Features in depth

What each part of FlexGrid actually does, and why we let it in the house.

A walkthrough of the v1 feature set, minus the startup cosplay. Free and Plus are the debut tiers; PRO ships as early access for live performers who prefer their tools a little hot and still cooling. A few beloved troublemakers are parked on the roadmap for further refinement.

01
Discovery
Plus

SmartShuffle

SmartShuffle treats your library like a deck of cards. It deals every item before any card is dealt twice — so a long session reveals everything you have, in an order that always feels fresh. As it deals, it balances across folders, aspect ratios, and durations so portraits don't pile up next to portraits and short clips don't all land in the same corner.

  • ◆ Status bar shows progress through the current pass ("Seen 83 of 247")
  • ◆ Locked tiles are respected — only unlocked cells are reshuffled
  • ◆ Combine with Auto-Advance for an endless self-curating display
02
Vision
Plus

Vision tags & subject zoom

FlexGrid analyzes your media on-device using Apple's Vision framework. 18+ smart filters — faces, bodies, text, animals, scenes, brightness, B&W, horizon tilt, blur, smudge, letterbox, composite detection, and feature-print perceptual similarity — become one-click grid filters with SF Symbol icons. Subject Zoom offers six framing modes: Fill to Face, Fill to Torso, Fill to Torso Only, Fill to Person, Zoom to Body, or Off. None of this analysis ever leaves your machine.

  • ◆ 18+ content filters with SF Symbol icons, including perceptual similarity via feature prints
  • ◆ Subject Zoom with 6 framing modes — from tight face crop to full-body framing
  • ◆ All analysis runs on-device; results cached for instant re-use
03
Curation
Plus

Pick Tray

Press P on any hovered cell to flag it for later. An orange flag marks the pick, and the Picks drawer collects thumbnails of everything you've flagged this session. Filter the grid down to just your picks, then decide what stays. It's a shortlist, not a commitment — designed to be cleared often.

  • ◆ Press P to toggle, or click the flag icon directly
  • ◆ Picks drawer with thumbnails; one-click "Show Picks as Grid"
  • ◆ Picks persist between sessions but are meant to be ephemeral
04
Automation
Plus

Countdown timers, web feeds & reaction camera

Give any cell a countdown timer with a visible progress ring — when it finishes, the grid can advance, shuffle, or recall a scene. Swap a cell for a live web page, an RSS feed, or a raw HTML snippet. Or drop in your webcam for picture-in-picture reactions. Three small tools that turn the grid into a dashboard, a show clock, or a streaming setup.

  • ◆ Per-cell countdown timers with configurable completion actions
  • ◆ Up to 4 web feed cells per grid, with CSS and auto-refresh
  • ◆ Live webcam feed with camera selection and horizontal mirror
05
Performance · early access
PRO

VJ Mode & beat reactivity

VJ Mode turns the grid into an instrument. Tap tempo to set the BPM, or let the microphone listen for beats and lock the grid to the room. Map any FlexGrid action to any MIDI control. Save scenes, recall them with a key press. Shipping as early access in v1 — the core is solid, the polish is ongoing.

  • ◆ Tap tempo, BPM-locked transitions, mic-driven reactivity
  • ◆ MIDI Learn for buttons, knobs, and faders
  • ◆ Scenes recall full grid state (Cmd+1–9)
06
State · early access
PRO

Productions, scenes & snapshots

A FlexGrid Production is a portable .flexproduction file that captures everything: the media, the layout, the filters, the scenes, the overlays. Open it on another Mac and you're looking at the same setup. Productions autosave on a configurable interval, and grid snapshots bookmark layouts within a session. Early access in v1.

  • ◆ Portable .flexproduction files capture full state
  • ◆ Autosave interval is configurable (30–300s)
  • ◆ Grid snapshots and color-tagged scenes for in-session recall
07
Vision · early access
PRO

Pose detection & Pose Compare Loupe

Pose detection finds and matches body poses across your media using on-device ML. Save reference poses to a library with thumbnails, then filter the grid to show only items that match. The Pose Compare Loupe puts two items side-by-side and aligns the skeletons for direct comparison — perfect for choreography review, athletic analysis, or photo selection where pose matters.

  • ◆ 19-joint pose fingerprinting, all on-device
  • ◆ Saved Pose Library with thumbnails and one-click filtering
  • ◆ Pose Compare Loupe with drag-and-drop and skeleton overlay
08
Branding · early access
PRO

Window padding, padding style & branding

PRO turns the space around your grid into a design surface. Window Padding (0–100pt) wraps the entire app in a configurable frame. Padding Style fills that frame with a solid color, one of eight liquid-glass preset gradients, a custom gradient, or a GPU-driven ambient shader. Layer a logo (PNG or Lottie) and custom typography on top, and FlexGrid becomes part of your brand identity.

