six apps, one sky.

how to read this

Zenith names things the way it draws them, and every app uses the same words for the same ideas. Learn the handful below and the whole suite reads consistently.

The six apps at a glance

Each app stands alone — install only what you want — but they were made to fit together. Each carries one of Zenith's six star colours as its accent throughout this manual.

Notation used throughout

The glyphs

Zenith writes in symbols wherever a symbol will do. The core set is shared across the apps.

• ✦the starThe suite's signature — marks the brand, confirms a choice, sits at a ring's heart.
• ✛addAdds a new node to the ring or web (Launcher, Tasks, Mind classic).
• ◈iconChanges the picture on a node (Launcher dock).
• ✎editOpens the editor for a node.
• ◎re-placeMoves a node to a new angle and orbit.
• −removeTakes a node off the ring or web.
• ⚙︎settingsOpens an app's settings.
• 🚀shuttleThe suite's shared share-inbox (§06).
• ☄comet / meteorA notification drifting past (Launcher); a one-time event (Calendar).
• ›deeperA row that opens something — a settings page, or a folder in list mode.
• ⟂overriddenA control being forced by an accessibility setting elsewhere.

The one rule

In the gesture apps — Launcher, Tasks, and Mind's classic mode — the whole interaction is one press. You hold, you slide, and lifting is what commits. If you ever get lost mid-gesture, slide to an empty part of the sky and lift: nothing happens, and you are back to the start. That escape hatch works everywhere.

how the suite fits together

Six separate apps, one shared spine. You never have to think about the spine — but knowing it exists explains why an AI key you enter once works everywhere, why a Google link you make once is read by all of them, and why a thought can move from your mind map to your task web in a tap. (Gold is the exception — it's bought per app, not shared.)

One vocabulary

The apps agree on what their words mean. These are the ones worth carrying between apps; the full list is the glossary.

The shared spine

Underneath the six apps sits a small shared layer (the team calls it zenith-core). It is what makes them a suite rather than a folder of unrelated apps. You interact with it only through ordinary settings; it never has a screen of its own.

Why install order can matter

The shared things above are held by whichever Zenith app is currently the “host”, in this order of preference: Launcher → Mind → Tasks → Calendar, then a local fallback. Almost always this is invisible. Two practical consequences:

• No app is required. Each works entirely on its own; the shared layer just lights up when a second app is present.
• If you plan to run several Zenith apps, install them and link your Google account after your main app is installed — an account linked while running standalone is not automatically migrated to a host installed later.

install, accounts & connections

Every app runs the moment it is installed, with no account and no sign-in. Two optional steps make the suite feel like one place: making the Launcher your home app, and linking a Google account once through Connections.

Making the Launcher your home

Zenith Launcher works as an ordinary app you can open, but it is meant to be your home screen. Setting it as the default launcher is what makes the home button return you to the sky, and it is what unlocks app shortcuts and the Direct inbox. Do it from the Launcher's welcome walkthrough, or launcher › settings › system › set zenith as default launcher →. On Android 10+ this opens the system's “default home app” chooser.

Connections — link an account once

Some apps can pull in outside data: Calendar can mirror your Google calendars, Tasks can import Google Tasks, and Mind and others can back up to your Drive. Rather than each app running its own sign-in, the suite links an account once and every app reads it.

The same “Connect an account” screen appears inside each app's settings (it is one shared screen bundled into every app):

• Launcher: settings › suite connections
• Calendar / Tasks / Mind / AI: the Connections row in that app's settings.

Link a Google account there, then tick which services it offers (Calendar · Tasks · Drive · Photos · Contacts) and, if you like, which apps each service feeds. You can link more than one account — a work calendar and a personal one, each granted to different apps.

Permissions, at a glance

Every permission any Zenith app asks for is optional, requested only when you turn on the feature that needs it, and explained on the spot. The full per-app detail is in §09; the short version:

zenith gold

Each app has its own Gold. Zenith Gold is a one-time in-app purchase — never a subscription — that lifts that app's free caps: Launcher $3.99; Tasks, Mind, Calendar, AI and Tulpa $1.99 each; and Zenith Icons $0.99 (a standalone pack). There is no suite-wide unlock — you buy Gold only in the apps you want. The rule every app holds to: every feature is usable for free, all accessibility is free forever, and Gold buys depth, quantity and flourish.

Bought in each app

Every Zenith app sells its own Gold and holds its own license — you buy it inside that app. When you reach a Gold feature, a burnt-gold panel names what you reached for and unlocks it right there; buying Gold in one app does not unlock another, and no app depends on another being installed to unlock. There is no central store and no license authority for the whole suite anymore — each app stands on its own.

What's free, what's Gold

Every app declares its own gates. Across all of them the pattern is the same — the whole feature works free, with a cap on how much or how fancy.

zenith ai & cielo, across the suite

Cielo is the assistant built into every Zenith app. This chapter is the suite-level overview — how you reach her from anywhere and what she can do across apps. Part VI is the full detail: setting up your key, her memory, personas (Tulpas), lenses, voice, and Zenith Assist.

Zenith AI is the app; Cielo is who you talk to

Zenith AI is the standalone app — the richest window onto the assistant and where you personalise her. Cielo is the persona: “the sky, answering.” She is bundled into every suite app, so you can reach her without the Zenith AI app installed at all — that app simply makes her richer.

Three ways to reach her

She uses your own AI key

Cielo has no brain of her own — she runs on an AI model you choose (Claude, GPT, Gemini and more), using an API key you provide. You enter the key once, in any Zenith app, and it is stored encrypted on your device and read by all of them. Free-to-start options (Gemini, Groq) are flagged in setup. Full detail: §41.

