Building Echo — The Devlog

Now · June 2026 · in progress

The road to 1.0

The next chapter is underway: Echo now has a defined 1.0 — a trustworthy study player on iPhone, Watch, and Mac, with honest study analytics and a complete flashcard workflow. The program, in landing order: a listening capture layer (so your stats accumulate from the very next beta build), CI and the Echo identity cleanup, the Insights screen (real listening time, streaks, chapter coverage, retention curves), opt-in Context Memory (place-tagged bookmarks and sessions), the full Anki workflow (decks, tags, a card editor, the mark-later Card Inbox, real .apkg import), Brain Dump notes with watch dictation, Markdown second-brain export, and iCloud study sync. About fourteen weeks of evenings and weekends, planned the same way everything else here was built: in public. Follow along on GitHub — or join the beta and watch it land build by build.

Week 1 · April 19 · 10 commits

The two-hour app

It started with a problem, not a plan. No audiobook app on the internet would loop a single chapter, survive thirty interruptions a shift, and play at 1.25× without chipmunk-voicing the narrator. One Sunday of vibe-coding later: a working player that loaded a folder from iCloud, looped chapters, and played speed-corrected audio. By the end of the day it had background-persistence so it would still be ready to play after a long pause — the first brick of what became Smart Rewind.

Then the repo went quiet for ten days. (Day job. Also: using the thing every day on the route, finding out what was missing.)

Week 2 · April 27 – May 3 · 20 commits

The watch appears

The project got a name (BookLoop — it wouldn't survive), and got serious: a playlist editor with a virtual chapter queue, disabled-chapter skipping, persistent progress, and per-book speed memory. Then the commit that changed the app's shape: "feat: Add Apple Watch app with Connectivity, Haptics, and Glassmorphism UI." One day later the watch had widgets and App Intents; by week's end the complication showed the current book's thumbnail with live progress. The phone could finally stay plugged into the aux cable, in a pocket, all shift.

Week 3 · May 4 – 10 · 48 commits

Bookmarks learn to talk

The week of the signature features. Smart Rewind grew its three tiers — seconds, minutes, hours — so every interruption length got a proportional rewind. Voice memo bookmarks landed, including the detail that still surprises people: memos play back inline when the narration reaches them. Then bookmarks reached the watch, learned to loop between bookmarks, and got volume normalization.

Also this week: an Appearance menu with OpenDyslexic and Lexend fonts (the accessibility thread starts here, not as an afterthought), a sleep timer, the MIT relicense — and the first macOS app. Honesty corner: this is also the week of commits literally titled "broke some stuff", "broken", and "stuck on computing dependencies" ×2, as three Xcode targets were forcibly consolidated into one project. It got fixed. The git history keeps the scars.

Week 4 · May 11 – 17 · 92 commits

The study player thesis

The week Echo decided what it was. Whisper transcription arrived via a Mac generator and Python/Swift CLIs — audiobooks became text you could search and sync-scroll on the phone. Picture bookmarks landed, with the player artwork dynamically switching to your photo as playback passes it (the context-dependent-memory feature, before we knew to call it that). Siri-dictated bookmarks, Markdown export, and deep links rounded out capture.

Under the hood, the foundation work began: the AVPlayer backend was replaced with AVAudioEngine (volume boost, pitch-true speed), the 2,900-line PlayerModel "god class" started its decomposition into focused services, settings were centralized, fastlane + App Store metadata appeared, and the app got Dutch localization, in-app help files, and a full accessibility pass. Five planning docs for an Anki-style SRS were committed — next week they'd become real.

Week 5 · May 18 – 24 · 132 commits

The big bang

The busiest week in the project's history, and it reads like a different app shipped every day:

• A real database. GRDB/SQLite foundation with migrations, DAOs, and tests — bookmarks and everything after now had a durable home.
• The Anki system. SM-2 daily review, inline flashcard recall during playback, audio snippet cards, JSON deck import, and hands-free flashcard review on the watch.
• The EPUB alignment pipeline — a Swift CLI that unpacks an EPUB, parses the spine, and fuzzy-aligns transcribed audio to text. The hardest problem in the app, started properly, with tests.
• V1 EPUB timeline core — block and anchor tables, an import service, manual anchors with interpolation: the seed of the Read tab.
• Plus: tab navigation, multi-file M4B support, CarPlay, a portable playlist manifest, a unified timeline feed — and this very website with the privacy policy.

Week 6 · May 25 – 31 · 81 commits

Stabilize, audit, rebrand

A maturity week. A systematic roadmap appeared and got executed: concurrency safety, crash elimination, silent-failure remediation, database integrity, accessibility polish — then a comprehensive code audit surfaced 55 findings, all resolved within days. The SRS gained review stats and daily notifications.

Two headliners: the EPUB Reader Feed shipped — the dedicated Read tab with card-based rendering, full-text search with highlighting, per-passage colors, TOC, and auto-scroll that follows the narration. And WhisperKit auto-alignment arrived: on-device speech recognition snapping chapter boundaries, detecting drift, and repairing it automatically. The "align an entire audiobook to its EPUB with one tap" dream became a feature.

And at week's end: "chore: Rebrand Orbit Audiobooks to Echo" — new name, alternate app icons, and the "For Every Mind" positioning, with the infinity-symbol icon in silver and gold as a nod to the AuDHD community the app was built from.

Week 7 · June 1 – 7 · 18 commits

Word-level precision + PDF

Fewer commits, bigger ones. TokenDTW replaced the earlier silence-mapping approach: word-level dynamic-time-warping alignment for drift repair, later optimized from ~125 MB peak memory to ~25 MB with a sliding two-row algorithm. The EPUB parser was unified across platforms and learned to preserve inline formatting (bold, italics, links, images). Tier 0 title matching made coarse alignment instant.

The reader grew up too: PDF companion documents shipped — page-level alignment, a manual-alignment sheet with a spring-loaded scrubber joystick, and page-screenshot bookmarks. The Now Playing screen was redesigned around full-bleed artwork, and accent colors started deriving from the cover art itself.

Week 8 · June 8 – 14 · 22 commits so far · in progress

Polish with a safety net

Current work, straight from the log: a watch connectivity overhaul (durable application-context sync; stale transport commands can no longer replay and phantom-pause you), pause-on-headphone-disconnect, a Pomodoro timer on the watch with a persistent alarm, a fullscreen cover-art viewer, and a configurable date overlay.

The engineering flourish of the week: the accent contrast safety pipeline. Artwork-derived theme colors now pass WCAG/CIELAB legibility gates, with a three-stage rescue ladder (nudge the hue → re-pick a safe hue → fall back to brand tint) so no album cover can ever make the UI unreadable. Plus the unglamorous good stuff: a zip-slip path-traversal security fix in EPUB extraction, and documentation refreshed across the board.