THREAD

Small, deliberate apps for iPhone, Mac & Vision Pro

Each built around an idea worth keeping.

Woven by Hessam Zahedi

Get the apps

Tap an icon for the App Store, or a name to learn more. Not yet available in the UK and Europe.

All 11 in one place: Hessam Zahedi on the App Store (opens in a new tab)

On YouTube@THREAD-HZ

THREAD on YouTube (opens in a new tab)

Woven by Hessam Zahedi

A short film for every app: what it does, how it feels and the idea behind it. New films land on the channel as the apps do, and the newest one plays here first.

Subscribe on YouTube (opens in a new tab)Every film (opens in a new tab)

Newest firstThe playlist button in the player’s top corner lists every film on the channel.

The podcasts are on video too: 9th Path on the podcast page  ·  Instagram: @thread.onemaker (opens in a new tab)

Stories behind the apps

Four of them started as an idea I had to write down first.

Liminal app icon

Liminal — The Atrium

A hall of doors. Behind each one, a mind.

A philosophy game with nineteen thinkers — Marcus Aurelius, Nietzsche, Rumi, Hafez, Simone de Beauvoir and more — reconstructed from their writings.

How Liminal is built

Liminal is a native SwiftUI app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, backed by a small Node server that talks to Anthropic’s Claude. All voices ship inside the app, their writing, their portraits, and about half the games — so it opens instantly and a good deal of it works with no connection at all. When you ask something live, the server assembles that thinker’s character prompt, gives the model room to actually reason before it replies, and streams the answer back a word at a time. Your keepsakes and reflections live on your device and in your iCloud; the server stores only your account and your credits.

Futures Study app icon

Futures Study

Predict. Resolve. Calibrate.

Strategic foresight for leaders, strategists and everyday decision-makers, built on the Cone of Possibility and STEEP horizon scanning.

More about Futures Study

Built around core strategic frameworks like the Cone of Possibility and STEEP horizon scanning, Futures Study brings the power of strategic foresight directly to leaders, strategists, and everyday decision-makers. Rather than relying on rigid, traditional forecasting, the app empowers users to systematically evaluate possible, plausible, probable, and preferred futures. Operating on the core framework to “Predict. Resolve. Calibrate.”, Futures Study helps you uncover hidden blind spots, stress-test long-term strategies against unexpected disruptions, and make value-aligned, resilient choices in an unpredictable world.

Sisyphus app icon

Sisyphus: Push Gladly

One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

You name your boulders — the pieces of your work that always come back. You push them up the mountain each day.

Pendar-e Nik app icon

Pendar-e Nik

Good thoughts. Good words. Good deeds.

Three lines a day, in Zarathustra’s three columns, plus a walk through the Fire Temple of Yazd on Vision Pro. Free, forever.

In the workshop

HealthState app icon

Coming soon

HealthState

Your stress, as a reactive pixel portrait.

A face drawn from your own physiology. Everything runs on-device. One payment, never a subscription.

Read more about HealthState

The lineage is worth naming. This is your stress as a reactive pixel portrait, the way status bars worked in 1993 in video games — a small face in the corner that told you how badly things were going before you’d finished reading any number, and that you learned to read the way you read a friend across a room. What’s borrowed is only that idea. Every character here is original: the palettes, the grids, the expressions, all of them generated at runtime from your own physiology rather than picked from a sheet.

HealthState pixel faces for five states: thriving, calm, tense, strained and overload

The body keeps a running commentary that almost nobody hears. Heart rate variability falls hours before you notice you’re strained; your resting pulse creeps up on the days you tell people you’re fine. The data has been there the whole time, on a watch you already own. What’s been missing is a way to feel it without reading it.

HealthState answers with a face. A small pixel character, drawn a thousand times a second from your own physiology, whose expression is not chosen from a set of moods but derived — brows that angle, a jaw that sets, sweat that beads as the numbers climb. Glance at your wrist and you know, in the way you know a friend’s mood across a room, before either of you has said anything.

A grid of HealthState pixel characters

HealthState won’t guess. Predictions come from your own logged episodes, and any claim a technique works has to earn it through randomized trials — including do-nothing rounds — with ties within the margin of error stated plainly.

At night it stages sleep from heart rate and movement, wakes you silently with wrist taps in a light phase, and learns your chronotype over months.

Notes is deliberately dumb: a private notebook no generative feature can read, enforced by a build-failing test.

Everything runs on-device — no server, no account, optional iCloud sync, full export. One payment, never a subscription, since an app billing monthly for your anxiety profits from your staying anxious.

Dezh app icon

Coming soon

Dezh — The Citadel

Hold the road from the gate to the town.

A Shāhnāmeh tower-defense game for iPhone, iPad and Mac, drawn entirely in code.

Read more about Dezh

Dezh (The Citadel) is a Persian-themed tower-defense game inspired by Ferdowsi’s epic poem, the Shāhnāmeh, where players defend a winding road against hordes of dark creatures (Dīvs) using specialized towers and legendary champions like Rostam, Ārash, and Kāveh. Across a 17-chapter story campaign, endless modes, and roguelite campaigns, players manage resources, brand towers with masteries and runes, and even play historic mini-games like Shatranj/Chess and Nard between sieges.

Dezh on iPad: Shatranj, one of five Persian court games built into the game

Uniquely crafted with zero external image files or art assets, generating all of its visual design procedurally through code, the game offers an ad-free, cross-platform experience across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

3D prints

If you are interested in more tangible physical items here are my designs available to download and Print on any 3D printer: MakerWorld