I recently had the chance to speak with Victor Baro, iOS developer, CEO of Panels, and creator of NanoApps. Each of his lightweight utilities serves one purpose, and performs it well. Check them out! Victor is also a fantastic animator, and if you develop for Apple products, I’m sure you’ll be inspired by his Metal graphics transitions.

Micah Blachman: What is the story behind NanoApps?

Victor Baro: Two years ago, more or less, I decided I wanted to leave the company I was working for and explore my own projects. I became full-time on Panels, which is an app for comic book reading I founded with my friend.

I wanted to start making these small utility apps, but I had to make myself an LLC in the US. When I was thinking about a name, I originally thought that maybe the apps could be called “toys.” My LLC is called Digital Toys. I wanted to name my clipboard app something that evoked “small,” so MiniClip it was. But the name MiniClip was already taken. I couldn’t find anything “Nano,” so Nano it was. 

MB: What was your inspiration for building NanoClip and NanoPad?

VB: I use Raycast a lot, and I pay for the Pro version. The problem is that with Raycast, I feel like I am not using it to its full capacity. A few months ago, I decided to remove Raycast from my workflow and see what I would miss. The two main features were the clipboard and the snippet manager, which was how NanoClip was born.

I use Claude Code to build apps. However, there is still a gap between what AI can do, and what your vision is. Claude Code was good at doing 70 or 80 percent of the app. But then, I had to build the animations, all the interactions, and decide how I wanted the whole thing to work. I had to build it myself. All the themes, and the font selection, too. There's a lot in the design realm that Claude Code is still, at least for me, not able to achieve. There was also a lot of iteration. I know that I just released NanoClip recently. But I've been using it for months.

MB: What has your work on NanoPad looked like?

VB: NanoClip and NanoPad both use a package I’ve built on the backend, called NanoKit. I also have some others in there that I haven't even talked about yet, like NanoMail. A lot of email apps, like Gmail, feel very heavy. I want something that can mark emails as read easily and that has lots of keyboard functionality. All of the keyboard functionality, window functionality, and the way the apps run on the status bar goes into NanoKit.

When I started building NanoClip, I knew there would be more than one. NanoKit really sped up the process. But the challenging part was getting the text editing functionality there. It’s not just parsing Markdown, it’s trying to do something more. NanoPad is about notes and tasks. You can create tasks as standalone tasks, but also, what I really like to have is either a daily note or a weekly note. That's very useful for me, because I have many different projects, and I can create tasks in different projects and notes in different projects, and then I can go to my tasks and see all of them.

MB: Why did you choose to make each utility serve one purpose, instead of combining them all?

VB: Like I said, Raycast was a huge inspiration for me. But I didn’t want to compete with Raycast. I agree with you, I could be building the whole thing in one app. At least in my mind, they serve different purposes. I can see a user only wanting NanoClip, and I want to make that possible. Raycast is so huge, I feel like I’m overpaying for it by only using two or three features. I want users of my Nano apps to know exactly what they’re getting. If they’re interested in all of them, maybe they can get a bundle or a discount. 

NanoApps interests me so much because they follow the Unix philosophy of every app serving one purpose. Something I find subpar about today’s world of mobile applications is that phones all have home screens, with buttons for each app. This, paired with informative app icons (another thing that is missing, unfortunately), should make it super easy to find what you’re looking for. But to have to navigate through another UI just to get to the program you’re looking for completely ruins the smartphone philosophy. 

This shift is unfortunately occurring on desktop as well. The shift to web apps has made the browser one of the only apps that professionals use daily. Again, this forces us to launch another system within our current system, just to get to the apps that we use. If Windows or macOS is going to bother with the taskbar or the Dock, then more apps should be native. If things are going to stick the way they are, then maybe something like ChromeOS is the right model—if done right.