Skip to main content
★ Flagship⚒ Workshop◎ OrbitPlainBillEditorialDesignWatcherHomeOneBoxDossierPriceTagBreachCompanion

Orbit II Lab · beta 2 · 2026-08-23

The wheel gives way
beneath your thumb.

Orbit fans your life out around one ∞. Beta 2 adds the second temperament: Flow, the trackball. Aim with angle, push to roll in, pull to roll back — thirty levels deep with a thumb that never leaves its spot. Both modes share one material, one manifest, one muscle memory.

MODE:
PLAN:

Try it

The frame below runs Orbit. For Flow, the tier toggles, and the honest thumb test, go full-screen — every control is in there.

ORBIT II · STARTER

One thumb.
Any depth.

Hold ∞ → slide to a section → through an app → past the edge. The wheel gives way beneath your thumb. (Flow mode lives in full-screen.)

What's in beta 2

Flow — the trackball

NEW · unbounded depth
A chain of 30 actions can't ask a thumb to travel 30 rings up the screen — no screen is feet long. So in Flow the wheel moves instead: hold slightly above the band and levels tick past under your unmoved thumb at a rate you set (0.6–4 levels/sec, slider). Pull below the band to back out. The gold Depth 30 petal is the proof.

The ratchet

Orbit mode
One extra ring without stretching: cross the fan's edge and the whole wheel glides down one band — the action ring lands under the unmoved finger. Ring 3 now clamps to the screen (the off-screen petal bug from the first phone test is fixed).

Locked petals

the honest paywall
Plan-gated actions render as frosted glass with a padlock — in both modes. Releasing on one opens the plans sheet. Toggle Starter/Motion right inside the full-screen tester to review both faces of the paywall.

One aesthetic, every screen

parity
Same glass body, accent rim-light, specular sheen and breathing ∞ as the pod desktop dock (ported from bar.py's material). Flow reuses the exact same material so mode-switching feels like turning one instrument over.

One wheel, three temperaments

Ease · Orbit · Flow

Ease

the grandma test, passed
No gestures required, ever: tap ∞, tap a section, tap an app. Big targets, big text, actions hidden. This path already exists and stays untouched — Ease is a settings toggle that hides the deeper gears, not a second product.

Orbit

default
Hold–slide–release, three rings deep, ratchet included. The fastest path when the target is one or two levels in — muscle memory carries between pod desktop and phone because the layout is one manifest.

Flow

live in this beta
The trackball for deep trees and power users. Angle aims, radial push sets roll direction, rate is tunable. Roadmap: momentum flicks (a hard push coasts several levels), circular “click-wheel” scrubbing inside one level, and per-user auto-tuned speed based on how often they overshoot.

While the wheel is open

Glance — the screen's empty corners earn their keep

Opening the wheel dims the whole screen anyway — so the space above the fan shows three quiet chips: weather, today's tasks, pod health (Orbit mode, full-screen). Each slot is configurable: calendar, camera events, grocery list, portfolio, a photo-of-the-day. Starter gets the default three; Motion unlocks slot customization. Everything renders from data the pod already has — nothing new is collected.

Why petals lock · where this sells

The fair paywall, and Orbit as a product

See it, want it, understand it

principle
The locked petal is right there under your thumb, one release away from a sheet that shows everything the bundle carries. You never pay to discover what you bought — you discover, then pay once for the whole gear.

Starter · Motion · Infinite

illustrative
Starter ships with every pod: all apps launch, one action each. Motion unlocks every action + Flow + glance slots. Infinite adds automations and bakes in remote access — the same subscription that already funds the platform.

Orbit as its own product

pipeline plan
The launcher can sell separately and gateway people into the platform: Android first (the PWA already installs; TWA wrapper → Play Store), iOS PWA → Capacitor shell → App Store, and a Windows tray build (∞ key opens the wheel over any desktop) that advertises the pod ecosystem inside a free tier. Full plan in docs/ORBIT-NAVIGATOR-V2.md.

What I need from Mark

decisions
① Thumb-verdict: ratchet vs Flow — which is the default? ② Flow speed default (slider value that feels right). ③ Tier names/prices. ④ Green-light the Play Store TWA spike. ⑤ Ease-mode entry: settings toggle or auto-detect?