Cartography surface — full year grid with moon phases and city labels

Cartography

Twelve months by thirty-one days. Every cell carries the real moon phase for its date — calculated from a synodic period model, flipped for the southern hemisphere if your coordinates say so. The busier a day, the larger its mark. Cities line the left margin — hover one and the entire year reshapes around that place.

Birthdays and anniversaries appear as dagger marks. Exercise days carry a yin-yang. Solstices and equinoxes are marked with their zodiac sign. The grid renders in a single Canvas pass — 372 cells, no lag, no lazy loading. You see the whole year at once because that's the point.

Chronicle surface — diary entry with time-coloured timestamps in Bembo

Chronicle

One entry per day. Every timestamp is coloured by the minute it was written — the hue is continuous, so no two moments share exactly the same colour. New text carries a faint tint of the current hour that fades over three seconds, like ink drying on paper.

Set in Bembo — ligatures, oldstyle figures, proper em dashes. Type cochineal or gamboge and the word responds in Werner's 1814 pigment hue. Type blur and the word blurs. Type tremor and it shakes. The cursor changes shape with your formatting — a quill when italic, a chisel when bold. Reminders, date travel, collections — everything begins inside the writing.

Patterns surface — dual rosette hour chart showing circadian writing rhythm

Patterns

Two twelve-hour rosettes, AM and PM, arranged like the registers of a dual-time watch. Each petal grows with the words written in that hour. A brightness comet sweeps the current dial once per minute — the minute hand. A smaller replica subdial ticks at two-second intervals — the seconds hand. The design language is horology, not dashboards.

Hover a city and the petals morph to show only that place's writing rhythm. A moon phase complication sits at the hub. Below, the corpus: total words, total days, longest streak, places visited. A timepiece doesn't demand attention. It rewards it.

The instrument

/

Commands

Word count, streak, moon phase — all from the editor. Type /wc or cd 10.12.25. No menus.

#

Colour

Hex codes render in their colour. Werner pigment names — gamboge, cochineal, verdigris — trigger 1814 hues.

!

Reminders

Write a message to your future self. It surfaces on the date you choose — optionally mirrored to Apple Reminders.

Annual events

Birthdays, anniversaries, recurring dates. They surface across the year without turning the diary into a planner.

Location

Today's city can be suggested quietly. Entries carry place without turning the diary into check-in software.

Keyboard-first

Scrubbers, Tab traversal, arrow keys, Escape. Every surface is fully navigable without a trackpad.

Exercise

Mark a day with !exercise. Cartography renders a taijitu glyph — visible across the year.

Export

Every surface exports as a high-resolution PNG. A second path saves directly to Photos.

Astronomy

The real lunar phase for every day — visible in Cartography, breathed in Patterns, oriented correctly for both hemispheres.

Principles

Local-first

Your diary is JSON on your disk. No cloud, no account, no telemetry. Nothing leaves the machine.

Zero dependencies

Built entirely on Apple frameworks. No pods, no packages, nothing to rot. Nothing to break.

Built for decades

Your diary at seventy should open as fast as your diary at twenty. The architecture is built for that.

Specifications

Price$27, one-time
PlatformmacOS 14 Sonoma or later
ArchitectureApple Silicon & Intel
DependenciesNone
NetworkNot required
Data formatJSON, human-readable
ExportPNG · Photos