Book the ryokan before Friday. Rooms are going fast.
by_cat = spend.groupby("category").amount.sum()
by_cat.nlargest(5)
MesaA Mac app by Atlouro
Put everything
on the table.
Mesa is a Mac app for thinking on an infinite canvas. Plan a trip, track a budget or map out a project. Notes, tables and web clips sit side by side, boards nest inside boards, and when you want a hand, Claude can work on the board with you.
Try it in your browser For macOS 26 · in private preview, get early access. The browser playground needs no sign-up.
Kyoto, 4 days
Day 1: Fushimi Inari at sunrise, before the crowds.
Day 2: Arashiyama bamboo grove, then tea in Saga.
Day 3: Day trip to Nara.
Yen to dollars
¥50,000≈ $333
Example rate $1 = ¥150
| Item | USD |
|---|---|
| Flights | 1,180 |
| Ryokan, 2 nights | 640 |
| Rail pass | 200 |
W
Fushimi Inari Taisha
en.wikipedia.org
Ask Claude for a rainy-day plan.
01 · Who it's for
Your life doesn't come in folders.
Your journal, your trip photos, the posts you saved, the recipes you screenshot. Right now they live in a dozen apps. Here they are on one canvas.
02 · Mesa + Claude
Claude works right on the board.
Mesa has Claude built in when you want it, and it also runs an MCP server, so Claude Code and other agents can reach your board too. Ask for a plan, a dataset or a diagram, and it arrives as cards you can move, edit and connect. Rather work on your own? Everything in Mesa works without AI.
1/3
Day 1 · Eastern temples
2/3
Day 2 · Arashiyama
3/3
Day 3 · Nara day trip
| Item | USD |
|---|---|
| Lodging | 640 |
| Rail | 200 |
| Food | 360 |
03 · Boards in boards
Zoom in. There's more inside.
Any card can be a whole board. Nest a project inside a project, and move between them the way you'd lean in over a desk, not through folders.
HomeKyoto trip
Renew passport
Book flights
04 · Cards
Every kind of thinking has a card.
Kyoto, whole trip
$2,580
$1,290 each
Reads BudgetWritten by Claude
A real web page running inside the card. Go ahead, drag the sliders. Ask Claude for a tool and it writes one from your board, and it stays in sync when the board changes.
Where the money goes
Year to date, from the bank export.
[ ]
Code cells run next to the notes that explain them. Press the play button.
Sketch a plan or a process. Write Mermaid and it renders on the canvas.
Sort: noneFilter8 rows
| Neighborhood | Status |
|---|
Real fields: text, numbers, dates, checkboxes, single-select. Click Place or Rent to sort.
Monthly spendinglinked
From the Budget table
Charts read straight from a table, so they update when the data does.
Add a task…
Ryokan etiquetteMarkdown
Nara · Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
Food to try3 of 5 done
Add Item
To-dos keep count as you check them off. Columns stack any cards into a list.
Folders gather cards without leaving the canvas. Click to open.
WWikipedia
Fushimi Inari Taisha
Open ↗
A Shinto shrine in Kyoto, known for thousands of vermilion torii gates winding up Mount Inari.
Clip any page from Safari. It arrives as a card that keeps the page's look.
before
Check @Budget before booking the ryokan.
Budget
Trip total $2,580. Flights are the biggest line.
Mentions
Check @Budget before…
Connections
Check @Budget before…
Connect cards with lines, or mention one inside another. Backlinks track it both ways.
Kyoto, four days
Day 1. Fushimi Inari at sunrise, before the crowds.
Day 2. Arashiyama, then tea in Saga.
Day 3. Nara by train, about 45 minutes.
Wedding toast, draft 3
Start with the camping story. Keep it under two minutes.
Close: raise a glass to the two of them.
Q4 plan
Goal: ship the playground and 10 customer calls.
Owner for each line, review on Fridays.
Markdown cards are documents. Open one to write long-form with blocks like headings, to-dos, quotes and tables, flip to the plain Markdown any time, and pick the paper it’s printed on.
