Rare Creature Apps
Three screens
Library, show, Now Playing. That is the whole map.
Your subscriptions as a grid of artwork. Tap a show for its episodes. Tap an episode to start or pick up where you left off — it never autoplays when you open it.
Search lives inside the Library instead of taking a tab of its own, and the Now Playing bar only appears once something is actually loaded.
Sleep
One tap on the moon. No picker.
Every other player asks you to choose fifteen, thirty or sixty minutes while you are already half asleep. NightCast asks nothing.
It works out a sensible fade from how much of the episode is left, eases the volume down in steps, then pauses and saves your place. Tap the moon again to cancel and the volume comes straight back.
it is 2am. go to bed.
The maths
It counts listening, not clock time.
Pausing to find the light switch does not eat your timer — the countdown only advances while audio is actually playing. Seeking does not reset it either.
If you start a different episode, Sleep cancels. If the episode ends mid-fade, it stops and restores the volume. It will never start another one.
- Waitmin(30 min, half of what is left)
- Then80% → 60% → 40% → 20% → 0%, every 3 min
- Each stepRamped over 2 seconds, not a jump
- At zeroPause, save position, end Sleep
- Next episodeNever
Looks
Paper, Ink and Ember.
Three appearances for three kinds of dark. Every pairing was checked against WCAG AA — Ember failed seven pairs on the first pass and was retuned until it passed.
Type scales all the way to the largest accessibility size without clipping the controls; the layout switches rather than squashing.
Left out
The list of things it will never do.
These are not features that have not arrived yet. They are written into the brief as permanently out of scope, because each one makes the app worse at the single thing it is for.
- NoAutoplay the next episode
- NoRecommendations, feeds, social
- NoAI summaries or transcripts
- NoAccounts, onboarding, subscriptions
- YesA moon button
Where it is up to
Built and tested. Not shipped.
The Sleep engine, feeds, search, playback and all three themes are built. The core has 50 passing tests, and a UI test drives the whole run: search, subscribe, play, Sleep on, Sleep off.
A real 4.9 MB Radiolab feed parses to 674 episodes, every one with a duration. What is left is the checks that only a physical iPhone can answer — the fade with the screen locked, headphones pulled out, a phone call mid-episode.
- Core50 tests across 6 suites, passing
- SleepObserved 1.00 → 0.80 → 0.60 → 0.40 → 0.20 → pause
- Feeds674 of 674 episodes, with durations
- To doSix checks on a real phone
