What I’m Building Next: A Tracker for the Sticky Notes, and a Cat for Your Wrist

Everything else on this blog is a how-to — weigh your cat monthly, write the medication schedule down, hand the vet one page instead of a memory. This one is different. Two new pages went up on this site recently, both for things that don’t exist in any app store yet, and it seemed dishonest to quietly add them to the navigation without explaining what they are or why a shop that sells printables is suddenly building software.

So: here’s what I’m building next, where both projects genuinely stand today, and what you can actually use in the meantime.

The Sticky Notes Problem

Three cats means three vaccination schedules, three medication routines, and — in my house, for an embarrassingly long time — a fridge door and a phone full of sticky notes pretending to be reminders. Every printable in this shop exists because I needed it first. The medication schedule template was a real page taped inside a real cabinet before it was ever a product.

Paper works. It works so well that I still recommend it, and I’ll keep saying that even after the app ships. But paper doesn’t nudge you at 9am, doesn’t notice that a dose is nineteen hours overdue, and doesn’t add up eight weeks of adherence into something you can hand a vet.

PetTracker is the app for that gap: vet visits, medications, and weight logs for every pet in the house, each one with its own colour so a multi-cat morning doesn’t become “wait, did she already have her pill?”

One design decision is worth explaining, because it came from a bad morning. Two of my three cats are black. Hei has green-blue eyes, Meow has yellow ones, and that is genuinely the entire visual difference between them. Both were on different medications, I had a bottle in my hand, and I stopped — because I wasn’t sure which cat I’d been about to give it to. Nothing bad happened. But the app I was using at the time would have cheerfully logged whatever I tapped. So in PetTracker, logging a dose shows the pet’s photo, name, and colour before it commits. Half a second of friction that does nothing on the 364 normal days, and catches you on the one strange one.

The promise I care most about is the boring one: exporting all your data to JSON stays free, forever, on every plan. Not free-for-now, not free-up-to-three-pets. The reason I started building this rather than settling on something existing is that this category has a habit of making your own records the thing you have to keep paying for, and I wasn’t willing to ship that.

The PetTracker page has the full feature list and the waitlist form.

A Cat That Lives on Your Watch Face

The other one is less useful and considerably more fun.

HeiTong Pets is an Apple Watch app where a cat lives on your watch face and your steps feed it. Two hundred and fifty steps is one kibble. You glance at the complication a few times a day, tap to pet or play, and a care streak quietly continues in the background. It’s the cast from the eighteen browser games shrunk down to something wrist-sized.

Two rules govern the whole design, and both come from apps I’ve deleted in irritation.

Everything purchasable is cosmetic. A lantern-lit scene, a hat, a second cat condo. Never a shortcut, never a stat boost, never a randomised pack you buy hoping for something good. The collectible cards are earned and never sold. There are no ads.

“Your cat is starving” is a banned sentence. Not a guideline — an actual list of copy that cannot ship. Streak freezes accrue while you’re consistent and spend themselves automatically on a missed day; your best streak is never erased; coming back after a real lapse earns a warm welcome and a gift rather than a reset counter. Of the three small daily tasks, two never require steps, so a day on the sofa is not a failed day. I have no interest in building something that makes you feel guilty for having the flu.

The HeiTong Pets page is here, with the same kind of waitlist form.

What “Coming Soon” Actually Means Here

I want to be precise about this, because “coming soon” is one of the most abused phrases on the internet.

Neither app has been submitted to any store. PetTracker is built and it’s what I use every day for my own cats’ medication schedule; what’s left is testing and store setup. HeiTong Pets runs end to end — stats, streaks, cards, shop — on the Apple Watch Simulator; what’s left is a Mac-and-Xcode submission step and an iPhone companion for care on the go.

I’m not going to give you a date. One person builds these, between everything else, and every indie ship date I’ve ever announced has been wrong. The waitlists exist precisely so that nobody has to keep checking — one email each, when each one is genuinely out, and nothing in between.

Things You Can Actually Use Today

A post about two unreleased apps ought to end with something real, so:

• Eighteen free browser games starring the same three cats. No signup, no app, no ads — they just run, on a phone or a laptop. Four of them reset daily if you like a small ritual.
• Purr, a web version of the cat sleep-sound rooms — three rooms, a mixer, a sleep timer that fades rather than cutting off.
• The paper versions of everything PetTracker will do. The one-page vet summary and the medication schedule are free posts, and the Complete Pet Care Bundle is the whole system as printables and spreadsheets, available now. If PetTracker never shipped at all, the paper system would still work — it did for years.

Why Any of This

The honest answer is that this whole project is one person at a kitchen table making the things they needed, and then finding out other people needed them too. The printables came from a fridge door. The games came from wanting to draw the cats. The apps come from the same place: I got tired of the sticky notes, and I wanted a small good thing on my wrist that didn’t try to make me feel bad.

If either of those sounds like something you’d use, the waitlists are one field each. And if not, the games are free and the cats don’t mind either way.