Wattle Pixel Co has always been broader than a single format. Books, creative resources and website work remain important parts of the studio, but behind the scenes another part of the business has been growing: original software products.
Three of those products are now far enough along that we can introduce them properly. They solve very different problems, but all three started the same way: with something that felt more complicated, fragmented or frustrating than it needed to be.
Wattle Pulse: money planning around real life
Most budgeting tools begin with a calendar month. Real life does not always work that way. People are paid weekly, fortnightly or monthly. Bills arrive on different dates. Some commitments are paid from cash, some from credit, and the question that matters on a Tuesday afternoon is often not “what did I spend this month?” but “what is already spoken for, and what can I safely use before the next pay day?”
Wattle Pulse is being built around that reality. It connects accounts, recurring commitments, spending plans, savings goals and transactions to the customer’s actual pay cycle, with an emphasis on explaining the numbers rather than hiding them behind a score.
The product is still evolving through Customer Zero testing and release preparation. We would rather show its status honestly than put a launch label on something before it is ready.
Wattle Markdown Printer: from GitHub Markdown to professional documents
Wattle Markdown Printer came from a very different problem. Technical documentation often lives comfortably in GitHub, where Markdown is practical, version controlled and easy to review. The experience changes when that same document needs to become a polished PDF for a proposal, design review, architecture pack or customer handover.
Copying the content into another document editor breaks the workflow. Uploading private repository content to an online converter creates a different problem. So we built a Chrome extension that works with the rendered GitHub Markdown already open in the browser and prepares it locally for Chrome Print Preview.
The current release includes Technical, Clean and Compact document styles, structured metadata, page-aware contents, figure lists and captions, wide-content handling, running page furniture and locally remembered settings. The extension does not upload the document to Wattle Pixel Co.
Wattle View: a fresher way to navigate authorised media sources
Wattle View began with a catalogue problem. Some media players can connect to a source but make it surprisingly difficult to know whether the local catalogue is genuinely fresh. We wanted to explore an experience where refresh behaviour is explicit, newest content is easier to find and the interface feels calmer.
The early prototype can connect to a compatible source supplied by the user, re-query it on demand and present live television, movies and series with clearer freshness information. The longer-term direction includes richer detail pages, programme information, favourites, continue watching and dedicated television experiences.
Different products, one product discipline
These products do not need to look identical or serve the same audience. What should connect them is the way they are built.
We want the problem to be clear before the feature list gets long. We want privacy and security decisions made while the product is being designed, not after launch. We want documentation to explain what exists, what is planned and why a decision was made. And we want releases to be tested against real use rather than declared finished because the code compiled.
That work is less visible than a polished screen, but it is the part that turns an interesting prototype into something people can rely on.
And behind Digital Services, the Client Hub is taking shape too
There is one more platform being built inside Wattle Pixel Co, but we do not treat it as another consumer product. The Wattle Pixel Co Client Hub is being designed to support our website and care services.
The aim is simple: give clients a clearer place for requests, approvals, files, project status and ongoing support instead of letting important work disappear into long email threads. Client Hub access will be included where appropriate with Wattle Pixel Co services and is marked Coming soon while it is still being completed.
What comes next
Wattle Pulse, Wattle Markdown Printer and Wattle View are all at different stages. “Coming soon” does not mean the same date, and we are deliberately not publishing dates we cannot stand behind.
What we can say is that Wattle Pixel Co is becoming a studio that not only creates books, websites and useful content, but also designs, engineers and operates its own software products.
That changes the questions we ask, the standards we set and, increasingly, the kind of work we are able to do.