OrbitSignal Interactive builds tools for Android — the working kind, the sort you open to get something done and close again. Everything we publish works with the connection off, because a tool that needs permission from a server to open your own file is not really your tool.
OrbitSignal Interactive is a trading name of Arthurs Property Services Ltd, registered in England and Wales and based in Worthing, West Sussex. It is a small operation: the people who design a product write it, ship it, and answer the post about it.
We work on software that holds your material rather than borrowing it. Documents, notes, drafts — the things you would be annoyed to lose and would rather not hand to a third party in exchange for the privilege of editing them. That principle decides most of our engineering: local storage first, no accounts, no synchronisation, and export formats that outlive us.
It also decides what we do not build. There is no advertising in anything we publish, no analytics library watching how you use it, and no subscription to keep a file readable. A release is finished when it is finished, and the next one exists to fix or extend it.
Native applications built and maintained in-house, from data layer and rendering through to release engineering and the compliance paperwork Google Play requires of a publisher.
Editors, parsers and renderers — the unglamorous machinery that has to be exactly right, because a writer notices the moment a cursor jumps or a list stops continuing itself.
Storage, autosave and export designed on the assumption that there is no network and never will be. It is a constraint that removes a surprising number of failure modes.
Store presence, releases, updates and correspondence for the titles we own. The address at the bottom of this page reaches a person.
One title in the catalogue at present.
A focused Markdown editor that shows the finished document as you write it. Plain Markdown goes in one side and renders live on the other — headings, bold and italic, lists, links, quotes, code blocks, tables — so what you will get is always in front of you rather than one click away.
Most of the work went into staying out of the way. Start from a blank page or a ready-made shape — meeting notes, a to-do list, a README — and the title fills itself in from your first heading. Press Enter inside a list and the next bullet, number or checkbox appears; press it again on an empty one and the list closes cleanly. Changes save themselves a moment after you stop typing, with a quiet status line so you always know where things stand.
Once a document has headings, an outline lets you jump to any section instead of scrolling for it. When it is ready, export it as clean Markdown or as formatted HTML you can use anywhere.