Rekindly 0.3 is out. There are only a few new features this time, but they are the ones that are most clearly about people and least about data. So I want to write less about how they work and more about what they are for.
The question you meant to ask
Everyone knows the moment: you hang up, and a minute later you remember what you actually wanted to ask. How the exam went. Whether the move worked out. How their father is doing after the operation. The question was there; it just never found its way into the conversation.
That is what "Ask next time" is for. You write a question down whenever it comes to you, on a walk, after a message, on the sofa in the evening, and the next time it sits at the very top of the briefing, before anything else. If you are writing a note anyway, /ask keeps it right there.
I think a question is the smallest form of care there is. A fact says: I know something about you. A question says: I was listening, and I care how it turned out. Facts are closed; questions are open. They leave the other person room to tell it themselves, and sometimes the answer is quite different from what you expected.
That is why a question you tick off does not simply disappear. If you like, you add the answer, and both end up as a note in the timeline. The question becomes a small piece of a shared story, and the time after next you know where you left off.
Days that matter to others
Birthdays are loud. There is cake and there are messages, sometimes too many. Other days are quieter: a friend's wedding anniversary, the day someone opened their own workshop, the name day of a grandmother for whom it counts more than her birthday. And then there are the days nobody celebrates.
When someone loses a person, the first year often brings many calls and messages. In the second year there are fewer, and by the third hardly anyone remembers. But the day comes back every year, and for the one who was left behind it has not grown smaller. A short message on that day, "I'm thinking of you today", costs one sentence and can mean a great deal. Not because you say anything wise, but because it shows you did not forget.
Besides the birthday, Rekindly now knows other days: wedding anniversaries, anniversaries, memorial days, name days, the day you met, and days of your own. They appear in the briefing, on Today, in the morning mail and, if you want, in your calendar. I was careful with the wording. For a memorial day, Rekindly counts the years since and never says that someone "turns" anything. Details like these go unnoticed as long as they are right, and they hurt when they are wrong.
Knowing is not the same as being reminded
While trying it out, something came up that I had not thought about before. Not everything you know about a person is something you want to be told about every year. It might be the anniversary of a relationship that ended long ago, which you still want to know about so you do not say something thoughtless on that day. It might be a day someone told you about in confidence, which should not pop up in your calendar between two meetings.
So every day now has a small bell. When it is off, the day stays in the details and in the briefing, where you find it while preparing for a conversation. But it does not appear on Today, in the mail or in your calendar. Rekindly knows, but it does not push that knowledge on you.
I think this is one of the most important things a tool like this can do: know when to be quiet. An app that reminds you too often is one you eventually ignore, and then you miss the reminders that matter.
No birthday twice
For the same reason there is a change to the calendar subscription that sounds rather technical. If you sync your contacts to the iPhone over CardDAV, it already shows their birthdays in its calendar. With birthdays switched on in the subscription as well, every birthday appeared twice. Not a disaster, but it is noise, and noise makes reminders worth less.
Now you choose: no birthdays, all of them, or only those of indirect contacts. Indirect contacts are the people you know through someone else, a friend's children or a colleague's partner. They are deliberately left out of the iPhone's address book, since you rarely call them yourself. But you do want to know that your friend's son turns six tomorrow, because it matters to your friend. Subscriptions can also be changed later now, without creating a new link and setting everything up on the iPhone again.
What software can do
In all of this, one thing matters to me: Rekindly cannot teach anyone to think of others. No software can, and it would be strange if it tried. Thinking of someone is not a task you tick off. It just happens, while cooking, while reading, when a certain song comes on or you walk past a café where you once sat together.
What software can do is more modest. It can make sure those moments are not lost. That the question you thought of on Tuesday is still there on Friday. That the day someone confided in you three years ago does not pass unnoticed. And then it can step back, so that the conversation happens between two people and not on a screen.
Try it
The demo already runs 0.3, with a few questions and days to remember in its invented data. Three database migrations run automatically on upgrade; a backup beforehand never hurts. Existing calendar subscriptions keep what they had. Everything that changed is in the changelog, and if something is missing or does not work, I would be glad to hear about it on GitHub.