  • ◆ Window padding 0–100pt, with auto-expand to fit branding
  • ◆ Padding fills: solid · 8 preset gradients · custom gradient · ambient shader
  • ◆ PNG/Lottie logo overlay in 6 positions; full typography control on text
09
Export · early access
PRO

AI Super Resolution & ML Motion Blur

When you export a collage or mood board, you can opt into AI Super Resolution (up to 4× upscaling) for sharper output and ML Motion Blur for cinematic optical-flow-aware blur on video cells. Both effects run on-device using Apple Silicon's Neural Engine. Your media never touches a cloud.

  • ◆ Up to 4× upscaling for sharper exports
  • ◆ Optical-flow blur on video cells during export
  • ◆ Apple Silicon + macOS 26 required
10
Broadcast · early access
PRO

Broadcast overlay & chroma key

FlexGrid speaks broadcast. Lower-third overlays render from HTML/CSS templates so they match your brand exactly. Chroma key backgrounds (green, blue, magenta) make it trivial to drop the grid into OBS or Wirecast. And in direct-download builds, Syphon output routes the live grid into Resolume, VDMX, or MadMapper.

  • ◆ HTML/CSS lower-third templates with the Overlay Editor
  • ◆ Green / blue / magenta chroma key backgrounds for compositing
  • ◆ Syphon output in direct-download builds only (disabled in App Store/TestFlight)
11
Intelligence
Plus

Smart Captions

On-device AI captioning and tagging powered by Apple's FoundationModels framework. Point it at your grid and get natural-language descriptions for each piece of media — without a single byte leaving your Mac. Useful for accessibility, for search, or for remembering why you kept that clip in the first place.

  • ◆ Natural-language descriptions generated entirely on-device
  • ◆ Requires macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence enabled
  • ◆ Tags integrate with Vision filters for combined search
12
Automation
Free

Siri & Shortcuts

Nine App Intents expose FlexGrid to Shortcuts.app and Siri. Automate shuffle, play/pause, grid size changes, blackout, freeze, lava lamp, and presentation mode — from a voice command, a keyboard shortcut, or a multi-step Shortcut that chains FlexGrid with the rest of your tools.

  • ◆ 9 intents: shuffle, play, pause, grid size, blackout, freeze, lava lamp, presentation, open
  • ◆ Works with Siri voice commands on macOS 15+
  • ◆ Chain with other apps in Shortcuts.app for complex automations
13
Calm
Free

Quick Hide & calm UX

Calm software knows when to disappear. A global hotkey blanks the screen, stops playback, and hides the entire app instantly — useful when someone walks into the room. Tap again and you're back exactly where you left off. Loading states use breathing indicators instead of spinners, the startup greeting is time-aware, and Reduce Motion is honored everywhere.

  • ◆ Global hotkey toggles instant blank screen
  • ◆ Breathing indicators replace spinners
  • ◆ Reduce Motion and VoiceOver supported throughout

On the roadmap

Temporarily mothballed. Still on payroll.

These features were built and tested, but they need a deeper retool before they meet our bar. They're disabled in v1 and will return later, ideally with better posture and fewer chaos tendencies.

Plus Returning

SmartFlex Grid

Drag-to-resize columns and rows, cell spanning, hero+grid layouts. It was serving too hard, too early, so we're rebuilding it on a calmer engine before it makes its return.

Plus Returning

Canvas mode

Blank-cell collage builder with per-cell drag-and-drop. Coming back with the SmartFlex rework so both features can stop fighting over the furniture.

Plus Returning

Masonry layout

Magazine-style templates that vary cell sizes for visual interest. Paused while we give the template set fewer filler episodes.

Plus Returning

Mood matching

Auto-arrange cells by color gradient, visual energy, or similarity clusters. Paused while we revisit the clustering model and ask it to be less chaotic-neutral.

Plus Returning

Mood board export

Styled export with titles, subtitles, and filename labels for client-ready deliverables. Returning alongside Canvas once both of them have better manners.

Free Returning

Lava Lamp mode

Full-window metaball shader with eight color palettes. Benched for v1 because if it ships, it needs to glide, not cough theatrically on older Macs.

What we don't ask for

The features only matter if the app isn't secretly being weird.

On-device
Vision, VideoToolbox, CoreImage, Metal — every AI/ML feature runs locally, not in some haunted warehouse of GPUs.
No accounts
No sign-in. No sync. No cloud. No telemetry. Your clips are not content for a dashboard.
Native macOS
SwiftUI · AVFoundation · Strict Swift 6 concurrency. Not Electron. Not a browser wearing expensive shoes.
One-time pricing
Free is real. Plus and PRO are one-time purchases via StoreKit 2. No subscriptions, because enough already.

Want the engineering gossip?

The systems that keep a 25-video grid smooth on a MacBook Air: borrowed players, four-tier caching, and enough adaptive performance logic to avoid public embarrassment.

Read the design notes → Browse the help center