Dou is an in-house I made for myself and then shared on Github as open source software. It can use Ollama or LM Studio as language model providers, meaning all the processing is done on device and privately.

It can be downloaded from my GitHub here:

https://github.com/shokuninstudio

Dou is what you get if you combine a chatbot, a Sticky notes app and a mind maps app. It’s a deceptively powerful desktop application for knowledge organisation, note-taking, and mind mapping. The name "Dou" means "way" or "path" in Japanese (Dao in Chinese and Do in Korean) reflecting the app's core idea of organising thoughts, ideas and data as text-based nodes along a path.

A path can be anything you want it to be. Your daily diet, a mood or health tracker, ideas for an app or business, a story outline, your goals ahead, or just random notes that you need help organising. You can have as many different paths you want on one canvas. Or you can create different canvases (saved as Dou files) for each path.

After you have arranged text nodes in order and linked them up, ask your favourite Ollama and LM Studio hosted large language model for feedback, summaries and more.

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It will be feature locked after I debug the current build on macOS, Windows and Linux. As long as it does the job it is supposed to (help me process my thoughts…yes, you can use a language model to help process your own thoughts, ideas and feelings) then there won’t be any need to add more bells and whistles.

I am currently working on a suite of apps for animators. They do not use ‘generative AI’, but I am attempting to do things nobody else is doing and am focusing on efficiency and performance. The goal is to make animation easier, faster and less stressful simply by creating clean interfaces, fast user interaction and smart algorithms. Basically I’m filling the gaps in the workflows rather than trying to replace any established apps.

Like Dou I am building them primarily for myself because so many animation apps have become bloated with far too many features that slow down performance on even the fastest computers. I feel animators are spending somewhere between 10-20% of their time navigating menus, palettes and drop-downs. That takes them out of the flow and subtly increases tension as deadlines approach.

If I find my ideas work really well, I’ll share the apps freely - some open source and some not.