There's a feeling you get when you pick up a well-designed instrument — a Nagra recorder, a Teenage Engineering OP-1, a good chef's knife. It's a feeling of readiness. The object communicates what it does and invites you to use it. No tutorial needed. No onboarding flow.
I've been chasing that feeling in software for years.
Most software tries to be everything. Features accumulate like sediment. The interface grows to accommodate every edge case, every power user request, every stakeholder's pet feature. The result is software that does a lot but feels like nothing.
Instruments are different. A piano has 88 keys. A field recorder has a gain knob, a level meter, and a record button. These constraints aren't limitations — they're the design. They create focus. They create mastery.
When I say I want software to feel tactile, I don't mean skeuomorphic textures or fake wood grain. I mean:
NØTE started as an experiment in this direction. Could a field recording app feel like a field recorder? Not a DAW. Not a voice memo app with extra features. A recorder — something you grab, point at the world, and press record.
Every design decision in NØTE flows from this question: would this exist on a physical device? If the answer is no, it probably doesn't belong in the app.
I think there's a huge opportunity to build more software this way — with the intentionality of industrial design, the restraint of a focused tool, and the satisfaction of something that just works when you pick it up.
Not every product needs to be an instrument. But more of them could be.