What she can do across apps

Cielo can carry out actions in whichever Zenith apps you have installed — “make a task from this”, “add this to my map”, “when am I free Thursday?” — because each app exposes its own capabilities to her as tools, and she picks the right one and reports back what changed. Anything destructive (deleting, removing) always asks first with an Allow / Cancel prompt.

the shuttle, links & documents

Three ways the apps pass things between each other: a shared inbox you drop things into, an address for every node, and a portable file for every app.

The Shuttle — a shared inbox 🚀

The Shuttle is the suite's shared share-inbox. Send something to it from one app and pick it up in another. Share a paragraph to Zenith Launcher and it lands in the Shuttle; open Tasks and pull it in as a task; or send a Mind idea across and it waits in the Shuttle for Calendar or Tasks.

• Send to it: use Android's share sheet to a Zenith app, or an app's own “to shuttle” / “↗ share” action on a node.
• Pick up from it: open the Shuttle (the 🚀 button in Tasks and Calendar; the Zenith tab of the Launcher's add sheet; “From Shuttle” in Mind's File menu). Each app turns a picked-up item into its own kind of node.

Deep links — every node has an address

Every node in every app has an address of the form zenith://app/type/id — for example zenith://mind/node/… or zenith://tasks/task/…. When Cielo or another app hands you a result, it shows as a chip you can tap to jump straight there, even into a different app. You rarely type these; they are how “open in Tasks”, “on the map”, and “on calendar” buttons work.

Documents — a file for every app

Each app can save its work as a portable file you own, on a shared envelope so any Zenith app can recognise and route it. Opening or importing a document always lands as something new — it never silently overwrites what you have.

You save and open these through Android's own file picker, so they go wherever you choose — your Drive, a file manager, a message to a friend. Tapping one of these files, or sharing it “to” a Zenith app, imports it.

the sky's voice & sound

Zenith makes two kinds of sound: a shared set of soft interface cues across all apps, and — in the Launcher, Tasks and Calendar — a procedural instrument that gives each node its own note. Plus Cielo's spoken voice. None of it ever interrupts your music.

Shared interface cues

Every Zenith app plays the same small palette of quiet, glassy cues — a soft tap, an airy open, a descending close, a warm chime when something completes, a gentle double-blip when something is blocked. They are cohesive on purpose, so the suite sounds like one place. This shared set is free and governed by a single suite-wide switch (in the Launcher, settings › system › suite tap & nav sounds).

The sky's voice

The Launcher, Tasks and Calendar also carry a fully procedural instrument — glass-and-bell tones, tuned so that a node's place decides its note. Trace the same path twice and it plays the same phrase; a practiced route becomes a melody you know by ear. It is pentatonic, so no two notes ever clash, and it never requests audio focus — your music keeps playing, and the sound engine stops entirely the moment the app leaves the screen.

• Playback and volume are free. In the Launcher, turning the voice on and setting its volume costs nothing.
• Tuning the voice is Gold gold — choosing which events sound, the ambient drone, and the musical scale.

Cielo's voice

Cielo can speak her replies aloud using an on-device neural voice (Piper) — nothing leaves your phone to do it. If a voice isn't available she falls back to your system text-to-speech. Her voice belongs to whichever persona (Tulpa) is active and switches with it. Detail: §44.

foldables & big screens

Zenith treats a big screen as genuinely different from a small one, not as a phone stretched wide. Every app uses the same rule for deciding which layout to show.

Canvas by default

At every size, each app defaults to its real spatial interface — its “canvas”. A narrow linear outline (“triage”) is only ever shown if an app deliberately opts into it, never as an automatic fallback. So unfolding your phone gives you more sky, not a different app.

Both views are always the same data underneath, so an edit made folded is already correct when you unfold.

Widgets, tiles & bubbles

Beyond the main screen, several apps offer home-screen widgets (which also adapt to cover vs. inner display), Quick Settings tiles for instant capture, and floating bubbles that hover over other apps. Where an app has these, its own chapter covers them — Tasks (§28), Calendar (§39), and the Launcher's Quick Ring (§11).

privacy & permissions

No servers. No accounts. No analytics. This is an architectural fact, not a policy — for most of the suite there is simply nowhere for your data to go. The exceptions are the ones you turn on yourself, and this chapter names each precisely.

The core promise

The Launcher, Tasks, Mind, Calendar and Icons have no backend. Your constellations, tasks, maps, almanacs, settings and custom icons live in each app's private storage on your device. Uninstalling removes them. A backup file is written only when you export one, to a place you choose.

The things that do leave your device — only if you turn them on

What each permission does

Zenith Assist & screen reading

If you make Cielo your device assistant, the home-hold reads the current screen's text only at the moment you invoke her — never in the background, never continuously — and passes it to the model you chose. The floating bubble does not read the screen; that is the assistant role, granted separately. Full detail: §45.

The complete policy, covering the website too, is at zenithsuite.app/privacy.

the core gesture

One finger, one continuous motion: hold · bloom · slide · lift. Nothing is drawn on the sky until you touch it, and the ring always blooms exactly where your finger already is.

The whole gesture

1. Press and hold on empty sky. A spark grows under your fingertip; after the hold delay (220 ms by default) it blooms into a ring of nodes centred on your finger.
2. Slide outward onto a node. It brightens, swells, and its name appears above it. A soft haptic tick marks each node you cross.
3. Lift to open it. The node goes supernova — a burst of sparks and an expanding Nova ring — and the app opens.
4. Or lift on empty sky and everything dissolves, leaving only a fading ghost of your stroke. Nothing changed.

Descending into a folder

A folder node wears a tiny orbit of its own — a centre point with three circling moons. Sliding across it does nothing; you must rest on it for the bloom delay (330 ms). Its ring blooms, the ring you came from vanishes, and the folder stays at the new ring's heart so you can see what you opened. Nest as deep as you like. To go back, trace your line back into the chevron marker at the previous ring's centre — the exact point you came from — and the ring folds shut.

