Who is behind it
Calíope is built by one person: David Villalobos Cambronero, in Costa Rica. I have worked as a DBA since 2016, after university studies specialised in databases. I am a programmer at heart. Calíope exists because no tool covered what my own work needed, so I wrote one.
The path
It did not start with Calíope. Before it, I wrote the MySQL component for the Gambas language, gb.mysql; it is listed in the Gambas hall of fame. In 2008 I started Calíope as a desktop client in Qt, for Windows, Linux and macOS. It shipped for years, and its builds are still on the Legacy Qt builds page. Then came the version you see on this site: a rewrite from scratch, in Swift, for the Mac, the iPad, the iPhone and the rest of the Apple screens.
Open source, then closed
The original Qt Calíope was open source, under the GPL, and it still is: its source is on the legacy page under that licence. The native Apple version is closed source. The reason is plain. The open version never brought in enough to sustain its development, and a client that touches production databases needs continuous work, not spare evenings. Nothing with a community around it was closed. This is a new program, in another language, for another platform, written years later. Nobody lost access to anything they already had.
How it is written
Calíope is written with AI assistance. What it does, and why, comes from my own work: I have been a DBA since 2016, and each tool in it answers something I needed on a real shift. The AI writes much of the code. I review every change and approve it before it ships, and I test it against my own servers. Whatever reaches your database is my responsibility, not the model’s. If something goes wrong, you write to me, and I answer for it.
AI is also what makes this kind of app viable. One person writing everything by hand could not build a client this size and keep it working on the Mac, the iPad, the iPhone, the Apple Watch, the Apple TV and Vision Pro. With AI, I can. That lets me sell Calíope the way I wanted to: one purchase, no subscription, no server of mine behind it and no investors to answer to.
Why this matters if you connect to production
Calíope has no server and no accounts. There is no infrastructure of mine for your credentials to reach, so they never leave your device: they live in its Keychain, and iCloud Keychain is an explicit opt-in. The privacy policy says exactly what stays where.
Contact
Write to me directly. One person reads it.