MACK KALISH ← BACK TO MENU
THIEVES DEN // SIDE QUESTS

WHEN I'M NOT
SHOOTING

The camera pays the bills, but I build my own tools too. When Lightroom or an off-the-shelf app doesn't do what I need, I make the thing. These three all started as a problem on a real shoot.

SIDE QUEST · WINDOWS DESKTOP

Kalendar

STATUS: SHIPPED

Windows shows you a calendar when you click the clock, and it tells you nothing. I wanted my actual schedule in the place my eyes already go a hundred times a day, so I built a frosted-glass calendar that slides up from the corner of the taskbar.

KALENDAR, RUNNING — TRAY ICON, PANEL, DAY DETAIL, THEME TOGGLE
  • Lives beside the clock. Click the tray icon, the panel slides up; click a day, you see what's on it.
  • Reads Google, Outlook, Yahoo and iCloud calendars.
  • Ships as a real Windows installer — double-click, next, install, done. No Python to install, nothing else to set up.
  • Optionally starts with Windows, and uninstalls from Settings like any normal program.
DOWNLOAD FOR WINDOWS ↗ Free, Windows 10 and 11. It isn't code-signed yet, so Windows will ask once — click More info then Run anyway. Source on GitHub.
PYTHONWINDOWS TRAY APPINNO SETUP INSTALLERv1.0.0SHIPPED
SIDE QUEST · iOS

Shoot Day Companion

STATUS: SHIPPED

An event shoot is mostly logistics. Who is speaking at 2:40, which room, what still needs covering, and what just happened that nobody wrote down. Shoot Day Companion is the app I wanted in my pocket while my hands were already full of camera.

  • Call sheet and running order for the day, readable one-handed.
  • A shot checklist you tick off as coverage lands, so gaps surface while there is still time to fix them.
  • A live moment logger — tap when something worth finding later happens, and it timestamps against the shoot.
  • AI shot ideas for when the schedule stalls and you need an angle you haven't already taken twice.
  • Schedule-photo import: point it at a photo of a printed run sheet and it builds the day from that.
  • A Live Activity so the next item sits on the lock screen instead of behind an app switch.
  • iCloud sync, so prep done on the couch is on the phone at the venue.
SWIFT / SWIFTUILIVE ACTIVITYICLOUD SYNCTESTFLIGHT
SIDE QUEST · LIGHTROOM CLASSIC

Mack Cull

STATUS: IN CALIBRATION

Culling is the least creative part of the job and it eats the most hours. A tournament weekend is thousands of frames, most of them near-duplicates of the frame beside them. Mack Cull is a Lightroom Classic plugin that does the boring first pass so I only make the calls that actually need my eye.

  • Scores every frame and flags the keepers, so the first pass is a review instead of a slog.
  • De-dupes burst sequences down to the frame worth keeping.
  • Spits out a coverage report at the end — what got shot, what didn't, where the thin spots are.
  • Tuned against my own catalogs and my own hit rate, which is why it is still in calibration rather than shipped.
LIGHTROOM SDKLUACOVERAGE REPORTIN CALIBRATION