Every timing, with its range

What each release does

Icon mode vs list mode

A switch at the top of settings turns every ring into a cascading text panel — same tree, same dock, same corners, same timings, just drawn as lists instead of rings. In list mode you slide down rows instead of around a circle, folders cascade a child panel beside the parent, and adding skips the placement step. Markers on a row: › folder · ▣ widget · ↗ shortcut.

the sky's furniture

A handful of fixed things live around the constellation. Every one of them can be turned off — the goal is a sky that is exactly as bare or as busy as you want.

Corner & edge hit zones

A hold that starts in one of these runs an action instead of opening a ring (§18).

The Quick Ring — the sky over any app

Turn on settings › system › ✦ quick ring and a small floating ✦ bubble sits over every app. Tap it and the real ring blooms right there, so you can launch anything without leaving what you're doing. It needs Android's “display over other apps” permission, and it is free.

rings, nodes & orbits

A ring is a folder's contents drawn as a circle. Every node has an angle (where around) and an orbit (how far out). Those two numbers are the whole layout system.

The kinds of node

Two behaviours any node can wear: a hybrid parent (a non-folder node that also holds children — dwell blooms its ring, release launches it) and a ritual (a folder that fires everything inside on release; §19).

Angle & orbit

Angles are spoken the way you'd describe them out loud: 0° is straight up, increasing clockwise. Orbit is a multiplier on the base ring radius — drag a node nearer or further and it lands on quarter-steps, magnetising onto a sibling's orbit if one is genuinely closer, so rings never end up with two circles a hair apart.

What changes a node's look

Node size, line thickness and glow live in settings › rings & effects; style (app icons · monochrome · text only · inverted mono), usage-as-light, and colours in settings › background & light; per-node colour, label and icon in the node editor (§15). Labels sit below a node normally but jump above it while it's under your finger, so your hand never covers the name.

the in-gesture dock

Four buttons up the left edge, visible only while you hold. They build the sky without ever leaving the gesture — no long-press menus, no edit mode.

✛ is always there while a ring is open; ◈ ✎ − appear once you've touched a node. While your finger is on −, the node about to go is circled in rose and named beside the button — slide off and nothing is removed.

Live placement

Sliding onto ✛ without lifting hands your thumb a ghost node: the ring's nodes fade, guide circles appear, and a readout reads 135° · 1.25× — release to choose. Move to the spot you want, release to lock it in, and only then does the add sheet open — your pick lands exactly there. To add inside a node (making it a hybrid parent), have that node under your finger as you reach ✛; to target the ring, route around any node on the way to the dock.

adding things

The add sheet's tabs are the menu of everything you can put on a ring — from an app to a browser bookmark to a system action.

Direct — the inbox for things other apps send you

When you use “add to home screen” in any app, Android hands it to your home screen. Zenith accepts it silently into the Direct inventory and shows a small toast — nothing appears on your sky until you place it from this tab. Entries keep the label and icon captured at the moment they arrived, so they never go blank; “forget” drops one from the list only (any node already using it keeps working). Direct needs Zenith to be your default launcher.

The placement screen

When a spot wasn't already chosen with live placement, a full-screen placement step appears. The circle drawn here is the real orbit at true scale: drag around it to set the angle, in or out to set the orbit, watch the readout in degrees and ×, then place ✦. Cancelling abandons cleanly — and releases any widget that was mid-bind.

the node editor ✎

Everything about one node, in one panel. Touch the node during a hold, then slide onto ✎.

icons on a node ◈

Four layers decide the picture a node wears; each overrides the one below.

The ◈ picker offers Zenith's eight bundled glyphs (star · moon · sun · comet · orbit · spark · eye · rune), any installed icon pack — including Zenith Icons (§46) — either as the pack's own match for the app or by browsing its whole library, and your own cropped image gold with a pinch-and-drag round crop. Applying an installed pack is free. Setting one pack for everything lives in settings › background & light › icon set; per-node ◈ choices still win.

deep sky & the star index

Two ways to reach an app that isn't on any ring. Deep Sky is a searchable list; the Star Index is the same apps arranged as a semicircle you slide through without lifting.

Deep Sky

Open it by holding the lower-right corner (the default), flicking up, or from any assigned position. The list appears first and scrolls immediately; the search box sits at the bottom, so you can browse without the keyboard ever appearing. Tap an app to launch it; work-profile apps are marked · work. A ✦ zenith settings row is always first — the guaranteed way back into settings, no matter how you've reassigned the corners.

Long-press an app for: open · view app info · ◈ set icon · inscribe talisman for this · hide from deep sky · uninstall. Hidden apps are managed in settings › star chart.

The Star Index

A semicircle of your apps in letter groups, anchored to the right edge at the height your gesture started. Draw a quick circle anywhere on the sky to open it (the reliable trigger — no system gesture competes), or assign it to a corner/edge/flick, drag in from the right edge, or dedicate a region to it. Slide onto a letter group and its apps bloom in outer arcs; slide onto an app and lift.

gestures, corners & actions

Thirteen positions on the screen can each run a built-in action — or open any app or shortcut. This is where the Launcher becomes a control surface.

The action roster

Zenith actions — the assistive service

Lock, shade, recents, quick tiles, screenshot, power, back and home are system-level actions no ordinary app can perform. Zenith offers them through a minimal accessibility service, Zenith actions, that is configured to read nothing from your screen — it only performs the actions you assign. It's entirely optional; enable it at settings › system › enable zenith actions →.

talismans & rituals

A talisman is a shape you draw. Draw it fast on the sky and it casts — opening an app, running an action, or blooming a ring. Swipe-to-type, for launching.

