Bringing Cleft to the car

A lot of ideas arrive while you are driving, with nowhere to put them. 1.13 added CarPlay support so you can capture one without reaching for your phone, and building it taught me more about the rest of the app than I expected.

CarPlay is the most constrained surface we have shipped. You cannot really look at the screen. You do not draw your own interface, you get a small set of system templates, and recording runs through CarPlay's CPVoiceControlTemplate. And you might be on a motorway with patchy signal. Those limits shaped the whole feature.

Designing for eyes off the screen

Because you cannot look, the interface collapses to almost nothing. One big New Note button. Tap to record, tap to save. When you save, the screen commits immediately and lets you start the next note right away, instead of waiting for the previous one to finish processing. Pause and resume are there if you need a breath, and the timer freezes while paused so the display does not lie to you.

Designing for a quick glance made the flow simpler, and the simpler flow turned out better on the phone too.

Built for bad signal

A note captured in the car is no use if it disappears when you lose signal. So CarPlay recordings upload as compact files, roughly a fifth of the size they used to be, so they sync faster on a weak connection. Anything recorded offline, from the car or the Watch, syncs the moment you reconnect instead of sitting stranded.

Showing a note's state at a glance

Back in your note list, a small steering wheel mark shows a note came from the car. A pulsing dot means it is still processing. A warning icon means it needs a tap to retry. You should be able to read the state of a note in the half second you can spare while you are still watching the road.

The result is what we were after: capture a thought, save it in a tap, and start the next one, without reaching for your phone.