On Calm Software

Open most applications and they compete for your attention. Notifications, badges, banners, modals. Every surface is an opportunity to interrupt.

This is not a design failure. It is a design choice. These products are optimized for engagement, and engagement requires interruption.

But there is another way to build software.

Attention as a resource

Your attention is finite. Every notification, every animation, every unexpected change in the interface costs something. Most software treats this cost as zero. It is not.

Calm software acknowledges this. It does its job and gets out of the way. It does not celebrate itself. It does not demand that you notice it.

What calm software looks like

• It loads fast and stays stable
• It does not move things around after the page renders
• It uses typography and whitespace instead of color and motion
• It provides information without demanding a response
• It respects the back button

These are not features. They are qualities. You cannot put them in a changelog, but you feel their absence immediately.

Why this matters

The tools we use shape how we think. Frantic tools produce frantic work. Calm tools create space for focus.

We build UINUX products with this in mind. Not every product needs to be calm. But the ones that do — the ones used for writing, thinking, and building — should be.

This blog is one of them.