Inscribing & casting

1. settings › talismans › ✎ inscribe new talisman. Draw your shape, then draw it again (the first shows faintly as a guide) so Zenith learns your hand. You can also start from Deep Sky (long-press an app › inscribe talisman for this) or trace a path to an existing node (✦ record from a constellation).
2. Bind it to an app, a built-in action, or any ring in your sky.
3. Cast it by drawing the shape fast on empty sky, before the hold delay elapses — a slow press becomes a ring, a fast stroke becomes a glyph. The trail turns to the talisman ink colour while you're fast enough. A cast flashes the glow colour, leaves a ghost of the glyph, and rings a Nova.

List order is priority: when two glyphs draw alike, the one higher in the talisman list wins; a warning appears at inscribe time if your new shape is too close to an existing one. Free allows 3 talismans; beyond that is Gold gold. A talisman bound to a ring opens it in place, staying open for taps — the one way to reach a ring that lives nowhere on your sky.

Rituals

Flag any folder as a ritual in its ✎ editor and releasing on it fires everything inside, in order, about 0.65 s apart — a morning routine as one release. It wears a double band. A talisman can target a ritual, so a single drawn sigil can set a whole sequence going.

comets

Notifications, but as weather. Each new notification crosses your sky as a gold comet with its title trailing behind it — catch it, or let it pass.

1. Turn them on: settings › system › comets is on by default, but needs notification access — tap enable comet feed → and grant it. The status line then reads comet feed connected ✦.
2. Catch one: hold on the comet's bright head. After the hold delay its flight freezes and a menu appears beside it: open · dismiss · snooze 30 min. Slide to a row and lift — or lift off the menu and the comet resumes exactly where it paused.

Each comet flies for roughly 11–17 seconds. Ongoing notifications (music, downloads) and Zenith's own are skipped. Nothing is stored: titles are drawn on screen and forgotten, never written to disk, never transmitted.

the sky veil

A curtain drawn over the launcher when the screen sleeps. A drawn sigil lifts it. It hides your sky from a glance — it is not device security.

Turn it on at settings › system › sky veil, and optionally assign the seal the sky action to draw it by hand. Two ways back in:

A refused sigil always speaks — “the sky does not know that sign” — so a failed attempt is never mistaken for a dead screen.

regions

The screen can be split into up to nine areas, and each remembers its own root ring. Where you start the hold decides which constellation appears — a work set on the left, a play set on the right, with nothing to switch.

Edit the layout at settings › regions & star index › ✦ edit region layout: a slider sets the count (free caps at 2; more is Gold gold), and full-length dividers drag edge to edge so regions can never gap or overlap. You can also dedicate a region to open the Star Index instead of a ring, and toggle the faint borders shown while holding. Reducing the count hides higher regions but keeps their constellations for when you raise it again.

skies & star charts

A Sky is a complete, separate setup — its own constellations, regions, background and theme. A Star Chart is a sky saved to a file. Multiple skies are Gold gold beyond the first.

Switching & managing skies

Skies live at the top of the settings main page: tap a name to switch (the current one is snapshotted first, so nothing is lost), ✎ renames, ✕ deletes any sky you're not currently in, and ＋ new sky creates one.

Star Charts — backup & sharing

settings › star chart holds three buttons: save this sky ✦ (a .zsd), back up all (a whole-launcher .zbak), and open… (imports a .zsd, .zbak, or legacy JSON as a new sky). Constellations, sky-scoped looks and your custom icons travel; widgets import but must be re-bound, and file nodes are device-local. This page also lists hidden apps to unhide, and an erase all rings reset (two-tap; export first — there's no undo).

launcher settings

Three ways in: tap the ⚙︎ in the lower-left, hold that corner, or open Deep Sky and tap ✦ zenith settings. Back walks up one level; every change applies immediately.

The thirteen pages

Themes & look

Eight themes: clean · mono · pastel (free) and rainbow · daytime · mono inverted · iridescent · neon gold (iridescent drifts through the spectrum on a ~40 s cycle; mono inverted is ink-on-paper and flips the background to white). Picking a theme restyles the accent, talisman ink, cast glow and palette at once; the colour pickers below fine-tune on top. Node styles: app icons · monochrome · text only · inverted mono; plus usage as light (loved nodes glow brighter).

The suite section

Because the Launcher is the suite's usual host, settings › system › suite is where the shared, cross-app settings are written: the navigation mode (hold vs tap), the free suite tap & nav sounds master switch (§07), and the star label placement (above / below). Siblings read these; the Launcher writes them.

my sky gold

Set the real night sky above your location as the background. Around 45 named bright stars plus a field of hundreds more, placed by local sidereal time and latitude, redrawn every minute so the sky slowly turns.

Turn it on at settings › background & light › my sky. Constellation lines are drawn as hairlines when both ends are above your horizon — Orion, the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, the Southern Cross and the Summer Triangle. Without location permission it draws a plausible mid-northern sky; grant the weather permission for your true coordinates.

what zenith tasks is

A mind-web task app. There is one uniform tree: a hidden central Hub, its children are your top-level branches (projects), and their children are subtasks, nesting without limit. Each task is a Node drawn as a star.

Tasks is a name-for-name port of the Launcher's interaction layer — the same Ring, Orbit, Dock, List Mode, Nova, Supernova, Comet and Ghost, the same starlight palette and the same procedural sky's-voice — with a botanical overlay (you grow branches, tasks bloom and pop) and a capture layer on top. A node here is a task; there is no separate store.

growing & completing

Two interaction modes, set by one switch (settings › interaction › mode): hold & drag (the default, the Launcher gesture) or tap & place (a latched style where taps do the work).

Hold & drag

1. Touch and hold anywhere → after the hold delay the web blooms open under your finger. It lives only while your finger is down.
2. Slide onto a branch with subtasks and dwell → it descends into that branch's ring. Trace back into the parent's heart to fold it shut.
3. Lift on a leaf task → Supernova: a spark burst and a Nova ring, and the task completes (strikes through). Lift on it again later to reopen.
4. The dock up the left edge holds − remove · ✎ edit · ◎ re-place · ✛ add. Slide onto ✛ to live-place a new child. A second finger can tap the dock while the first holds.

