Why I built Eyeball, my link-saving widget
It's for people who save a lot of links.
First, thank you to to the more than 50 of you who signed up and are using the very first version of Eyeball. That’s more than I expected! We pushed three updates in the first week that great improved the user experience, including adding a share extension (below).
Amy and I, we share a lot of links.
We text these to each other longform articles, YouTubes, random Substacks (much better than this one), tweets, tweets that are really video clips, tweets of videos that are actually podcasts. Maybe a dozen each day.
But sending a close friend or loved one something you really want them to read/see/listen is very different from asking if there’s any milk in the fridge or sharing a breaking-news alert. They’re going to look at it when they can, probably not that minute. And if your link is really good, they’re going to want to sit with it.
I wanted to share links with Amy away from our texts. And I wanted to be able to find our links again. When we’d send each other stuff and then, later, I’d try to look for it (iMessage > Amy > scroll down.. sigh…. > Links > more…. sigh…) All our links were lost, like a broken kite floating away in the iClouds.
What I really wanted was to see all the good stuff we send each other in one place. They were an expression of our tastes, a conversation in URLs, a record of our relationship. I wanted a way to save links calmly so I can see it when I want. With a little bit of serendipity built in.
So I built Eyeball.
We see so much content and we’re often sending and saving links in one form of another. Links in iMessage or Whatsapp get lost in the conversations. Links in Apple Notes are hard to find; they don’t contain any information. Links in other places are forgotten in those other places. Rather than have another notes app, I wanted the links to live somewhere you’d always see them.
Someone on Hacker News asked me why Eyeball is better than a group chat. The answer is, it isn’t. Just different.
I was inspired by the very original version of Instapaper, the read-it-later app by Marco Arment in 2008 that was way ahead of its time. And some very smart newish apps like Airbuds (music) and Locket (photos) that use the widget as a way to make their product feel a little more connected and intimate. A widget lives on your home screen. You see your home screen a million times a day to do important things, and that means you might see something on the Eyeball widget, too. That’s the serendipity. That’s the calmness I was looking.
I started playing around with the idea for a of taste from the people you trust. I made some very ugly mock-ups in Figma and set to work prototyping it. (In fact, I learned to use Figma by watching YouTube to design this app.)
So far, it’s working. When I open my phone now, I sometimes see something from Amy — and it’s nice. My static screen has life. And it’s from someone I love.
Quite quickly, it became clear that I needed a way to share with it that as native to the iPhone as the widget. So we built a iOS share extension. For example, here I’m on Instagram and I want to save and share this beautiful photograph by my talented artist friend Roger Jazilek. A couple of clicks and it’s on a friend’s home screen.
That’s why I built it and how I use it everyday. How would you use Eyeball? Please hit reply and let me know.
INTERESTED TO KNOW MORE?
Here are some links on my previous product, Fanzine, which contained a few of these nascent ideas but didn’t quite work. This is more tactical advice on how I, a non-technical writer and filmmaker, think about making computer products.
