Things

I keep finding myself drawn to products that do one quiet job well. Things came from that instinct.

The idea is simple: sometimes what you need is not a giant productivity operating system, not a kanban board, not a life philosophy disguised as an app. Sometimes you just need a place to put the thing that is currently rattling around in your head before it escapes. A reminder. A half-plan. A person to call. A mood. A place. A tiny promise to your future self.

So I made a small iPhone app where a “thing” gets a name, a date, a few optional tags, and the ability to be starred if it matters more than the rest. Swipe left and it is done. Completed items don’t disappear into oblivion; they move into their own searchable space, which I like because it makes the app feel less like a void and more like a trail of closed loops.

What I enjoy most about this project is its restraint. I was not trying to build an empire here. I was trying to make something that feels light in the hand and light in the mind. Open it, capture the thought, move on. No ceremony. No productivity guilt. Just enough structure to make recall easy later.

It is also, in a quietly satisfying way, a very native little app. SwiftUI, no third-party dependencies, persistence through UserDefaults, and even the Xcode project file and app icon are generated by scripts. There is something pleasingly obsessive about that. It means the project is not just functional; it is tidy in the way only a side project built with affection tends to be.

I think that is the real pattern underneath it: I like tools that help the mind stay a little less cluttered without demanding too much in return. Things is my attempt at one of those.