Tap & place instead latches the web open: a tap opens it and it stays; taps select, descend, complete and hit the dock; a tap on empty sky closes it. Handy for one-handed or precise work. List mode swaps the rings for a cascading, expandable outline.

Reading a task at a glance

Branches wear a progress-ring arc (done / total). Completed nodes are a dim hollow star with a slash. A dashed lock-ring means the branch is gated on its subtasks; an amber ring means it's waiting. Small pips show reminders and attachments, and a node can carry its own symbol. The sky's voice adds growth-flavoured cues — grow for a new branch, pop/settle as a task completes.

capturing from anywhere

The point of Tasks is that a thought becomes a task before it escapes — from any app, without opening Tasks. Everything you capture lands in the inbox, and you place it on the web when you're ready.

organising the work

Tasks has a deep set of ways to shape when and whether a task shows up. Reach most of them from the Viewer panel (bottom-right) or a task's edit sheet.

settings & cross-app

Reach settings from the Viewer panel (bottom-right) › Settings, or double-tap empty sky.

Settings, by group

Size (ring radius, node size) · View (layout, full web, labels) · Theme & palette · Background · Interaction (hold vs tap) · Timing (hold 220 ms, dwell 330 ms) · Motion & effects (glow, sparks, comet, haptics, dock) · Sound (on; volume) · Reminders (interruptions-per-day, quiet hours) · Accessibility (reduce motion, high contrast, magnify, latched buttons, dwell-to-complete — all off by default) · Capture (inbox, paste, bubble) · Categories · Places & agenda · Google · Files. Defaults match the Launcher's where shared (hold 220 ms, node 26 dp, labels on hover).

Documents, sync & the other apps

• Files: save a web as .ztd, back up everything as .zbak; opening either imports as a new branch or restores (§06).
• Google: no sign-in of its own — link an account through Connections; import a Google Tasks list into the Shuttle, and back up / restore / share a board through your own Drive.
• Cielo: the ✨ AI window and a per-node Talk button; “Ask the Sky” is the invocation. Bring your own key (§41). Deleting asks first.
• To Mind / To Calendar: a task can send itself to a Mind map (🗺 To Mind, or 🔭 Analyze in Mind to see a project's dependency graph) or push to Calendar (📅 To Calendar); “On map” / “On calendar” jump to the paired item.

What's Gold

Free covers every functional part of Tasks. Gold gold adds every theme, custom colours, your own background image, your own images as node symbols, and a second task list side-by-side on a big screen. (Talismans free up to 3, as in the Launcher.)

what zenith mind is

Ideas are Nodes; a node's picture is a body shape; a single connection is a Link; a named, coloured group of links is a Constellation — a relationship layer. The whole thing is your Web (a map).

A map is either stellar (the 3D star system, default) or classic (the Launcher's ring style as a mind-map), chosen when you create it. Maps opened from another source — Cielo's memory, or a Tasks dependency projection — open read-only, badged as such.

flying the sky

The camera is an orbit rig — it always looks at an anchor point from some angle and distance. You fly by moving the camera, not the world.

Named camera moves live on a node's card and in the controls: Fly To (frame a node close), Anchor (make it the pivot you rotate around), Dive (render only that node's downstream subtree as a local sub-universe — Surface exits), Warp (the ambient dust streaks while the camera flies fast), and Reset view. Optional idle auto-orbit, ambient drift and live physics are toggles in settings.

building the web

Add nodes, connect them, group the connections into constellations. The controls sit in the screen corners; the detail card appears when you select a node and stays put while the map rotates.

Adding & editing nodes

• Add: the ＋ (bottom-left) opens a New node sheet — label, colour, one of nine shapes, “Place in sky”. Long-press ＋ on a selected node to add a related node (child / parent / sibling), which also draws the link.
• Detail card: edit the title and Markdown body inline; tap tags to filter the whole map; tap a backlink to jump. Action chips include talk (per-node AI), connect, dive, fold/unfold, and (under more) move, fly to, anchor, focus, impact, pin, cluster, and send to / open in Tasks.
• Edit node sheet (the ⚙ “features” icon): label · glyph/emoji · note · tags · symbol (icon-pack, or your own photo gold) · colour · shape · size · glow · confidence · attach an agent card · share across Zenith · delete.

The suite's five-button action grammar — ✚ add · • details · ✎ open details · ⟢ reposition · − remove — appears here as the classic-mode ring dock (✛ ◎ ✎ −) and, in stellar mode, spread across the card chips and the features icon.

Linking & constellations

Connect mode (the Link button, cyan when active): tap one node then another to link them, or drag a rubber-band from one to the other. New links join the active constellation. Tap a line to set its relation word, flip its direction, or delete it.

Manage relationship layers in the Constellations sheet (the Hub icon): each has a name, an enable toggle, a “set active”, a line style (solid · glow · dashed · beam · thread), a weight and a colour, and an optional flow that animates a pulse along the line. Fold hides a node's descendants behind it (with a “+N hidden” count); Unfold brings them back. Multi-select (top-right) enables bulk link / colour / tag / group / delete.

analyze & present

Mind can read the structure of your web back to you, tour it for an audience, and — with no AI key — still scatter a starting cluster from a sentence.

