Not a family calendar with a child-friendly skin on it. The child is the primary user and the adults' view is the secondary one, which is the reverse of every co-parenting app on the market. It works unchanged for a child who lives in one house with a schedule too busy to hold in her head.
Co-parenting apps are built for the adults. The child appears in them as a subject: a name on a schedule, a row in somebody else's week. Bitsy inverts that. The screen she opens is the product, and the parent view is the one that had to fit around it.
Which means the interface cannot rely on reading. Time is counted in sleeps, never dates. Every pictogram renders with its one canonical word beneath it, lowercase, at a size worth reading, because that pairing is how she learns to read it. The words are not labels for adults. They are the point.
The eclipse at the centre of the screen is one segment per night, filled in the colour of the house she sleeps at. The colour change around the ring answers when do I go? before a single number is read. The arc is one colour for a while and then it is the other, and where it turns is when she goes. A child who cannot count past three can see that.
It is not a children's app she will one day stop opening. It is a calendar that starts as pictures and sleeps and gradually becomes an ordinary one, at which point she is simply a person with a calendar. Every difference between kid mode and a normal calendar is a scaffold with a removal date.
Children do not read on a schedule. The stage is a setting; her birthday only supplies the default when nobody has set it. It overrides in both directions, so a confident reader moves on early and a child finding it hard is left where she is rather than pushed into month grids by a machine on her birthday.
Two invariants hold across every stage, and the test suite enforces both: capabilities only grow, and scaffolds only fall away. A later stage may never offer less than an earlier one. A child must never experience this app taking something away from her as she gets older.
Two adults who may disagree both write to this, and a child reads it. That single fact decides most of the architecture.
care_nights derived from them. Applied and migrating cleanly against real Postgres.
Phases one and two are done: the skeleton, the database, the design system and the
care engine. The repository layer, the /v1 routes, the real screens, the
PIN exchange, the glyph artwork and the deployment do not exist yet. Nothing is
deployed and nothing is shippable.
Bitsy Calendar is one of the Locke Werks house apps and the source is private. For access or a conversation about it, write to archon@lockewerks.com.