Our family, in one calm place.
Recipes, the grocery list, pets, chores, and a weekly digest of school emails, for my wife and me.
Private. Just for our family.
Family life runs on small messages. One parent finds a story time and sends the link. The other is busy, and nobody knows if it got seen.
The dog’s pill is due, and no one remembers who gave the last one. One week brought sixteen school emails, and the one that mattered said to sign a form by Monday. At six o’clock, dinner is still a guess.
I didn’t want another dashboard full of tiles. I wanted one place on our phones for both of us. So every screen in Nook has one box at the bottom. Type whatever’s on your mind, and Nook files it where it belongs.
I picked the look in three rounds of five designs. Then I built the app in under a week: 109 commits, 56 of them on the first day.
One box files whatever you type. Anything one parent adds becomes a one-tap needs you for the other.
Type a dinner, an event, a chore, a grocery item, a pet dose, or a pasted link. Nook shows a card of what it understood, with one clear button like "Add to Saturday." Tap it, and the card glides into its row.
Plain rules read every keystroke for free. Nook only calls the AI when the rules aren’t sure, and even then, the card asks you to pick between two choices instead of guessing.
Whatever one parent adds lands at the top of the other’s Today, like "6 things need you." Each item has one button: Got it, Reply, Reorder, or Sign. The sender sees "Alex saw both things you shared today."
This is for the "did you see my message?" problem. A database trigger builds the list, so no screen can forget to tell the other parent. Pet pills, late chores, and the school digest land there too, so everything waiting on you is in one list.
Paste a link to a story time or a festival. Nook reads the page and rebuilds it as one clean card, with cover art, the price, the ages, the date, the place, and the drive time.
Events from different websites still look like they belong together, because eight flat cover drawings replace each site’s own art. Drive times start from home, but the home address never goes to the AI.
School emails go to a private address. Each Sunday, a short digest shows the week at a glance, the to-dos, the dates, and what the kids did. One tap puts a date on the family calendar.
Every line has to name the email it came from. Code throws out any line with no real source, any date that isn’t real, and any link that isn’t in the email. A digest costs about half a cent to make.
Recipes come in from a link, a cookbook photo, or pasted text. In cook mode, each step shows the exact amounts it uses, like "Toss 1½ lb baby potatoes with 2 tbsp olive oil." Timers sit inside the steps, and the screen stays awake.
Steps point at the ingredients instead of copying them, so the app calculates every amount instead of retyping it. Change the servings, and every step rescales. Code checks every amount, so a bad AI answer can’t put a wrong one on screen.
Three rounds, five designs each. Each round locked one decision before the next one started.
Paper KitchenPicked
Soft Companion
Calm ListPicked
Fridge Door
Ember Evening
One calm scroll
Three tabs
Needs you firstPicked
By time of day
Week stripPicked
Rising cardPicked
Focus sheet
Lands in placePicked
Talk it through
Smart words#f6f0e6#fffbf4#2b2320#c4623a#5e8a4e#8a5a83Fraunces for headings, Inter for everything else, and digits from Newsreader.
Warm paper instead of app chrome, and about 30 custom line icons. There are no points and no streaks. Nobody needs a streak for the grocery list.
Tick things off, or add something to the list.
The school digest turns a week of emails into three lines.
Sheets and the type box rise over the phone keyboard, and a tapped field scrolls to the middle of what’s left.
"friday to sunday," "Oct 27-28," and "this weekend" all become events. A half-typed "add a d" doesn’t get read as tomorrow.
Every paid AI call checks the month’s spend first and stops at $10. Each one has a free fallback.
The home address is used only for drive times and weather. None of the 11 AI calls ever sees it.
Fraunces draws its 8 with the big loop on top, so it looked upside down. Numbers now come from a tiny second font.
Anything that spends money stops at an approval card. Nook copies the list and opens the store’s app, and you check out there.