PDFJR Pass voucher.pdfPDF · 412 KB
OpenReveal in Finder
PDFRyokan booking.pdfPDF · 1.2 MB
OpenReveal in Finder
XLSXKyoto budget.xlsxSpreadsheet · 86 KB
OpenReveal in Finder
Before we fly
Print the @JR Pass voucher, it has to be exchanged at Kansai.
Check-in after 3pm, see the @Ryokan booking › Check-in section.
Flights are already in @Kyoto budget.
Mentioned in Packing and Day 1
Drop in a PDF, a spreadsheet or a deck and it becomes a card that stays linked to the real file, so Open and Reveal in Finder always work. Mention it from any note, down to a single section, and Mesa tracks every place it’s referenced.
⌘K finds any card on any board, by title or by what's inside. Try typing.
05 · Beyond the canvas
Agents that ask first. Memory that carries over.
-
Loops
Wire Mesa's tools and Claude into a visual workflow, then run it or schedule it. Every step lights up as it runs, and anything that edits your board waits for your approval.
Memory from Claude Code
Point Mesa at your Claude Code memory folder and the Assistant picks up what your coding sessions already learned. Imported memories start switched off until you turn them on.
Agents with approvals
Scheduled Claude runs over your Spaces: a morning inbox triage, a weekly digest. They read freely, and any move, edit or delete pauses for a yes from you.
X bookmarks
Your bookmarks sit in a quiet tray. Drag a post onto the canvas and it becomes a full card with photos, video and quoted posts.
Threads
String cards into an ordered thread: the steps of a plan, the beats of a story. Step through them in order, wherever they sit on the board.
Portals
A live window onto a card that lives somewhere else, even in another Space. Edit the source and every portal updates.
The Shelf
A tray that follows you across Spaces. Pin the cards you keep reaching for and pull them onto any board.
Reader
Open a Space as a quiet, read-only wiki. Mentions and portals turn into links, and every page lists what points back to it.
06 · Capture
Catch it anywhere. Sort it later.
Press ⌥Space in any app and a Scratch Pad drops down. Clip a page from Safari in one click. It all lands in your Inbox, and a few keys send each thing to the Space where it belongs. Try it: type a thought below, or clip the article.
GuidesThe best ramen in Kyoto, ranked
Twelve bowls, four neighborhoods and one very long line on Kiyamachi street.
✓Inbox zero
Move to
07 · Private by default
Your thinking stays yours.
Mesa is a Mac app, not a website. Your boards live in a database on your Mac, with a snapshot taken each time it opens. You choose which model helps, or whether one does at all.
Pick where the thinking happens
Your boardThis MacAnthropic
- On your MacBoards live in a local database, not on our servers.
- SnapshotsA backup is taken every time Mesa opens.
- Only when you askNothing is sent to a model until you ask the Assistant or run an agent.
Plain Markdown out, any time
- Kyoto trip/
- Itinerary.md
- Budget.md
- Packing.md
- assets/
- torii.png
- edges.json
Export a Space as a folder of Markdown files. Layout rides along in front-matter and connections in edges.json, so nothing gets locked in.
Agents knock first
~ % claude mcp add mesa http://127.0.0.1:4123/mcp
Claude Code and other agents reach your board through a server that runs on your Mac and only answers to a token you hand out. In Mesa you decide whether every action asks first or only the risky ones do.
08 · Also from Atlouro
Other things we're making.
-
Agent tools · macOS
OuroborosA control room for coding agents. Start, supervise, approve and review runs of Claude Code and other agents in one place. 1,870 commits and about 3,000 tests in three months.
-
Live · Web
Draft LabNBA draft analytics with a machine-learning model trained on 18 years of prospects, covering 19 draft classes. Live at hoops4dh.com.
-
Prototype · Unreal Engine 5
ColossusA game prototype where Claude Code works inside the Unreal Editor through MCP, building the world alongside us.
About Atlouro
Atlouro is a small software studio in Atlanta. Mesa is our first app.
ATL plus ouro, Portuguese for gold: America's first major gold rush began in Dahlonega, Georgia, an hour north of here. Our mark is the Sankofa, an Adinkra symbol for going back to fetch what matters. Mesa's icon is Denkyem, the crocodile, for adaptability.
Mesa is in private preview.
Leave your email and we’ll send you a build as soon as there’s room. Just that one email, no newsletter. Questions? michael@atlouro.com