The Elegant Violin

Software made the slow way, for people who look closely.

The Elegant Violin is an independent software studio in Florida. It makes native applications for Apple platforms — written against the operating system’s own frameworks and nothing else.

No third-party code goes into them. That is a working method before it is a marketing line: every layer is understood by the person who wrote it, so there is no analytics library quietly reporting home, no framework deciding how the thing should feel, and no account standing between you and your own files. The studio is one person. It answers its own mail.

The first application is Baryta.

The Baryta application icon: a fine-art print of a dusk landscape on a dark ground.

Baryta

A photo browser for network storage.
macOS, Apple TV, iPad and iPhone.

Baryta browses what you finished, not what you’re working on.

Photographers who keep their work on a NAS have somewhere to put finished pictures and nowhere good to look at them. The editing applications are heavy and want to import. The media servers want a package installed on the box, a library scanned into a database, and an account. The file browsers show you files. Baryta connects to the share you already have and puts the photograph on the screen.

  • The photograph, alone, in a window.

    Everything else gets out of the way and stays out of the way — not only in full screen, but in an ordinary window on an ordinary desktop. The information you want is available and silent until asked for: exposure first, then camera and lens, then where you were standing. Nobody is shown a map they didn’t ask for.

  • Baryta collects nothing.

    No account, no analytics, no telemetry, no third-party frameworks. This is not a policy that could be revised next year; it is a property of how the application is built. There is no code in it that could send anything anywhere, because there is no code in it that somebody else wrote. The privacy policy is short for the same reason.

  • Nothing to install on the NAS.

    No package running on the box, no library to scan, no service to sign into, no waiting for an index to finish. Baryta speaks to a share that is already switched on — because a share is how the photographs got onto the NAS in the first place. If the Finder can see it, Baryta can see it.

  • RAW stays invisible, on purpose.

    There is no neutral rendering of a raw file, only somebody’s recipe. A generic one would show you a worse picture than the one already sitting in your editor, and the camera’s embedded JPEG is the interpretation you rejected. So Baryta shows finished photographs and doesn’t second-guess your colour — which also means no waiting on a 200 MB file you were going to skip past anyway.

What isn’t in it

A good part of what Baryta is worth is what was left out, so it is worth saying plainly rather than letting you discover it:

  • No catalog
  • No import
  • No editing
  • No transcoding
  • No RAW
  • No video
  • No account
  • No subscription
  • No telemetry

What it gives you is folders — the ones you already made, in the order you already made them. If you came looking for search, faces, albums or a shared library, other applications do those things well and Baryta does not do them at all.

Baryta is in development. macOS comes first, then Apple TV, then iPad and iPhone, as a single purchase covering all of them. Nothing is for sale yet; when it is, it will be on the Mac App Store. If you would like a note when that happens, or you keep photographs on a NAS that isn’t a Synology and would be willing to test against it, write to [email protected].