keywords
everything is a keyword you type.
no toolbar. no icon row. no menus, no sheets, no settings gear. this list is the only index the app has, because there is nowhere in it to go looking.
- one full stopa switch
- something with an on, an off or a pause keeps a single full stop. gecko.on. we.off. focus.on. sound.7.
- two full stopsan insertion
- anything that puts something into the writing needs two, so that the single-dot form stays free for ordinary prose. pic. is punctuation. pic.. is a photograph.
40 things
the page
what is there before you type anything.
- The app opens on a page with the cursor already blinking. There is no new-note button, no onboarding and no empty state. The note is a single body of plain text, and its title is derived from the first line when it is read rather than stored as a separate field. Saving is automatic, 250ms after you stop.
- Drags the list of notes over the page. Titles only: no previews, no icons, no dates, no folders. Search from the same field filters as you type.
- In the pulled-down list, holding a note is the only place its own actions live; there is no icon row on a list row either. Pin it to the top, put it in a folder, take it out of one, or delete it. Deleting does not ask twice; a note is one note, and the app has never had a confirmation dialog.
- Made from the same long press. A folder is a name and nothing else: no nesting, no colour, no icon, just a heading with some notes under it, drawn as a slightly grey block in the list. Tap the name to fold it away. Removing a folder never removes writing; its notes are simply loose again.
- Scales the type. Every element sized in line-heights (the focus veil, wewe's terrain, the media chips) rescales with it, because they are measured against the text rather than the screen.
- Inserts a checkbox glyph at the start of the current line. Tap the box to flip it between to-do and done; done draws in green. The checkbox survives edits made above it, because the mapping is diffed rather than counted from the top.■
the box is the only chrome on the page, and it flips
- The only styling surface in the app, and it exists only while something is selected. Three actions: Colour, which opens a six-digit hex keypad whose swatches fill in live as you type; Strike; and Emote, which converts the selection to its emoji whether or not auto-emoji is on.
- Tap to flip between light and dark. Long-press to open settings, the only way in.
things you put in the page
each one opens inline, in the line you typed it on. two full stops.
- Opens the camera inline, in the line you typed it on. The photograph becomes a capsule in the writing rather than an attachment at the bottom. Nothing comes from your gallery; the camera is the only way in, so a picture in a note is always one that was taken while the note was being written.
- The same, recording. A filter word in front picks one of five analog looks, and the look is baked into the recorded file itself through an NTSC-emulation pipeline (subcarrier, dither and all) rather than being a preview that disappears when you play it back.
- A voice note. Tap to record, tap to stop; the finished clip lives as a capsule in the line. Playback shows the words as they are spoken, transcribed on-device.
- Drops a speed reader into the writing at that spot: one word at a time, Spritz-style, from the .epub library the app finds on your phone by itself. Every anchor is an independent reader on its own book, so two of them in the same note are two different books at two different positions.
- An audiobook listener on the same book and the same position as rd.., so pausing the reader and typing lstn.. picks the voice up exactly where your eyes stopped. Twenty-four voices, all on-device, cast as named people with faces rather than shown as engine identifiers.
- A location pill. Type a query after it and it resolves against where you actually are: a place in the line, not a map screen.
things the words do by themselves
no trigger. finish the word and it happens, or it doesn't.
- With the ✌ toggle on, a word swaps for its monochrome emoji as you finish it. 2,409 curated entries, filtered to exactly what the bundled Noto Emoji font can actually draw, so you never get an empty box.
2,400 words. the letters go, the meaning stays
- Nike, Audi, Spotify: around 130 of them become that brand's monochrome mark, drawn from a generated icon font. Lower case is never a brand, which is what keeps ordinary prose untouched.
- Tints its own letters that colour. Roughly a thousand names from the XKCD colour survey and CSS, so "dusty rose" and "electric lime" both work. An unknown modifier on a known colour falls back to the nearest match rather than failing.
~1000 names. the word paints itself the moment it is finished
- "Nike Alphafly 3" becomes a sticker: a real cut-out photograph of the thing, resolved once over the network and then cached forever as a transparent PNG. Simple product shots are cut by flood fill; busy photographs go through subject extraction.
- Before a word becomes a sticker or an emoji, the app reads the sentence it is in to work out which meaning you meant. "Air Jordan" in a sentence about clothes resolves to the shoe; in a sentence about basketball it does not resolve at all.
