Research notes¶
The research behind Sioul's design, in detail: what was found, how strong the evidence is, the rule each finding gives, and where Sioul applies it, or why it does not. research.md keeps the rules in short; design.md the design they shape.
| Note | The question it answers | Researched |
|---|---|---|
| tasks.md | What lowers the cost of starting, keeping up with and coming back to tasks: initiation, time blindness, working memory, choice, transitions, shame, long lists? From research and from task apps. | October 2026 |
| done-for-the-day.md | When resources run out, what do guilt, shame and rumination over unfinished tasks call for, and what follows for "Done for today"? | October 2026 |
| life-admin.md | What does running one's life admin need beyond tasks: dates remembered, letters, money, offices, helpers; why tools get dropped; what to refuse? | October 2026 |
| wearables.md | How can a local desktop app read a person's own Garmin data, and turn it into calm offers of breaks and movement? Sioul read a watch until 8 October 2026; the feature was taken out, the note stays. | October 2026 |
| platform.md | Google calendars, contacts and tasks; security keys and one-time codes in the embedded browser; GitHub as a source of tasks: which facts decided the implementation? | October 2026 |
| meal-prompts.md | How do people with eating disorders, and people who eat irregularly (burnout, depression, ADHD), want to be invited to eat; what harm do food apps and reminders do; what follows for meals, naps and sleep kept free in the plan? 31 design criteria, 11 open questions. | October 2026 |
| time-estimation.md | How far off are people's guesses of how long their own tasks take, by kind and size of task, in ADHD, depression and burnout; does their guess carry information; how should an app learn a personal estimate-to-actual ratio and use it in a plan? About 115 sources, 34 design criteria. | October 2026 |
| capacity-budget.md | How can a planner learn a person's daily capacity for cognitive, emotional and anxiety-raising work from self-rated costs and past days, and plan within it (pacing, energy envelope, recovery, sports load models)? About 90 sources, 51 design criteria, 18 open questions. | October 2026 |
| wellbeing-gain.md | Can what an activity gives back be a daily budget to fill; what is it made of; how does a planner mix it with costs for a balanced day? About 60 sources, 25 design criteria (G1–G25), 12 open questions. | October 2026 |
| global-pause.md | Taking the good moment (weather, daylight, a short outing) and moving work to later: what outdoor time and exercise give and when they harm (energy-limiting illness), control over one's own working time, what evening work costs (detachment, sleep, chronotype), how far a day may be extended, and how this differs from a pause in overwhelm? About 115 sources, 21 design criteria (GP1–GP21), 15 open questions. | October 2026 |
| emergency-pause.md | A pause for overwhelming moments (meltdown and shutdown, panic, bad news, ADHD surges, dissociation, a crash, a suicidal crisis): what helps and what harms in the minutes after, how to speak through a screen, telling someone, coming back, what each platform lets an app silence, and the legal limits? About 170 sources, 31 design criteria (P1–P31), 17 open questions. | October 2026 |
| call-screening.md | How an Android app can screen every incoming call and decide who rings, when: the call-screening role (contacts included, with permission to read them, from Android 11), what it can and cannot do, do-not-disturb and voicemail as fallbacks, robocaller prefixes and impossible numbers in France, open-source blockers, emergency callbacks, why unexpected calls matter. 21 design criteria (CS1–CS21), 16 open questions. | October 2026 |
| android-chats.md | How Sioul on Android could hold chats' notifications until their time: Qt WebView's limits, Android's WebView without web notifications by design, catching them with a page script, keeping a page alive in the background, GeckoView, each chat on a phone, Android's notification listener over the native apps and the browser (snooze, not cancel; Discord, Proton Mail, browsers in detail), open protocols (Matrix first), terms of service. 8 options compared, a recommendation, the phone tests it needs. | October 2026 |
| sms.md | How could the phone's notifications, texts first, reach the computer through Sioul's sealed sharing; what may an Android app do with texts without being the SMS app (read the history, hear new texts, send, Android filing what it sends); what does being the SMS app take and what breaks when it fails; which Rust crates exist (SMS PDUs, MMS, numbers, JNI) and their licences; how a text written on a computer leaves the phone once, never twice? Three phases and a recommendation. | October 2026 |
| bundling.md | A Bitwarden client with nothing to install, an antivirus beside a GPL-3.0 program, sounds to focus or rest by, a weather applet: which licences and facts decided them? | October 2026 |
| spam-filter.md | How should a spam filter trained on one person's own mail be built, run on every device and measured honestly: which model, which header facts, which labels, what it leaks, how it is attacked, which Rust crates? The TREC spam tracks and about 70 sources, each design recommendation marked built, decided otherwise or not built, the Rust stack and the folded table the phone reads. | October 2026 |
| openpgp-card.md | How can Sioul sign and decrypt mail with an OpenPGP key held on a security key (a YubiKey), on Linux, Windows, macOS and Android, without GnuPG: the openpgp-card crates, each system's way to the card, GnuPG's conflict, the certificate's check, packaging and the risks. |
October 2026 |
| colour.md | How can sites be shown in the screen's own colours (an Adobe RGB or P3 panel) on X11 and Wayland without converting twice, and their loud colours softened: what Chromium inside Qt WebEngine and Qt 6.11 do with colour, where X11's profiles come from (the atoms, colord, the daemons that publish them), Wayland's compositors, Rust's colour libraries, how precise a lookup table must be, OKLCh's soft chroma limit, and the cost on a graphics card (estimated). | October 2026 |
| calls.md | How can a call in a site take the camera, the microphone and the speaker chosen, and change them during the call: what Qt WebEngine 6.11 allows (nothing from outside), what Linux's sound servers do with Chromium's default device, a relay track against plain replaceTrack measured in a lab on fake devices (a site's mute, voice meter, effects, hang-up; delay and processor cost), how Jitsi, BigBlueButton, Meet and Teams hold their tracks, and what was built. |
October 2026 |
| android-providers.md | How DAVx⁵ (here /e/OS's Account Manager) maps iCalendar and vCard onto Android's calendar, contacts and tasks providers, and what another app may write there without breaking its sync; why Sioul writes to none of them. | October 2026 |
| secure-mailboxes.md | Why did banks, insurers and public offices build "secure mailboxes"; what do these portals ask of the people who must watch them (the Défenseur des droits, the W3C's accessibility texts, executive function in ADHD, depression, PTSD and burnout); which stores behind them were breached since 2020, by the organisations' own notices and the regulators; and what grounds letters sent back by mail, end-to-end encrypted (official advice on passwords and second factors, OpenPGP, S/MIME, the OpenPGP card, organisations that already take encrypted mail), with its limits and what the sources do not say. | October 2026 |
How to read them¶
- Each note opens with its question and how its evidence is graded: from meta-analyses and trials down to user reports and vendors' own claims for the behavioural notes; primary sources (documentation, licence texts, source code) for the technical ones.
- Every finding carries its citation, with its DOI or URL beside it or under its section, as the search found it. "(unverified)" marks what could not be confirmed at a primary source.
- "Built", "next", "not built" and "refused, because…" say where Sioul stood when each note says (4 October 2026 for most; 8 October 2026 for the spam filter and the security key; 18 October 2026 for the secure mailboxes); the feature notes (for example tasks.md or health.md) say how it works now.
- The searches ran on 3 October 2026. 32 of the behavioural notes' citations were checked against Crossref, arXiv and PubMed on 4 October 2026: each resolved, with matching authors, year and venue.