Mess-tronome
An iOS metronome for kids, built to turn five minutes of tidying up into something with a beat.
parked
- commits
- 161
- last 30 days
- 0
- first commit
- May 7, 2026
- last commit
- Aug 18, 2026
- stack
- React Native
Counted from git on Oct 15, 2026.
- App Store listing — TODO: Jard to supply the link, or confirm it was never published
A kid-friendly metronome in React Native for iOS, displayed as “Mess-tronome”. The metronome is the product: the design brief puts audio reliability above any visual choice.
The look was derived deliberately from two references Jard picked on 2026-08-17, Yoto (the parent-operated control surface: icon, label and value-pill rows on cards) and Pok Pok (the mood: paper-warm grounds, a flat primary palette, calm and not addictive). Colours were sampled from the reference screenshots rather than picked by eye, and the beat colour (vermilion) is reserved for the pulse and the primary action. The reasoning is written up in design/DESIGN-LAW.md in the repo.
The last commits (2026-08-18) finish the main screen and settings, with a before/after set of screenshots. Nothing since, hence “parked”. I could not tell from the repo whether it was ever released.
What I learned / would do differently
- Giving the design process real references with an error signal (“look like these”) worked better than asking for “beautiful”. The design doc says the same.
- The project started as a fork of the baby-naming app and carried residue (a serif font, colour names) that had to be explicitly ruled out. Starting clean would have been less work than un-baking.
- Hard rules written down up front (touch targets of 56pt or more, no bounce on a tap) kept later changes consistent.