Mobile App

Idea Compass — An Ambient Idea & Moment Graph

Capture ideas as they happen. Watch them connect.

A personal app for capturing ideas by voice or text the moment they strike — without stopping to organise or tag anything. Each entry is recorded with the time, the place, and a note about what you were doing when it arrived.

Over time the journal becomes a graph: ideas connect to each other and to the life moments around them, and the app surfaces which threads are gaining momentum and which have quietly gone cold. It is deliberately not a to-do list — nothing here has a due date or a done state.

Test it on TestFlight

Now in beta for iPhone (iOS 26+). Tap the link on your iPhone, install Apple's free TestFlight app, and you'll get Idea Compass to try — no account or sign-up needed. Feedback is very welcome.

Capture, without breaking stride

The best ideas rarely arrive at a desk. Idea Compass is built for the moment they actually happen — while you're walking, commuting, or mid-conversation — so nothing has to wait until later, by which point it's usually gone.

  • Voice or text. Type a thought, or tap the microphone and dictate it. No forced fields, no folders, no tags at the moment of capture — friction is the enemy of catching a fleeting idea.
  • Every entry is a Moment. Each capture is stamped with the time, an optional place, and an activity (walking, gym, meeting, commuting, home, work…). Actions you later take on an idea are logged the same way, so each idea grows its own timeline instead of ending as a dead note.
  • Hands-free with Siri. "Hey Siri, add an idea to Idea Compass" captures a thought without unlocking the phone or opening the app; it syncs in the next time you do.
  • Widgets. Home-screen and lock-screen widgets drop you straight into capture with a single tap.
  • Works offline. Everything is captured locally first and syncs when you're back online, so you never lose a thought to a dead zone.

See how your ideas connect

Notes apps store ideas in a list, where they sit isolated and forgotten. Idea Compass treats them as a connected web — the differentiated part of the app, and the reason a scattered pile of thoughts becomes something you can actually reason across.

  • The graph. A living map of every idea and the links between them. A replay mode plays the whole web back in the order it was captured — you literally watch your thinking build itself over time.
  • Orbit view. Put one idea at the centre and see everything related to it orbiting around, with the closest relationships nearest — a focused way to explore the neighbourhood of a single thought.
  • Idea Evolution. Ideas relate as living things, not flat links: one can be Inspired By, Split Into, Merged Into, a Prototype Of, or a Successor Of another. A lineage diagram plots those relationships as a family tree on a time axis, so you can see exactly where one small thought branched, and where two separate threads converged into a project.

Look back, and make sense of it

Capture is only half the point. The other half is being able to return to what you've gathered and find the story in it — which is where the AI-assisted reviews come in.

  • Story Mode. Turns one idea's whole journey — the original thought and everything you did about it — into a short, reflective narrative you can read back.
  • Life Chapters. Reads the entire journal like a life story and proposes autobiographical chapters ("University", "First Startup", "Moving Cities"), laid out on an interactive timeline.
  • Weekly Reflection. A magazine-style digest of the week: what you captured, and which ideas gained momentum versus which quietly lost it.
  • On this day. Resurfaces ideas from the same date a week, a month, or years ago — a gentle nudge to reconnect with a past thought.
  • Shareable journey cards. Render any idea's story as a small, self-contained image card worth sending to a friend.

Momentum, not just storage

It's easy to capture ideas and never act on them. Idea Compass is designed to make the follow-through — or the absence of it — impossible to ignore.

  • Momentum analytics. Plain-English insight into where your momentum tends to break down — which ideas you act on, and which stall after the first spark.
  • A quiet nudge back. A local, on-device reminder about ideas you worked on and then let go quiet for a couple of weeks — scheduled entirely on your phone, nothing sent to a server.
  • Idea Resurrection. Surfaces an old, forgotten idea that resembles something you've been thinking about recently, and suggests linking the two — so good ideas get a second life instead of being buried.

Where and when ideas happen

  • Map of ideas. Every geotagged idea plotted where it actually happened, with playback that animates an idea's journey across places over time.
  • A capture calendar. A GitHub-style contribution heatmap over every Moment, so your rhythm of capturing ideas becomes visible at a glance.
  • Insights and history. Local statistics over everything you've ever captured, plus a fully searchable timeline of the whole journal.

Privacy-first AI

The reflective features are AI-assisted, but privacy is the default, not an afterthought.

  • On-device by default. The AI runs on your iPhone using Apple Intelligence — free, private, and nothing leaves the device.
  • Bring your own key, optionally. For the heavier whole-journal features you can connect your own Claude API key, or run a hybrid of on-device and Claude — entirely your choice, in Settings. The app is fully functional with no key at all.
  • You stay in control. Every AI suggestion — a link, a chapter, a connection — is something you confirm, never something applied automatically.

A deliberate boundary

Idea Compass is not a task manager, and it works hard not to become one. There are no due dates, no priorities, and no "done" states — an idea is a living narrative, not a checkbox. When a thought genuinely needs to become a task, it exports one-way to Apple Reminders and leaves the app, so the journal stays what it is: a record of how you think, not a to-do list.

Built in Flutter for iPhone and Android, with the on-device intelligence layer written natively against Apple's Foundation Models. Currently in TestFlight beta for iPhone, ahead of an App Store release; the Android build follows.

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Essays on AI, governance, decision-making, neuroscience, and reflective thought — by a serving IAS officer. Unsubscribe anytime.

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