Orbita

Notes pile up and drop out of sight.

Folders and lists hide how ideas connect, so old notes stop coming back. Second brains like Obsidian keep everything but show little: a flat graph you look at once. I wanted the map to be the app, opened every day on the vault people already have, with the links visible, the forgotten notes in view, and questions it can answer.

One second brain, ten ways in.

The universe

Each folder is a spiral galaxy and each note a star, larger the more links it has. Open one and light runs along its links; notes with no links drift at the edge.

The brain

The same particles fold into a brain. Each folder takes a region; every particle carries both positions, and the GPU blends them with a staggered spiral so the shape assembles instead of jumping.

The journal

Three questions in the morning and three in the evening, a mood slider, a 30-day curve and a streak, all saved as plain Markdown in the same folder.

Writing and Claude

A Markdown editor with [[link]] autocomplete, backlinks and unlinked mentions. Started with --mcp, the app becomes an MCP server: Claude searches and writes notes, and the open window shows the change.

The time machine

Drag the bar under the universe and it goes back to any day: each note lights up on the day it was written, with a detent you feel on the trackpad at every month. On Sundays a weekly review sums up notes, links and mood, then replays the week in the universe.

Suggested links

Orbita compares notes on the Mac, with Apple's sentence embeddings and TF-IDF, and suggests the links that are missing, with the words both notes share. One click writes the link, and Command-Z takes it back.

The lens

The same particles rearrange into thirteen charts: waves of topics over time, the hours you write, a calendar of streaks, the notes you came back to, the galaxies that went quiet. Each one answers its question in a sentence computed from the vault, and the particles fly from one chart to the next.

Light up a word, bring your vault

Type a word and the notes that contain it light up wherever they sit in the chart, with their titles. A button finds the Obsidian vaults already on the Mac and opens one in place: nothing is copied, and both apps keep working on the same files.

Several brains, one universe

Keep one second brain for work and one for life, each in its own folder. Open them together and each becomes a galaxy with its name on it; the brain gives each a region, and the lens compares them. A new note asks where it goes, with one button per galaxy.

Zoom to a single note

Every view zooms toward the cursor and pans with two fingers, and the dots grow as you get closer. Close up in the lens, each note's particles carry its name, and notes on the same spot share one label that opens a list. In the note panel, arrows walk through the rest of the galaxy.

A second film, from the first launch.

The teaser at the top is built from the app itself: the 3D shots come from Orbita's own video exporter, run on the demo notes, and the screens are the real app with titles added on top. This film walks through the guided tour that opens on first launch: picking a folder, reading the universe, linking notes, the time machine, and the iPhone, Siri and Spotlight entry points.

The site draws the same universe live.

The product page ports the app's geometry to WebGL: the same spiral galaxies, the same brain and the same staggered blend, driven by scroll instead of a button. It was designed with the Hallmark skill and checked against its lint, with one accent colour and no invented numbers.

Five decisions that shaped it.

• Plain files, no database. Orbita reads and writes a folder of .md files, so an Obsidian vault opens as is, iCloud Drive syncs it, and quitting the app loses nothing.
• One set of particles, two shapes. Every point stores where it sits in the universe and in the brain. Switching views changes one number on the GPU, so 42,000 points move without rebuilding anything.
• Draw only when something moves. A settled chart or a still universe is drawn once and left alone; the view wakes for a transition, then stops. File changes are re-read one file at a time, so a large vault no longer rescans on every save. At rest the app stays under 4% of one core.
• No animation on keyboard actions. Search opens and closes instantly, like Spotlight. Animation is kept for rare moments: the first launch, a saved thought flying to its galaxy.
• Claude through MCP, not a chat box. The app does not ship its own AI. It exposes nine tools, so Claude Code or Claude Desktop can work on the notes with the user's own account.

Taste works better as a filter.

I wrote the motion and design rules down before building (when to animate, how long, which easing, one accent colour) and rejected ideas that failed them, which cut more effects than it added. The bugs that mattered only showed up by using the running app: a right click the 3D view swallowed, a note edited by Claude that the open editor would have overwritten. Each one became a fix and a check I now repeat.

Version 0.5 holds more than one brain. Next, sign it.

0.5 keeps several second brains, one per area of life, each in its own folder; opened together, each becomes a galaxy with its name on it, and the lens compares them. Every view now zooms toward the cursor and pans with two fingers, and the dots grow as you get closer, so a single note is easy to pick; 0.5.1 adds arrows in the note panel to walk through the notes of one galaxy, and 0.5.2 asks where a new note goes with one button per place: today's diary, each galaxy, or a new one. 0.5.3 puts note names on the lens charts when you zoom in, and updates itself: it checks a signed version file on launch and every half hour, sends a macOS notification, and installs with one click. 0.6 speaks English as well as Italian and adds a light theme and Apple's Liquid Glass, chosen in onboarding or Settings; the 3D views stay at night. 0.7 makes the universe a place to enter: a flight in on launch, nebulae around each galaxy, an evening sky tinted by the journal's mood, linked notes orbiting the one you open, and synapses firing between notes. It also answers questions from your notes with Apple's on-device model, takes dictation, turns dropped links, PDFs and pictures into notes, suggests where Inbox notes belong, brings back forgotten ideas and reminds you of dates written in notes. 0.4 connected Orbita to Island, my notch app: a thought typed in the notch lands in Inbox already linked, clipboard items and screenshots save with one button, the evening mood goes into the journal from four buttons, an alert says when Claude wrote a note, and a meeting note is one click from the calendar alert. Island talks to Orbita on the Mac only, through a windowless command and system notifications. 0.3 added the lens with thirteen charts, word search across them, picture and CSV export, one-click import of an Obsidian vault, and a lighter engine that draws only when something moves. 0.2 had brought the guided tour, the iPhone companion, the widget, Siri, Spotlight and 120 Hz motion. Next: Developer ID signing and notarisation so the download opens without a warning, and a way to sign the app for other Macs.