits to art exhibitions — in London and locally — usually meant trawling many different websites, with no easy way to know how close exhibitions were to one another in order to make a trip time-efficient. Could I make an app for that?

That's when Salon was born. Salon matches artists with current exhibitions that resonate with their profile, shows how close each is to the others, and builds in live transport — London tube and bus, live bus and train for Norwich and East Anglia — plus local amenities for both, with Google Maps for directions.

And one more idea took shape in April: Spotters UK, an app for anyone who loves watching trains, buses and planes. Open it and you get a live map of everything moving near you, right now — trains, buses, planes, and the Underground if you're in London. Tap any one and it tells you the story: where it's heading, who runs it, and a photo of the actual vehicle — buses matched by number plate, planes by tail number — every shot taken and credited to a real enthusiast. It works anywhere in the UK, you can save sightings to a digital spotting log, and there's a built-in guide to telling trains apart. No sign-up, no ads, nothing to pay. Still a prototype — but a promising one.