Martin Höller builds apps for people with busy minds. The most popular one works by refusing to let you ignore it.
Höller is originally from Graz, Austria, spent eight years in Berlin, and has lived in Florence since 2022. He’s been building for Apple’s platforms since 2006, and he still does freelance iOS and Mac work for clients when he isn’t working on his own stuff. His own stuff ships under the name Blue Banana Software, which is Höller plus two collaborators: Teresa Brancaccio handles communication and Simone Jahrmann edits. The company’s stated mission is apps that support focus and daily rhythm, designed with neurodivergent needs in mind. Höller says that comes from lived experience: The site notes that his own light ADHD and dyslexia shape how he builds.
In Your Face
Höller’s app that gets the most attention is In Your Face, which is fitting, since attention is the whole product.
It’s a meeting reminder utility. Shortly before an event on your calendar, In Your Face takes over your entire screen. You get the name of the meeting, a countdown, a big Join button, and a Dismiss button. You can snooze for a minute, or five, or until the event starts. What you can’t do is not see it. It lives up to the name. It is most decidedly In Your Face.
The origin story is short. Höller had a coworker who was always late to meetings, because he’d get so deep in his work that the calendar notification came and went without him noticing. At a company outing, after more than one beer, Höller told him he needed a reminder “in your face,” and said he’d build one for him. Then he did.
Höller pitches the app to people with ADHD, hyperfocus, and time blindness, and judging by the App Store reviews, that audience has found it. But the target market also includes anyone who has looked up from a task and realized their next meeting started four minutes ago. If you were mid-thought when Notification Center politely reminded you about your next call or meeting, you could easily miss it. In Your Face eliminates that problem.
The details are good, too. The app lives in the menu bar, where you can see what’s happening now and what’s next. It finds the video link in a calendar invite (it knows about more than 60 conferencing services) and joins the call with one click. It can move the alert earlier to account for travel time when the meeting is somewhere you physically need to be. There are custom reminders for things that aren’t on your calendar, themes for the alert screen, calendar filters, and desktop widgets. It runs on Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, and there’s a Windows version, too.
In Your Face is $3.99 a month or $24.99 a year. If you’d rather own it, the direct-download Mac version has a $69 one-time license, and the app is on Setapp as well. Höller says it has surpassed 100,000 downloads.
The rest of the bunch
That same idea, building for people whose minds are busy, runs through everything else Blue Banana ships:
Chimeful is a Mac menu bar app that plays gentle chimes when it’s time to take a break, drink some water, stretch, or rest your eyes. If In Your Face is the loud one, this is the quiet one.
Tracktiq is time tracking for freelancers and consultants on the Mac, covering hours, revenue, and payments. As a fellow consultant, I understand the need.
wrdlr is a word finder for patterns and puzzles, on Mac and iPhone. Given how I spend my days, I’ve decided not to think too hard about whether that counts as cheating.
World of Noms is an iPhone app for browsing iconic dishes from around the world and jumping straight to a recipe. Höller lists food among his hobbies, and it shows.
Noomba helps you practice numbers in foreign languages, across several learning modes. Numbers are the part of a new language that falls apart the moment someone says a price quickly.
Then there are the music apps. Pocket Jam loops sections of any song and changes pitch and tempo independently, so you can slow down a solo, or drop a track into your tuning without reaching for a capo. Piano Tabs does something similar for MIDI files, showing you the notes on a keyboard with looping and a speed trainer, and it comes with more than 800 pieces built in. I’ve been beta testing some new versions of these, and the care Höller and his team put into their apps is clear, even in prerelease builds.
Check out Blue Banana’s apps.