Two weeks into Attic: the app that refuses to nag you
By Rob Chipman
Two weeks ago Attic was a folder and a README. Today I can walk my actual house with it.
Quick update on where the home-documentation app is, and on one design decision that ended up shaping everything else.
What works now
You add a home, then you fill it in. Rooms hold items: paint, appliances, flooring, fixtures, the general stuff that doesn't fit a category. Each item carries the fields that actually matter for that type, so a paint entry asks for brand, color, finish, and where the leftover can is, while an appliance asks for model and serial and purchase date. Not a blob of notes. Structured fields you can hand to someone later and they'll understand it.
Underneath the rooms are the systems: heating and cooling, electrical, plumbing, the water heater, the roof. These are free in the app and always will be, because knowing your panel and your shutoff is the kind of thing everyone should have whether or not they ever pay me a cent.
The newest piece is maintenance. You can tell Attic when you last serviced something and how often it needs doing, and it pulls the whole house into one calendar of what's coming up. Furnace filter, gutters, the HVAC tune-up. It can remind you, and the reminders run entirely on your phone. No server ever sees your schedule.
The rule: nothing is allowed to scare you
Here's the part I didn't expect to spend so much time on.
Every home app I looked at treats your house like a problem. Red badges. "Overdue" in angry type. Little alarm bells telling you you're behind, you missed something, you're failing at homeownership. I hated all of it. Owning a house is already enough quiet pressure without an app piling on.
So Attic has a rule I've been holding the whole team to. Nothing in the app is allowed to make you feel bad. No red, no warning triangles, no badges counting your sins. When something's due, it says so in a calm, plain way and then it lets you get on with your day. A task you haven't done yet is just a task you haven't done yet. It is not an emergency and the app will never pretend it is.
There's exactly one exception, and it's reserved for real danger: the things that are actually dangerous if you get them wrong. That's the only place the app raises its voice, and it earns it. Everything else stays calm.
It turns out that one rule decides a hundred smaller things. What color a date is. Whether a number gets a circle around it. How a reminder is phrased. Once you commit to "this app is a calm place," you find a dozen tiny habits you have to break.
What's left
A lot, but the shape is there. I'm tightening the flows, running the whole thing through testing on a real device, and getting it ready for the App Store. The pricing is settled and it's simple: free to download and use, a one-time $4.99 unlock for the full home inventory, and a subscription only if you want cloud sync and a partner on the same home. I'll lay all that out properly when it ships.
Getting close. Next update from the home stretch.
-- Rob