lo

Where you are, right now.

One permission is the whole setup. Turn location on and lo reads the ground you are standing on back to you from six directions at once — the name of it, the time it keeps, the sky above it, what is being written about it, what is on there this fortnight, and the map of it. Mark a spot and it stays.

Turn it on

Nothing here answers a question without a position, so the gate stands in for the whole dashboard rather than sitting inside it. One tap, and every card below the first line is a reading of the same fix.

lo

lo starts from where you are. Turn on location and the time, the weather, what is happening nearby and the map all follow.

What one fix turns into

Here

A pair of coordinates becomes a name — the ward, the city, the region — with how sure the device is about it. Every card under it is a reading of this one line.

Time

The clock of the place you are in rather than the one your computer is set to, its offset from UTC, and the sunrise and sunset of the day you are standing in.

Weather

What is overhead now: the temperature, what it feels like, the humidity and the wind, and the high and low the day is heading for.

News

Headlines filed under the narrowest name your position has — the ward before the city, the city before the prefecture. Somewhere with no newswire of its own gets what is around it instead.

Events

The public holidays that apply where you are standing rather than the ones the country as a whole keeps, and what is on within the fortnight.

Map

The ground you are on, your fix on it, and every spot you kept. Open it full screen when the rest of the page can wait.

One tap keeps a spot

The button does not save the position the page happened to be holding — it asks the device again and saves that answer, then leaves the undo where your thumb already is. A name comes later, from the list, if the spot turns out to want one.

  • A fresh fix on every tap, not the one already on screen
  • Undo in place, for the tap that was a mistake
  • Rename or delete from the list of what you kept
  • How far each spot is from where you are standing now
  • Send one to the map, and the map goes there

Where the answers come from

Six services, five of them free of keys and accounts. Answers are cached against a rounded grid — about a kilometre for the place and the sky, about ten for the news — so a phone reporting its position every few seconds asks each question once.

BigDataCloud
The place name, its region, its country and its subdivision code
Open-Meteo
The weather now, the day's high and low, sunrise, sunset and the timezone
Google News
Local headlines, and what is on around here
Wikipedia
What is around you, when there is no local newswire to read
Nager.Date
Public holidays, filtered down to the subdivision you are in
Mapbox
The map — the only one of the six that wants a token

Quiet by default

A username is the whole account: no password, no email, nothing to confirm. Your position is sent as a question rather than written down, and the caches are keyed to a rounded grid instead of to you. The one thing lo keeps is a spot you chose to keep.

  • A username, and nothing else, to sign in
  • The last fix stays in the browser, so a reload has a map before the device answers
  • Turn location off from the account page and the app lets it go
  • English, 日本語 and 中文 throughout