The phone surface of pouch has been usable but unfinished for a while. This week we sat down with it specifically — not the engine room, not the apps that talk to it; the home view on the actual phone. A few days later the home reads more like a bag than a list.
Pockets, not piles
Drops bound to a stream — every clip from a folder watcher, every file from a scrape — used to show up as individual rows on home. They crowded out the things that aren't stream-bound: a quick note, a pinned reminder, a clipboard fragment.
Now each stream collapses into one card on the home view:
🌊 scrapes · 5 drops. Tap to expand; the
latest few peek out, with a "see all" pointing into Browse
for the long tail. The pocket has its own shape; what's
inside stays in the pocket. The pouch root reads at one
scale; the streams read at theirs.
Pinned at the top, without a label
The old design wrote "Pinned" above the pinned items in small caps. Now those drops just sit at the top with a small green border and a 📌 in the corner. The cue carries the meaning. A thin dashed rule separates pinned from recent. About 24px of vertical real-estate gone — small per app-open, but it compounds.
The corner search
Search used to live as a permanent strip below the topbar. We never used it that way; search is an explicit verb, not an ambient invitation. It now sits as a magnifying-glass icon at the top right; tapping it opens a focused overlay with a clear text input and the same tag-chip suggestions underneath. The strip's 45px is back on the canvas.
On vaults (briefly)
The host-side daemon that mirrors pouch's bytes onto a machine you own used to be called "anchor" in our codebase. We renamed it to "vault" some time ago; the vaults doc page already reflects that. We've been re-thinking what a vault is for and how several vaults relate to each other on the same stream — replicas, transient relays, "this machine produces, that machine archives." Nobody is running one in anger outside of this workshop yet, so the architecture work has been quiet. There'll be a post when there's something specific worth saying.
The smallest visible change, the biggest payoff
The change that took the longest to figure out and the most fun to ship is barely visible: a gear icon on every stream card. Tap it and the home view "focuses" on that stream — the FAB and drag-and-drop now route into that stream, not the pouch root. "I want to add to this specific stream" used to mean three taps and a picker; now it's one.
We almost added a separate action for it, or partitioned the drop zone, or a third tab on the bottom nav. None of those felt right. Borrowing the existing stream-settings page as the focus surface gave us the affordance without adding a primary verb. The streams are pockets; the gear opens the pocket.
Where this is going
The phone is the primary entrance for the way most people will use pouch. The desktop SPA will get the same treatment, more visibly — different work, a different post.
A few obvious surfaces are still rough: Browse could use a better filter language, the share sheet wants a second pass, and there's no proper "stream hub" page yet (the gear takes you to the stream's settings, which is the right place to focus from but the wrong place to read a stream's drops at length). Each of those is a small tightening, not a redesign. The bag's shape feels right now.
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