One person, four kids,
and a great many coins

I did not set out to make software. I photograph coins and I deal in them, which means I already spend my days doing the thing this program does: lighting a surface until the truth about it shows up, deciding whether a line was struck into the metal or scratched onto it, and then saying so out loud to somebody who is about to spend money on the answer.

The tools I could find were split between two kinds. Some cost more than the coins I was pointing them at. The rest gave me confident answers that were not true. The second kind is worse. A program that says no doubling detected about a coin with obvious doubling has not failed politely, it has told you something false in a calm voice, and if you are a dealer you will eventually repeat it to a customer.

So I wrote my own, and I have not stopped.

Why it behaves the way it does

Nearly everything odd about this program comes from the fact that I have to live with its answers.

Every tool that guesses says so. The ones that measure and the ones that infer live on separate tabs, and the inferring ones are labelled in a colour that means caution with their own weaknesses printed beside them. When the doubling screen finds a second image but cannot measure the gap reliably, it reports what it found and prints no distance at all, because a wrong measurement dressed up as a measurement is worse than nothing. I would rather ship a tool that admits a limit than one that quietly invents a number I might quote.

Your photographs are not watermarked. They are your photographs. I would be furious if somebody stamped a logo across mine.

I never see your coins. A licensed copy does contact my server to check its licence — I am not going to pretend otherwise — and that exchange carries your licence key and a fingerprint of the machine, and nothing else. No photographs, no collection, no measurements, no record of what you were looking at. There is no telemetry and no analytics of any kind. The only other thing that ever leaves your machine is a bug report, and only because you typed it and pressed send.

There is a lifetime licence, because that is what I would buy. A monthly option exists because people asked for one and a month is genuinely how some people work — a busy fortnight cataloguing a collection and then nothing until spring. But nothing here renews behind your back, and the lifetime price is not a penalty for wanting to own the thing you paid for.

It will not hold your work hostage. If the licence check cannot reach my server, the program keeps going. Past the grace period the paid tools stop, but the camera, the photograph strip, your collection and the export all keep working. Coin photography is often unrepeatable - the coin gets sold, slabbed or put back in the roll - and locking somebody out of pictures they cannot retake, because of a network fault at my end, would be indefensible.

Dealer and collector are not the same person

I do both, and they want different things. The dealer needs to know what a coin is worth and wants it photographed, graded, labelled and listed by Thursday. The collector wants to know what it is - which die, which variety, which stage of that die's life, and what happened at the mint on the day it was struck.

That is why the collection half of this program is as developed as the microscope half. A tool that only examines coins leaves you with a folder of beautiful photographs and no idea which coin they belong to. So every photograph is filed against a coin record that also holds the grade, the cost, the current value, the provenance and the shelf it physically sits on - and it will print the 2x2 label with the barcode so the shelf and the software agree.

The part nobody asks about

I like staring at code. That is the honest explanation for the size of this thing. A doubling detector that took five rewrites before it would separate a real 1955 doubled die from an ordinary cent, and then a sixth pass to work out that its measurement was wrong even though its verdict was right, is not a business plan. That is somebody enjoying themselves.

Four children is also part of the explanation, in a way that will make sense to anyone who has any. There is no patience here for software that takes four minutes to open, asks you to sign in, or interrupts to tell you about a feature. The program starts, the camera is live, and the coin is on screen.

Where it is going

Forward, steadily, and in public. Features get added because a real coin made them necessary - usually one sitting under my own lens that the program could not yet help with. When something here cannot do what you need, that is worth telling me, because that is genuinely how the list gets written.