Analyze

The Analyze sheet (the Insights icon) reports the structural health of the web, each section with a count and tap-to-jump rows:

Present Mode & the Offline Generator

Present Mode / Tour (the ▶ button) is a slow cinematic auto-tour: it flies body to body, selecting each in turn, with a gentle drift — any touch cancels it. The Offline Generator is the zero-key fallback: type into “Ask the sky” with no AI key set and it splits your text into concepts and builds a hub-and-spokes cluster, then recentres — a demonstration of the shape a connected model would produce. Add a key for real AI generation.

settings & cross-app

Settings live under the bottom-right ⚙. The headline groups:

Map mode (3D orbit sky / 2D flat) · Theme (clean/mono/pastel free; rainbow, daytime, ink, iridescent, neon, ember, abyss are Gold gold) · vignette & nebula · Starfield (count, twinkle, warp) · Nodes (size, glow, Halo — the global light-spread multiplier — pulse, labels: off/selected/near/always) · Constellation lines · Camera & motion (sensitivity, damping, idle auto-orbit, auto-arrange physics) · Effects (sparks, nova, comet, warp, haptics) · Detail card anchor · Accessibility (reduce motion, remove glows, high contrast, touch-target size).

Documents & the other apps

• Files: save a map as .zmd, back up all as .zbak, plus export to Markdown or JSON. Opening a .zmd adds it as a new map; a foreign-app document is politely refused.
• Drive sync via Connections — link a Google account once and back up / restore all maps to your own Drive, or publish a share link.
• Shuttle: send a node “to shuttle”, or pull shared items in as nodes via File › “From Shuttle”.
• Tasks interop: “send to tasks” creates a back-linked task; “open in tasks” jumps to it; a Tasks project can be projected here read-only to run Analyze on.
• Cielo: “Ask the sky” builds its context from the active persona; a per-node Talk scopes it. Mind exposes twelve tools to Cielo (list, add, link, move, delete, analyze, fly-to, summarise, …) so she can build the map for you.

What's Gold

Free is generous: 3 maps, 2 boundaries, the clean/mono/pastel themes, and icon-pack / emoji / colour node symbols. Gold gold lifts to unlimited maps & boundaries, every theme, and your own photos as node symbols.

what zenith calendar is

Time is drawn as an orbital system, astronomically true. The orbit ring is one year; the Earth sits at its real position for today and creeps forward as the day passes; the Moon shows the real lunar phase.

All of this is computed on-device from real sky math; nothing needs a network. The pitch, in the app's own words: time is not a list; time is an orbital system.

reading the orrery

Zooming in changes what each body becomes: the year opens to a day-globe, a week-moon, or a month grid. You travel time by moving the bodies.

The ◉ button (and tapping the big date header) jumps to today. The ‹ button and system back step out one level; Year is the root.

commitments

Commitment is the word for any calendar entry. What kind it is decides how it's drawn and how it recurs.

Creating, editing, deleting

Add a commitment with the ✛ button (on the selected date), by long-pressing the ring or a day, from the Quick Settings tile or a shortcut, from shared text, or by asking Cielo. One dialog handles add and edit: a title, the kind chips (☄ once / ↻ repeats / ✦ yearly), cadence and time chips, an optional duration and place, a colour, an almanac, and notes. Confirm is place it; dismiss is let it pass. Edit from a commitment's detail card (✎ edit). Delete is burn out — and when Cielo does it, she asks first.

Reminders fire as notifications (they survive a reboot); a home-screen widget shows today plus the next few commitments and the real moon phase.

settings & cross-app

Settings live under the ⚙ sheet, grouped by theme.

The Sky (theme — ten, clean default; halo; nebula; starfield; my sky — the real stars overhead) · True directions (reverse the year orbit / Earth's spin / Moon's spin) · The sky's voice (the suite-wide sound switch and volume; haptics) · Ease (reduce motion, remove glows) · Almanacs · Shuttle · Beyond (Google connections).

Almanacs

An Almanac is a whole calendar set-up — you can keep several overlaying calendars, each with its own colour and visibility. Save or export one as a .zcd, back everything up as .zbak, and open either (imports never overwrite). Each Google calendar you choose becomes its own mirror almanac.

Google & Cielo

Link a Google account once through Connections, then choose which calendars to mirror and sync now (a read-only pull; events arrive as meteors). Cielo works over your calendar through twelve tools — add / query / move / delete a commitment, find free time, place a commitment from another app's item, and summarise a day, week or month — so “when am I free Thursday afternoon?” and “put Sam's birthday in every year” just work. A commitment can also hand itself to Zenith Tasks (→ tasks) or post to the Shuttle.

What's Gold

Every view, every kind of commitment, reminders, the widget, the tile and Cielo are free. Gold gold lifts the caps of 3 almanacs and 1 Google-mirror almanac to unlimited.

meet cielo

Zenith AI is the app; Cielo is who you talk to. She is calm, spare and warm — and she can both hold an ordinary conversation and act across your Zenith apps.

Her chat has two looks, toggled in the header:

• Chat — an ordinary message transcript.
• Sky mode (the default) — her reply assembles as living kinetic typography over the night sky, emphasised words blooming larger. While she works, the screen reads “the sky is gathering words…”.

The empty screen says “Ask the Sky — Cielo is listening.” The composer takes typed or spoken input (the mic uses Android's own speech UI). “Ask the Sky” is the universal invocation across the whole suite (§05).

setting up — your own key

Cielo has no brain of her own: you bring an API key from an AI provider, enter it once, and it's stored encrypted on your device. A key entered in any Zenith app unlocks her everywhere.

Supported providers

Adding a key

Setup appears until a key is present. It explains that “a key is like a password that lets this app talk to the model — you make it once,” recommends the free Gemini option, and for each provider gives step-by-step help plus a Get a key button that opens the provider's console. Paste the key, tap Start (it validates before saving), and you're set. Change model any time from the in-chat picker or settings › model (which also offers Replace key). Your key is stored encrypted on the device and never logged or transmitted anywhere but to the provider you chose.

talking, memory & the library

Beyond conversation, Cielo can act across your apps, and she remembers — as a Zenith Mind map you can actually look at.

