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Startups5 min read

N.B. Indie Builds: iPhone Apps, a Tourism Map and 3D-Printer Dashboards

A second roundup of software New Brunswick developers build on their own time: four iPhone apps from a Quispamsis studio, a Saint John tourism map, long-running open source from Fredericton, Home Assistant flows for 3D printers, a toolkit for Albion Online players and a UNB graduate's home server.

Closing card: a New Brunswick outline with amber pins on Quispamsis, Saint John and Fredericton beside the headline N.B. indie builds, Oct. 20, 2026, and six project names: App Deco Studio, NB Buzz, Nimble-Snapshots, Bambu flows, AlbionKit and Home server, edition 2

Our first roundup of New Brunswick side projects ran on Oct. 18. Here is the next batch: software people build in the evenings and on weekends, ship and keep maintaining.

Four iPhone apps from Quispamsis

Roddy Munro runs App Deco Studio, a one-person studio for Apple platforms. The federal corporate registry lists App Deco Studio Inc. in Quispamsis, incorporated Jan. 1, 2024, with Munro as its only director. According to his LinkedIn, he has made iOS apps on his own since 2014, alongside a day job as an iOS engineer.

All four of his current apps are free on the App Store and published by App Deco Studio Inc.:

  • Söka keeps bucket lists, suggests goals with AI and plots them on a map, with a scratch map of countries you have visited. Its site quotes a MacStories write-up.
  • Classifier catalogues collections of anything, from coins and stamps to vinyl and trading cards, on iPhone, iPad and Mac. It replaced his earlier licence-plate tracker, Plate-It. An update shipped Oct. 19.
  • Ceramispace is for potters. It stores glaze recipes and scales batches, tracks clay and glaze inventory, and logs kiln firings. Its latest update came out Oct. 18.
  • Sunwise turns the UV index into a personal burn time based on your skin type, with hourly and seven-day forecasts on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. It launched in May 2026.

He also publishes Swift code on GitHub, including True North Tides, a SwiftUI app for checking local high and low tides.

NB Buzz, from Uptown Saint John

Karen Lloyd got the idea for NB Buzz at her window on Princess Street in Uptown Saint John. During the 2023 cruise season, she writes, she kept seeing passengers walk up from the ships, stop and turn in circles looking for a café or a place to eat.

With help from a colleague, she spent two years building the app. NB Buzz puts restaurants, events, parks, trails and attractions from across the province on one map, and alerts you when you are near one. Each spot links to a post on Experience New Brunswick, the online magazine Lloyd founded and publishes. The app is free on iPhone and launched in August 2025. An Android version is listed as coming soon.

Open source from Fredericton

Ash Furrow grew up near Woodstock and studied computer science at UNB. He moved home to Fredericton in 2020 after years in Toronto, Amsterdam and New York. He works at Wealthsimple, and on his own time he still maintains open-source tools for iOS developers, including one he started in 2014:

  • Nimble-Snapshots lets developers check in automated tests that an app's screens still look the way they should. It has more than 320 stars on GitHub, and it was last updated in September.
  • danger-ruby-swiftlint posts SwiftLint style warnings directly on pull requests.

A recent one is Embarkation, his version of the Embark colour theme for VS Code. He also blogs about the craft. Recent posts include "LLMs Are Tools" and a look back at five years in New Brunswick.

3D printers on the home dashboard

WolfwithSword publishes under that handle and lists New Brunswick on GitHub and X. Since late 2022 the developer has been building Node-RED flows and dashboards that connect Bambu Lab 3D printers to Home Assistant, the smart-home software behind the NB Power and Moncton water add-ons in our first roundup.

Bambu-HomeAssistant-Flows collects them in one place: printer status over MQTT, Grafana dashboards, bed-levelling visualizations and a controller for printer accessories, with step-by-step guides and a configurator on the developer's site. It has more than 120 stars on GitHub.

The same developer makes SubathonManager, a free desktop app for streamers on Twitch and YouTube. In a subathon, the stream's countdown grows with every sub, bit or donation. SubathonManager runs the timer, goals and on-screen overlays on the streamer's own computer. Version 2.0.4 came out Sept. 29 for Windows, Mac and Linux, and the code is open source.

AlbionKit

The developer behind cosmic-fi lists Bathurst on GitHub. Their AlbionKit is a web toolkit for players of the online game Albion Online. It finds price gaps between the game's city markets, tracks gold prices, works out the profit on farming, cooking and alchemy, and follows player-versus-player fights and faction events.

The market figures come from the Albion Online Data Project, a volunteer network of players who share price data. The site says its tools are read-only and do not touch the game client. AlbionKit's code is public on GitHub, but all rights are reserved, so it is not open source. Version 1.0.0 was tagged Oct. 18.

The same account publishes skin3d, an MIT-licensed JavaScript library that renders Minecraft player models in the browser.

A UNB graduate's home server

Adrian Freeman graduated from UNB in 2026 with a computer science degree, specializing in cyber security. Before that he was a cyber security program specialist at Brilliant Labs, where he helped write a cybersecurity curriculum used in public schools across Atlantic Canada. In the summer of 2025 he interned in IT at the Joint Economic Development Initiative, building cybersecurity training environments. His GitHub and X profiles now list Nova Scotia, and he works as an SAP developer at IBM.

His website is the front page of a server he runs himself. It links to his own instances of LibreChat for AI chat, Jellyfin for media and Cockpit for server administration. On GitHub, he has built a web server in C that serves his own site and a small database engine in Python that tracks its own memory use.

Know a New Brunswick side project that deserves a look? Send us a tip.

Sources

ChronologyUNB· 46 stories since Nov 20, 2024

  1. N.B. Indie Builds: iPhone Apps, a Tourism Map and 3D-Printer Dashboards (this story)
  2. N.B. Researchers Put Caregiver Strain Under AI Motion Capture
Chronology · show all 46 stories
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  5. Senator Spotlights UNB's DAIR and Picketa as Proof of New Brunswick's 'Innovation Sandbox'
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  9. DataNB's ICT Workforce Study: N.B. Keeps Its Tech Grads for a Year, Then Loses Many
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  24. UNB Researchers Deploy Collaborative AI Agents to Guard Power-Substation Networks
  25. UNB Researchers Build a Mixture-of-Experts Defence Against Adversarial AI Attacks
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  33. Cybersecurity Pioneer Ali Ghorbani Named to the Order of New Brunswick
  34. McKenna Institute's TeXplore Turns 17 Days Off School Into Soldering, Robots and AI
  35. SeaGreen Puts Seaweed Biochar in Ten Queen Street Flower Planters
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  40. How Fredericton Became a Cybersecurity Town
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  43. Gray Wolf Analytics: Crypto Forensics from a Fredericton Classroom
  44. Three Years In, the McKenna Institute Is Quietly Rewiring New Brunswick

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