Please, software, shut up

The most important number in my Firefox theme is 0.6667.

That's how many CSS pixels make one real pixel on a laptop running at 150% scaling. Get it wrong and the thin line under your current tab, the only accent colour in the entire theme, gets smeared into a fat grey stripe. Get it right and nobody notices anything at all.

Nobody noticing is the whole point. Over the last few weeks I built three things on the side: a browser theme, a writing app, and a blueberry who lives on my phone (stay with me). Somewhere around week two I realised they were the same project three times over. Each one was me, trying to make a piece of software shut up.

Open your laptop. Count the things asking for you before you've done a single thing. Badges. Toasts. A sign-in nudge. A "what's new" tour of features you didn't want last time either. And a brand new AI sidebar, which you did not ask for, which would love to summarise your own email back to you.

Somewhere, a product manager is getting a bonus for engagement. I work in marketing. I know exactly how that meeting went.

Out of the box, the top of Firefox is two rows of chrome, account icons, extension icons, divider lines and its own opinions about colour. I wanted one slim graphite row and one accent. That's it. That was the brief.

Bookmarks were the fun bit. I like having bookmarks. I don't like looking at them. So the bookmarks bar gets pushed down below the bottom edge of the window until only a 6px strip is left inside it, completely transparent. Move your mouse to the very bottom and it rises. Move away and it sinks back down like it was never there. It's one CSS transform and I am more proud of it than of some campaigns I've run.

The installer is 106 KB. It backs up your Firefox setup before it touches anything, and Uninstall puts everything back the way it was. My favourite bit is a hidden switch, /render, which opens the installer off-screen, walks through all eight of its screens and saves each one as a picture, so I can check one changed sentence everywhere at once. No normal person will ever use it.

Honest bit: it's a pile of CSS leaning on Firefox's internals, and one big Firefox update can knock it over. I split the stylesheet into 20 numbered sections so that when it breaks I can at least find the body. Quiet software, it turns out, is also delicate fragile software.

Scriby is a writing app for people writing books. It's a fork of NEO by Hugh Howey, whose notes say NEO exists because every writing app eventually gets ruined by bloat. I didn't touch what the app believes. My job was to make it feel like a quiet room on a Mac.

While you type, the bottom bar disappears completely and leaves three faint dots behind. Touch it and it rises in 0.22 seconds. Move away and it waits 0.4 seconds before it sinks.

Why wait? Because a bar that bolts the instant your mouse twitches is just a different way of shouting. Those two numbers took longer to settle than I'd like to admit to anyone who employs me.

Quiet also means never, ever losing words. Every save goes to a temporary file first, gets flushed to disk and only then renamed into place, so a power cut can't leave you with an empty chapter. If two devices changed the same chapter, both versions are kept. Almost all of that is Hugh's work and the code is full of comments about cases that look redundant and are not. I learnt to believe them.

And the AI in Scriby, the Companion, speaks only when you press Send. Anything it rewrites, the original goes into a drawer called Darlings first. You can kill your darlings. Scriby just keeps the bodies in a drawer. Very healthy.

Kedu is a blueberry. He lives on an iPhone propped under my Mac's screen. When I ask about something on the Mac, he flies out of the phone as a big teardrop cursor, lands on the exact thing I meant and says one short line next to it.

His instructions are three rules. Point whenever you can. Answer in under fifteen words. Never announce what you're about to do.

Never announce what you're about to do! Imagine a keynote that followed that rule. Four minutes long and the whole room would stand up and clap.

He used to talk out loud. Now he chirps instead, a few notes from the C major pentatonic scale, which has the lovely property that any random string of its notes sounds sweet. It is mathematically difficult for Kedu to sound rude. I can't say the same for most notification sounds.

And from 10pm to 7am Trivandrum time, he's asleep. There's a tiny one in the footer of every page on this site, check tonight if you're up late. He's the only piece of software I own with a bedtime, and honestly it's the best feature in the whole lot.

Quiet is a terrible thing to sell.

Nobody screenshots a pop-up that didn't happen. Nobody posts "this app didn't interrupt me once today!" My lovely 0.6667 will never make a visible difference to anybody's day. That's the job working, and it's also why nobody gets promoted for it.

Worse. Both Scriby and Minimal open with the loudest moment I could possibly have designed. Scriby isn't notarised by Apple yet, so the very first launch throws a warning and you have to go into Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway. Minimal isn't code-signed, so Windows greets you with a big blue Windows protected your PC. I built a calm room and the front door is a burglar alarm. Because I haven't paid for the certificates yet. That one's on me.

If I had to fit it on a sticky note: software should earn every interruption. Almost everything I did this month was deleting, hiding or delaying something. The interesting design calls were never about what to show. They were about what to leave out, and for how many milliseconds.

Right. I'm off to turn off some notifications. You first.

What's Minimal? A flat, quiet theme for Firefox on Windows 11: one graphite row, one accent, a 106 KB installer that undoes itself cleanly. Free to use, not to sell. thomasalex.in/minimal

What's Scriby? A Mac writing app for novelists. No account, no subscription, every book is a folder of plain files on your own disk. scriby.thomasalex.in

What's Kedu? A blueberry assistant on my iPhone who points at things on my Mac. Version 0.1, private for now, works on exactly one desk.

Did you code all this yourself? I directed Claude Code and then fussed over the details until they felt right. The fussing is the bit I'd call mine.

Why 0.6667? One divided by 1.5. That's it. That's the post.

Tom