Acting across apps

Cielo picks the right tool for what you ask, fills in its details, and can chain steps across apps — then reports what actually changed. Anything destructive stops for an Allow / Cancel prompt first. Results come back as deep-link chips labelled app · type that jump you straight to the thing she made. What she can reach depends on which Zenith apps you have installed (each exposes its own tools — Tasks' tasks, Mind's nodes, Calendar's commitments, the Launcher's apps and skies).

Memory

Cielo's long-term memory is stored as a Zenith Mind graph: each thing she remembers is a “memory crystal” — a hub node with its key points as children, in a constellation called “memory”. If you have Zenith Mind, you can open this map read-only (badged “Cielo's memory”) and literally see what she knows. Memory comes in scopes — universal facts about you (always in mind), the suite's own knowledge, and per-project memory retrieved when relevant.

The Library

Cielo's Library — “what the sky always remembers” — has three tabs: Chats (your conversations, resume or delete, toggle whether each feeds memory), Knowledge (files you attach for her to read, from the device or your Drive), and Mind (the memory stars above). You can also Seal & End a conversation, which writes a short sealed summary that's woven into future chats without carrying the whole transcript across.

tulpas & the forge

A Tulpa is a persona — who is answering. Cielo is the default Tulpa, bundled into every app and impossible to remove. You can install others, and a companion app lets you forge your own.

Switching who answers

The chat header shows the active persona's name; tap it to open Switch Tulpa. Switching is suite-wide — every embedded Cielo across your apps changes at once — and each being keeps its own voice and memory, with your facts and projects carried across. Uninstalling the active being falls back to Cielo.

The forge — Zenith Tulpa

New beings are made in the companion app Zenith Tulpa — the forge. It creates, edits and exports beings as .tulpa files (one file = one being, portable and shareable); it does not chat or install. Creation is “The Invocation”: a ritual with no guide, where you lay offerings into a circle — a name and sign, a bearing and creed, skills, a voice, a default lens — and a being coalesces from the void. Three modes: Guided, Quick (the default), and Direct (write the layers yourself — Gold). When you Cast the being, you hand it to Zenith AI to install.

Zenith AI is the only installer. Install a .tulpa by tapping the file, sharing it to Zenith AI, or “Install from file…”. Installing new beings is a Gold gate gold; making and keeping your own in the forge is free, with Gold lifting the caps on direct authoring, custom voices, deep knowledge and how many beings you keep.

lenses & voice

A Lens is how the active persona responds right now — a way of seeing, not just a tone. Lenses are stackable, and independent of which Tulpa is speaking.

Lenses

Apply them from the chat toolbar's Lens chip: “change the lens the way you'd change your tone — her spirit stays; only the delivery shifts. Stack as many as you like.”

Voice

Cielo can speak her replies with an on-device neural voice (Piper) — nothing leaves your phone to synthesise it. Turn it on at settings › voice › cielo speaks, with a separate toggle to auto-speak in Sky mode. Her default voice is a placeholder named Amy until a bespoke Cielo voice ships; a being with no voice falls back to your system text-to-speech. Voice belongs to the persona and switches automatically when you switch Tulpa. Using voices is free; cloning or recording your own is Gold gold.

zenith assist

Make Cielo your phone's assistant and the home-hold gesture summons her over any app — able to see the screen you were looking at, and act on it across your Zenith apps.

Turning it on

At settings › presence › cielo as your assistant, tap Choose to open Android's digital-assistant picker and select Cielo. Zenith AI is the suite's default holder of that role, but there's no exclusivity — you pick who holds it in Settings ▸ Default apps ▸ Digital assistant. Once she holds it, the home-hold over any app hands her that screen's text as context (“Screen attached — ask about what you were looking at”), and she can route actions into your installed Zenith apps.

The floating bubble

A separate feature (settings › presence › floating bubble): a little star over every app that opens the Ask-the-Sky sheet when tapped. It needs the overlay permission — and, importantly, the bubble does not read your screen. Only the assistant role does that.

the icon pack

Zenith Icons is a standalone Android icon-pack app (version 1.0). Install it and its artwork auto-applies to your apps through your launcher's icon-pack setting — and its extra sigils and constellations become a palette you can pick from for custom shortcuts.

What's in it

• 975 icons, with 1,377 app mappings — so most apps get a hand-made match, and the rest fall back to their own icon.
• 21 categories, including System, Google, Communication, Social, Media, Tools, Shopping, Zenith, Zenith Features, Apps, Node Symbols, Constellation Sigils, Life & Productivity, Media & Hobbies, Esoteric, Expressions, Hand Gestures, Cosmos, Star Constellations, Asterisms, and Other.
• Beyond app icons, it ships real star constellations, asterisms, cosmic imagery, alchemical and zodiac-style sigils, hand gestures and expressions — all hand-pickable as custom icons.

Art & specs

Every icon is drawn as glowing white artwork on black, with soft bloom, rendered on a 192×192 canvas and filling about 86% of it; launchers scale it down and may mask it into a circle or squircle. The look is the suite's — light on a night sky, in keeping with the constellation motif.

Price & licensing

Zenith Icons is a $0.99 standalone pack with its own Play listing — a one-time purchase, not free. (It is “Zenith Icon Sets” as a product line; future sets ship as their own packs.) The app-to-icon mappings are derived in part from Lawnicons under the Apache License 2.0, with attribution in the app; all of the artwork is original.

applying icons

An icon pack is applied from inside your launcher, not from the pack app — opening Zenith Icons itself just points you back to your launcher's settings.

In a third-party launcher

Install the Zenith Icons APK, then open your launcher's settings and choose the icon pack named “Zenith Icons” (the wording varies — “Icon pack”, “Icon style”, “Look & feel”). Your launcher applies the mappings across your apps.

In Zenith Launcher

Zenith Launcher applies a pack across every app icon from settings › background & light › icon set — Zenith's own packs are listed first. Applying a pack there is free. For a single node, the ◈ picker (§16) lets you take the pack's match for that app or browse its whole library and choose any icon — which is exactly how you reach the sigils and constellations.

