About

I’m Rob Schmitt, a software developer in Edinburgh, Scotland. I’ve been making websites and software for most of my working life.

Soot is a Markdown notes app, which is a sentence a great many people have written before me. I’m not pretending there’s great demand for another one.

But I genuinely believe there’s room for one more. I wanted something my wife could use as happily as she uses Apple Notes, without ever finding out what Markdown is, and with your notes kept as ordinary files in folders for people like me, who care very much.

I also have strong feelings about how software looks and feels, most of them about things nobody else will notice: the space under a heading, a highlight a few pixels off centre, a button that isn’t quite where your hand expects it. Soot gives them somewhere to go.

So that’s why it exists: a gap I think is real, a long list of opinions about typography, and the developer’s chronic inability to look at an app without thinking “how hard can it be?” Quite, it turns out.

I write about building it on the blog, and share work in progress on Bluesky, X and Mastodon.