lo
Where you are, right now.
One permission is the whole setup. Turn location on and lo turns where you are into a dashboard: place, time, weather, map, local news, events and radio, warnings and trends, what this ground looked like then — plus the people and posts nearby. Keep the cards you want, resize them, and mark a spot when it matters.
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 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
What is on around the city during the next fortnight, found in the language you are reading lo in.
Map
The ground you are on, your fix on it, every spot you kept, and the posts people left nearby. Open it full screen when the rest of the page can wait.
Warnings & trends
Active local weather warnings where the country supports them, and the searches that are rising where you are. Cards that cannot be answered in a country are left out rather than shown empty.
People & posts
Who has lo open nearby, ordered by distance, and the words or photos people pinned to this ground. A post keeps the fix from when its writer started it.
Food & cafés
Where to eat and where the coffee is, off OpenStreetMap, nearest first with how far each one is. The two feeds here that stop at no border.
Wikipedia
The landmarks around you, with their pictures — a card of their own, and a layer of pins on the map you can open where each one stands.
Then
What this ground looked like when it was a different here: photographs taken around this spot at least twenty years ago, off Wikimedia Commons, oldest first — a year and a distance to each, and a pin on the map where the camera stood. Open one for the picture itself, and for the walk to the spot it was taken from, to see what stands there now.
Radio
The stations broadcasting around you, off radio-browser, nearest first — one at a time, the way a radio has one dial. Each stream is knocked on before it is offered, so a press gives sound rather than silence; while it plays, the sound draws itself on the tile, and a press on the drawing changes what it draws.
Direction
Which way the handset is pointing, as a figure and, on its other face, as a compass rose — with how high you are and how fast you are moving.
Your layout
Add or hide any card the place can feed, drag the tiles into your own order, and give a list more room. Some cards have a second face — turn the clock, the sky or the needle over. Signed in, the arrangement goes with you to the next device rather than staying in this browser.
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
- Bring marks in from other apps — Takeout, GPX, KML — and take the whole account out as a ZIP
The same ground, on glasses
lo also runs on Even Realities G2 smart glasses. The phone signs into the same account and supplies the fix; the lenses carry the dashboard as three pages — where you are standing, who is around you, what is being said — turned with a thumb on the temple.
- Press and hold to speak: the transcript comes back asking whether it is a mark, a post or a reply
- Open a café or a restaurant and a small map draws you, the door and the streets between — north-up, redrawn as you walk
- Three seconds on a message marks it read on both devices
- English, 日本語 and 中文 on the lenses too
Where the answers come from
Ten public feeds need no keys or accounts; only the map needs a token. Answers are cached against a rounded grid — about a kilometre for the place and the sky, about ten for the news — so a moving phone does not repeat the same question at every fix.
Quiet by default
An account is a name and a password, and nothing else — no email, so no reset link either; the name is asked for on its own screen first, so a mistyped one is answered before a password is given. Your live position is shared with the server while lo is open so nearby people can see distance and recency; weather, news and other public readings use rounded-grid caches. Marks and posts are only created when you choose to leave one.
- A name and a password, 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, 中文, Français, Español and Deutsch throughout