Using the sigils & expressions

The extra art — constellations, asterisms, sigils, hand gestures, expressions — isn't mapped to any app; it lives in your launcher's manual icon picker for custom shortcuts. To use one: long-press an app or shortcut, choose to change its icon, pick the Zenith Icons pack, and browse the sigil or expression categories. In Zenith Launcher, that's the ◈ picker's “browse all”. Anything unmatched still ships under Other, so nothing in the pack is unreachable.

troubleshooting

Sorted by what a person actually says. Launcher first, since it's where most holds happen, then the other apps and the shared layer.

"Nothing happens when I hold the screen"

You may be in a corner (52 dp) or an edge band (18 dp), which run their assigned action instead of opening a ring — start nearer the middle. You may be moving, which turns the touch into a flick or a talisman — hold still. The hold delay may be long (rings & effects › hold delay). Or that region may be set to open the Star Index (regions & star index). This applies to Tasks and Mind's classic mode too.

"The ring opens but it's empty"

That region has no nodes yet — it says “slide to ✛ to add”. Slide onto ✛ and place one. Each region keeps its own ring, so a full region 1 doesn't fill region 2.

"Folders open when I don't want them to, or won't open at all"

Folders open on a dwell, not a pass — keep moving while you browse. Adjust “folder ring blooms after” in accessibility › extended.

"I hid the gear and can't find settings"

Hold the lower-left corner; or open Deep Sky (lower-right corner, or flick up) and tap ✦ zenith settings, always the first row.

"App shortcuts or Direct don't work in the Launcher"

Android only gives those to the active home app. Set Zenith as your default launcher (settings › system).

"Lock, shade, recents or screenshot do nothing"

They need the Zenith actions accessibility service (settings › system › enable zenith actions); lock and screenshot also need Android 9+.

"No comets appear"

Grant notification access (settings › system › comets › enable comet feed). Only new, non-ongoing notifications become comets, and you have to be on the home screen to see them.

"My talisman won't cast"

Draw it faster and bigger — speed is the trigger; if a ring blooms you were too slow. Check the master switch, and check that a look-alike higher in the list isn't winning.

"I'm locked behind the sky veil"

Press one finger anywhere and hold perfectly still for four seconds — a ring fills and it opens. This always works, with or without a sigil inscribed.

"I bought Gold in one app but another app still shows it locked"

That's expected — Gold is per app now, not suite-wide. Each app has its own one-time Gold, bought inside that app; a purchase in one app doesn't carry to another. To lift a locked feature, buy Gold in that same app. In demo builds, the Gold toggle lives in that app's settings › system.

"Cielo says I need a key / won't answer"

Cielo runs on your own AI key — add one in any Zenith app (§41); the free Gemini or Groq options are the quickest start. A key added in one app works in all of them.

"An app can't see my Google calendar / tasks"

Link the account once through Connections (§03) and tick the service for that app. If you linked it before installing your main app, link it again now that the host is present.

"The icon pack won't apply"

Stock Pixel and Samsung launchers can't use icon packs — install Nova, Lawnchair, Smart Launcher, Niagara or Zenith Launcher, then choose “Zenith Icons” in that launcher's settings (§47).

"A widget says 'unavailable' after restoring a backup"

Widget bindings are device-local — the node imports but the widget must be re-added on the new device. The same is true of file nodes.

instructing a user

For whoever is doing the explaining — a support reply, a friend on the phone, or an assistant answering a question. The wording below can be read out as-is.

Five rules

1. Say where the finger starts. “Press and hold in the middle of the screen” is complete; “open the menu” is not.
2. Say whether to lift. Most mistakes are lifting too early — say “keep holding” at every step that needs it.
3. Use the app's own verbs: hold · slide · lift · rest · trace · draw · grow · strike · fly · cast.
4. Give the escape first: lifting on empty sky cancels everything.
5. Name the corner, not the icon — “the lower-left corner” survives every theme change.

Answers, ready to read out

Decision tree — "it isn't working"

glossary

One word, one meaning, across the whole suite.

quick reference

The one card. If you print anything, print this.

Launcher gestures

The suite at a glance

Suite facts

ai safety & your rights

Zenith's AI is filtered for safety on your device. This is a safety floor — Zenith's own safeguard, layered on top of the underlying model's own alignment. It is not a guarantee that the AI always understands, so use your judgement; but the checks below run every time.

Two checks around every request

• Before the AI runs — your request is checked against Zenith's safety policy. A request for restricted content, or an attempt to bypass the AI's limits, is refused and never sent to any model — including requests to generate restricted images, video or audio, even in apps that don't create media.
• Before you see or hear a reply — the response is checked too; a flagged reply is replaced with a short refusal rather than shown or spoken.

Both checks happen locally — your prompts are not sent to Black Syntax to be moderated. A safety log of blocks and anything you Report is kept only in that app's private storage on your phone; you can view a summary, export it, or clear it in the app's safety settings.

AI-generated, and it can be wrong

Content the AI produces is labelled AI-generated. It can be inaccurate or invented — verify anything that matters, and don't treat it as professional (medical, legal, financial) advice.

Reporting

Every AI reply has a Report action, so you can flag anything offensive without leaving the app. Reporting logs the content on your device, removes it from the live conversation, and helps tighten the filters.

If you're struggling

What the AI won't do

However a request is phrased, Zenith refuses to generate — or help attempt — content involving child safety (CSAE, zero tolerance), sexual content or non-consensual intimate imagery, hate and harassment, dangerous or illegal instructions, deception and impersonation for harm, self-harm facilitation, or jailbreak attempts. (Creating or cloning your own voice for your own persona is fine.) The full list is the Acceptable Use Policy below.

The full policies