I spend a lot of time on my laptop. At some point I started asking: if I'm going to be on screens this much, why not make it count? Build better habits, take care of myself, become a slightly better version of me every day. That question became this project.
The starting point was my plants. I kept forgetting to water them because I was deep in work. If the reminder was on my screen, I couldn't miss it. Then the gratitude habit I'd been meaning to start for months. I have a journal on my desk, I just forget to open it. If the prompt was already there, the barrier was lower. Reading came next: Goodreads is great for logging finished books, but I wanted to know if I was actually reading every day. And the writing widget came from something older. I read The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot in school and started writing in a diary religiously after that. I missed the habit. I wanted prompts and a timed session to get me past the blank page, without replacing the physical notebook entirely.
I didn't look for what already existed. I wanted exactly what I needed, not a compromise around someone else's version of it.
PRD-first caught scope creep before it started. Writing what was in and out before touching any code made the build much cleaner.
Communicating state through the widget's own visual language rather than through notifications feels right for the form factor. Honest to the constraint.
Designing Bloom at widget scale forced the interaction model to be as simple as possible. Those decisions are now feeding directly into the standalone app.
All four widgets are actively in development. Screenshots and live links will be added as each one ships.
The suite name is still provisional. Daily Rituals Widget Suite is working but not final.
Bloom's expansion into a standalone gardening app is in early design. The widget is the research phase.