The road to the playa

0.7.4 · Every camp counts

Aug 24 · a field report, fixed within the hour

• The setup camp picker offers the whole city now: all 1,184 placed camps with their placements — not just the ones hosting events. If your camp was missing, "Run setup again" in Settings will find it.

0.7.3 · Welcome home

Aug 24 · the app introduces itself

• A real first hour: a 30-second setup — your name (optional) and your camp, picked from the real 2026 placements or typed freehand. Pick a placed camp and Home lands on the map, "Take me home" works from night one, and your friend card starts pre-filled. Nothing required; nothing you type leaves the phone.
• A tour you can keep: five cards, the whole app in under a minute — replay it, or re-run setup, from Settings whenever.
• The way home, in the header: the map door becomes a live arrow the moment the app knows where home is, pointing at your camp from every tab.
• Pins you can keep: the compass's ✎ manager lists every pin — Home first, then newest — each with its address and a visible Remove.

0.7.2 · Faves

Aug 24 · a campmate asked to plan her burn days

• ♥ Faves: tap the heart on any event — browsing, searching, even in the Angel's answers — and it joins your lineup: time-ordered, grouped by day, walk-timed. Hearts are keyed to the event itself, so they survive every data update.
• The settled city: event submissions closed Aug 22 and the weekend's approvals are in — 6,500+ events, every placement current, the art register as it stands.

0.7.1 · The real city

Aug 21 · the API key arrived

• Real 2026 placements: every event card carries its camp's true clock address, with walk and bike times to the actual spot.
• The art of 2026, on board: every registered piece in the artists' own words, searchable and citable by the Angel. Locations stay hidden until Gate opens, exactly as Burning Man requires.
• Search knows names: typing the exact name of a thing puts that thing first, above every party riffing on its name.

0.7.0 · Tap the file, it opens

Aug 20 · beams became real files

• A beam is a file now: a .playapal opened from Files, Quick Share, AirDrop, or a cable installs itself — cold start or warm, no internet anywhere in the loop.
• Share the whole app phone-to-phone on Android, with honest guidance past the scary screens.

0.6.1 · The map answers back

Aug 20 · "it doesn't feel very interactive" — now it does

• Tap anywhere to aim: touch a spot and the compass points at it, named by its real address — "Map spot — 4:36 & G". Tap again from the arrow view and walk there.
• Hold and drag to place exactly: a tap is fast but coarse. Press and hold for a third of a second and the target lifts off your fingertip, so your hand stops hiding the thing you are placing. Drag until the address reads right, then let go — that is how you pin your camp's actual corner instead of near it.
• Pinch and pan: two fingers zoom to 4x, one drags the city under you, and the map stays inside its frame at every zoom.
• Tap a pin to pick it: your saved pins, your friends' camps, the Man and the Temple all answer a tap on the map itself — no more hunting the chips below, and no more dropping a rival pin beside your own.
• Your camp is a waypoint: set your camp address on your card and Home appears on the map without dropping a pin.
• Fixed: taps landing centimeters off while zoomed; a press held between 0.22s and 0.35s doing nothing at all; the map flickering while zoomed and again every five seconds while standing still; and a long press crashing the app on some phones.

0.6.0 · Camp knowledge

Aug 20 · "can info be uploaded to it?" — yes, by anyone with the camp passphrase

• Add to camp knowledge: a memory, an event the guide missed, a fix to a wrong fact, or a camp resource — typed in the app, no files. Your own notes can be edited and removed.
• Notes travel with the camp beam, integrity-checked with the shared camp passphrase (not encrypted; the author name is a label, not a verified identity) and carried verbatim across hops. The beam is a real shareable file now, and a copy stays on the phone for re-sending.
• Notes are first-class knowledge: search, a live "Camp notes" reader document, and the Now tab. Search and reader passages are labeled "recorded by X; camp-passphrase verified, not authenticated"; event cards name who added them. Citing a fix beside the exact fact it corrects is wired underneath and gets its fact-picker UI in a coming release.
• The whole loop was driven end-to-end on two devices before release, and everything the testing stumbled on was fixed: loud profile saves with a camp-change warning, honest import counts, back navigation in the reader, first-tap saves with the keyboard open.

0.5.2 · Listening to the first users

Aug 19 · the evening the app met its audience

• Typing to the Angel works like a messenger: the input and Send stay visible above the keyboard.
• Downloads show themselves: a model pull reads its live progress right on the model list.
• The Boards heading tells the truth, and the site and README now say plainly that every tool works with no AI installed and the Angel is the optional layer. The copy was trimmed after real-user feedback.

0.5.1 · Consent, the reader, and the Max Angel

Aug 19 · same-day follow-through on the public release

• Consent on friend cards: sharing asks "just for them" or "pass it on" at the moment of sharing; only pass-it-on cards ride "Beam friends", and direct cards say so on their row. This is honored by the app rather than enforced by cryptography, and the app tells you that itself.
• The pack reader: read the saved source materials straight through, credited and fully offline, with no question needed first.
• Playa Angel Max: the first zero-contradiction Angel on our 31-question battery (a Gemma 4 E4B fine-tune) joins as a top tier for high-memory phones, with an honest measured-RAM recommendation.

0.5.0 · The social city

Aug 19 · the first public release, the candidate that rides to the burn

• Friends on playa: share a friend card as a QR any normal camera scans; the card travels inside the link itself, with no server, address book, or account behind it. "Beam friends" gossips a whole crew's map; a printable paper list honors the BurnerMap tradition.
• The offline city map: Black Rock City drawn from measured geometry, with streets, plazas, toilet banks, your pins, your people, and your blue dot. It needs no tiles and no network.
• One coherent app: three tabs, the Angel as a full-screen conversation, the real 2026 city geometry live, daily-event honesty, curation with restore, and the disclosure that the whole app is AI-written under human direction.

0.4.0 · The trained Angel and the field kit

Aug 17–18

• The whiteout compass: offline GPS to a city address, one giant arrow with clock-phrase directions, dropped pins, "Take me home", nearest toilets, walk times on every event card.
• An open model catalog with a device-aware chooser; retrieval ranking and disciplined thinking budgets; an eval instrument carrying its owner's scoring bar. iOS cracked: it runs on a 4 GB iPhone mini.

0.3.0 · Facts over vibes

Aug 15–16

• A fact graph under the packs: provenance-carrying edges, a query engine, and the roots of the lineage view.
• Engine hardening, and the training program stood up: three audits over every fact before any fine-tune touched the model.

0.2.0 · Camp life, on day two

Aug 14

• The camp board: gifts and needs shared phone-to-phone as sealed beams, designed, built, and device-verified in a day.
• The survival guide grew its credited layers; pack import landed.

0.1.0 · An Angel in your pocket

Aug 13 · day one

• A fully local LLM on a phone: model downloads, SQLite full-text search, data packs, the conversation loop with local tools, and spoken replies, because hands are for bikes.