It’s been a gigantic year for us here at the Black Pixel. Only mid-May and we’ve shipped a couple of stellar apps for our clients and, at last, taken some time to work on one of our own. When you set out to make a product of your own, whether you’re a carpenter or an X-ray technician or an iPhone developer, they say you should scratch your own itch. You’re your own best customer, they say. So we found our itch.

There’s a recurring problem when we developers get together for dinner and drinks, and that’s how to split the bill. When you’re dining alone or with a friend you can use mental arithmetic or your iPhone’s Calculator to figure out what you owe. But get into parties of five or ten or twenty—the kinds of dinners we find ourselves in at Seattle XCoders, WWDC or the tearfully-remembered C4 conference—and you’ve descended into a new level of hell. Some people don’t eat, some people don’t drink, nobody remembers the sales tax, and everybody needs change.

That’s the problem we set out to solve with Bistromath.

I could sit here and write at length about what makes Bistromath special and why we’re super stoked to release it. I could go on a feature-by-feature tour, but that wouldn’t leave me with anything to talk about next time. Suffice to say we’ve made something shockingly powerful and flexible beneath a calm, restrained user interface. We like it a lot, and we think you should check it out.