Ed Rooth N/A
Creator / Found of Chromatose
Ed Rooth (aka Hekuli) is a solo developer and visual artist with over 20 years in software. He's the creator of Chromatose, a real-time, shader-based video synthesizer for iOS that he designs, engineers, and ships entirely on his own. A longtime DJ and electronic-music hobbyist, he fell down the real-time-graphics rabbit hole, taught himself Metal, and set out to put a GPU instrument in everyone's pocket.
Building a Real-Time Video Synthesizer in Swift & Metal
What else can an iOS app be? Chromatose is my answer: a real-time, modular video synthesizer that turns an iPhone into a GPU-driven instrument, running custom Metal shaders at 60fps, even on a five-year-old device. It's a genuinely new category of app, and building it meant taking Swift somewhere it rarely goes.
I designed, built, and shipped it solo. This session is a candid tour: a performance-critical render loop, a custom Metal pipeline, and a deeply custom UI where the usual frameworks stop helping. I'll share the architecture that held up, the parts I rewrote more than once, and the platform realities (Apple API black boxes, SwiftUI/UIKit gaps, GPU performance) that tutorials skip.
The bigger idea: the techniques that make a video synth fast and maintainable (custom rendering, value-type architecture, document versioning) are what let you invent something new on a platform millions already carry. You don't need to care about graphics to use them.