Hello World

This may seem like just the beginning, but there’s a long history. The latest cycle of an ongoing idea. Using time as interface to adjust the drip-rate of things we want to remember.

Specifically, things with links.

It could be an Instagram profile, side-stepping their algorithmic feed that often hides what you follow, and showing ads more frequently than what you truly want to see.

Or it could be a personal homepage. An artist, or writer, or someone generous enough to publish archival knowledge. These aren’t frequently updated, but are beautiful and expressive representations of someone’s practice. The type of thing that may sit in a bookmarks folder for years and never get any attention, even though a brief glance may bring some joy.

Some apps like Twitter provide a chronological feed. These work if you don’t follow to many profiles, and inherently reward profiles that post the most frequently, leading to a lot of noise from the same suspects, and quieter voices being drowned out. Early testers of CycleMarks love following social profiles for these reasons.

Some things you may check too often, like the news, and simply adding your usual sources set to once every day or two helps to reduce fomo, as you know it’s only accessible in your daily digest once until visited, then hidden for the duration of the cycle, and will re-appear when that time passes based on how you’ve prioritized time relative your attention.

Some of us may have a massive archive of favorites, research, or otherwise. Things get lost in the expanse. Add a few of them, like some Are.na Channels—your own, or those of others—and set it to a few months. What a nice little treat one morning!

If you want to join the fun, feel free to request an invitation.

First Iteration

The first iteration of the idea was called Hardly Everything. In-fact, after not being touched in five years, it’s still humming along, with a modest number of dedicated users.

Part of the stability is due to there being no services. This is going to get a little technical. Data is managed by the user using Local Storage—a browser API that enables your data to live with you.

Or more specifically, your browser.

This decision was made in response to centralized platforms owning your data. Your data, in a sense, is you. This also simplified the engineering, as no databases or backend services were required.

However, this introduced friction. A recent conversation with someone who continues to use Hardly Everything on a daily basis mentioned his weekly habit of manually backing up all of the data to a text file! A poetic gesture, maybe, but not a common solution.

This had the additional disadvantage of data only being accessible in the browser used to create it. You couldn’t access your data from desktop on your phone, or vice versa.

One critical feature—a reminder—was not possible, as there was no way for a backend service to query user data and send a friendly notification or email on days when fresh links were resurfaced. A notification is critical—the idea fundamentally does not compete for your attention, and instead hands it back to you.

Despite all the friction, people still found it handy, and it continue to recommend it.

Second Iteration

Some years later, the idea cycled back around, ripe for revisiting. The core focus was to address mobile. Hardly Everything worked fine in a browser, but did not particularly excel on the phone.

This was due to issues of data portability as mentioned before, along with the interface. Creating a native app would ensure the interface felt great to use, with fluid gestures and the affordances of (then new) SwiftUI.

Building natively also enabled sending a push notification on days with fresh links.

Data ownership remained a priority, as did enabling synchronizing across devices. This was built on Apple’s CoreData API. It worked well for native apps, but the javascript browser API and documentation was a mess, and does not see much (any?) use.

This was all great—if you owned an Apple device. Specifically, an iPhone. Creating a desktop app out of the iPhone app wouldn’t require a total rewrite, but would have been substantial work.

Another set of compromises. And another name. This time, it was called Kawara, after the artist On Kawara who is regarded for the “Today” series of date paintings; canvases simply containing the date.

Learnings

After these two iterations of the idea a few areas of improvement became clear with time.

The first being awkward names. That was an easy fix. CycleMarks is self describing. Bookmarks that cycle back around.

The second was a series of technical decisions made with the technology front of mind and convenience of implementation, both at the expense of user experience.

Prioritizing data ownership was (and still is) a great thing, and a tool for doing so is planned. But when it comes to sequencing, the first priority is creating a frictionless user experience for saving and accessing links across all devices. Simple as that.

CycleMarks Beta

With these observations in mind, the third (lucky number) iteration on the idea is CycleMarks. Basically, it fixes all that shit mentioned above!

It just works, everywhere. Your browser, on desktop or phone, and as an app on every device by simply tapping “add to homescreen” or “add to dock”, depending upon where you’re at. It works really, really well. More on this in future Discover entries.

Login and connection is drop dead simple. Your data is in a database, yes, but it’s accessible everywhere, and export and a basic API are planned.

HardlyEverything will live on in perpetuity, so long as browsers continue to render it correctly. Kawara has not been accessible for some time, as Apple’s App Store requires continuous builds and approval requests with incremental versions of iOS.

Time as an Interface

There’s a lot of wisdom to find in nature. And nature is full of cycles. Night turns to day, with a period of rest between the two, where your mind and body recover. Imagine never sleeping!

Summer turns to winter, the old falls away and the new emerges. A micro expression of of solar cycles, the Earth around the Sun, the Sun orbiting the galactic core. It’s wild stuff.

Time is the only truly scarce thing. We’re all familiar with attention economics. So it seems there’s a lot to explore interacting with time, and timescales, and loops and rhythm.

Tools that involve time are, dare we say… timeless. There’s too much to write about here. Plans for future Discover entries will expand on the expanse.

Future

The focus is to keep the focus, but there are some clear improvements to make. For now take a look over here. And of course if you have any ideas or feedback, please feel free to reach out.