- With emoji mode on, every "I" and "me" is drawn as your own face, a small avatar built from Open Peeps parts in the settings screen, rendered as vectors in the theme's ink so it is always the right colour on either background.
things that keep time
counting down in the writing, or waking you up later.
- An inline countdown: 10:23:34, ticking down in place in the middle of the sentence. It is anchored to the wall clock so it cannot drift, the digits swap at a fixed width so nothing reflows around it, and it beeps when it finishes. Any number of them, anywhere, all independent.
the digits keep their place in the line and start falling
- A reminder pill. The rest of the line is read as a time ("call mum tomorrow 6pm") and becomes a real alarm that survives a reboot and posts a notification whether or not the app is open.
parsed out of the sentence, and it survives a reboot
switches
one full stop, because they have an on and an off.
- Expressive typography. As you finish a sentence, the app scores it for meaning across eighteen concept categories and occasionally gives its single most important word a matching typeface and colour, drawn in with one of twelve entrance animations. Once a word has been granted a style it keeps it, so the page does not churn as you keep typing. Deterministic and entirely on-device: no model, no network.
one word per sentence, scored for meaning, kept once granted
- wewe arrives: a small ink creature that lives on the letters. It treats your typography as terrain: ascenders and descenders are hills, the x-height is ground, an emoji is a plateau, and the interior dip of an m or a w is somewhere to sit. It reads your mood from what you write and how you write it, and keeps a conversation going in the first person plural.
- Typed with the creature on, it hears its own name and drops whatever it was doing and hops around the cursor for a few seconds.
- The lantern. Everything but a circle of writing around the cursor fades to the page colour: white on light, black on dark. The circle is sized in line-heights, so it tracks your font size, pinch zoom and screen without being told. wewe comes and stands beside the cursor to hold the light.we said we would start at six.it is nearly nine and the pageis still the only thing lit.
a veil sized in line-heights, so it scales with the type
- One dial for every sound the app makes: wewe's footsteps, the pop as a gecko word draws in, the emoji morph. Also a slider in settings. sound.1 is nearly silent; there is no separate mute.
what the app remembers
everything you have written, searchable from inside the writing.
- A question pill. Finish the question with a question mark and it is answered from your own past: notes, chat, reminders, searches, everything the app holds, ranked and flattened into a single index. No model and no network: it can only tell you things you have already written.
- From the pulled-down list, searches across every note and every conversation at once. Days you have shared appear at the top of the results, highlighted.
the day you share
the only part of the app that leaves the phone.
- Marks this note as the day you are sharing. Change your mind as often as you like; the most recent mark wins. At 7:00 PM local the note freezes permanently: no text, media, layout or formatting can change again, and the editor refuses the edit rather than warning you about it. It stays up for one daily cycle, then expires and cannot be republished. Never typing it publishes nothing, and a day without one is treated as an ordinary day rather than a broken streak.
- Sends a live copy of this note privately to named people. Still editable, active for twenty-four hours, and promotable into a real shared day later.
- The only response there is to somebody's day. No likes, no reactions, no counts. You highlight a sentence, a paragraph, a photo or a clip and write to the author privately, as many parallel one-to-one conversations as there are readers, each blind to the others.
- How people connect. There are no usernames and nothing to search: you show a QR code, they scan it, and their identity key is exchanged with yours. The whole social graph is the set of people you have stood next to.
- Messages over Bluetooth mesh: every phone is both server and client on one shared service, flooding messages so two phones out of range still reach each other through a third. End-to-end encrypted. The same glyph rules as the editor apply, so emoji, brand marks and location pills work in a message too.
- A shared day may only contain media captured inside the app, in that note, on that day. No gallery import, no filters, no beautification, nothing generated. Text can be copied freely; photographs, video and audio cannot be carried into a note that is going to be shared. ecko.on is refused with the specific reason ("a photo here is from another day") rather than quietly publishing it.
the few controls there are
hidden behind a long press, because they are not the point.
- Light, dark, or follow the system. Three colours in the whole app: black, white and one green.
- TXT, Markdown or PDF out; TXT and Markdown back in. There is also a square 1080×1080 image share, and all of them render emoji and brand marks through the same bundled fonts the editor uses, so an exported note looks like the note.
- Every cut-out the app has resolved for you, kept on the phone. Clearable.
- Builds the face that stands in for "I" and "me". Open Peeps parts, assembled by you.
- Removes every note, every conversation and every file the app has written. There is no server copy to go and ask about, which is the point.