Slow to make. Fast to use.
Why a software company would put the word slow in its name, and what we mean by it.
Slowrox makes software that respects your time. Our products are Lynx, a download manager for Mac and Windows, and Aura Scanner, an app that reads one photo and tells you how you come across.
The name is a promise in two halves. The slow half is ours: the research, the sketches, the measurements, the rewrites and the testing that nobody sees. The fast half is yours: the moment you paste a link or take a photo, things should simply happen.
What slow means in practice
- We measure before we decide. A change to Lynx's clip engine ships with numbers: seconds, megabytes, frames.
- We take things out. Most of the work on a screen is removing a step until there is nothing left to remove.
- We fix causes. A bug is done when we know why it happened and a test makes sure it never happens that way again.
What fast means in practice
A 35 second clip from a long video arrives as 11 MB in 29 seconds, instead of the whole 255 MB. A reading in Aura Scanner arrives as a deck of cards you can swipe right away. Being fast is not about the network. It is about not making you wait for anything we could have done beforehand.
We will write here about what we make and how we make it. Some posts will be about products, some about engineering, and some about the company itself.