Most days don't have a name. We wanted somewhere to put them anyway.
Hue. began as a question: what if a journaling app didn't ask you to rate your mood? Mood scales are leftovers from clinical depression questionnaires; they're useful for screening illness but lousy for noticing yourself. They reduce a Tuesday afternoon to a number, and the number is almost always wrong.
Our answer is twelve colors, each a domain of life that asks different things of us — broader and stranger than five faces, and that is the point. You don't rate your day. You pick the color that's loudest right now and tune its vividness — how present it is, not how good or bad. A 5 in grief and a 5 in joy are both real; they aren't opposites. Some weeks have both.
Then you write a sentence, or you don't. The app doesn't mind.
What we will not do.
Practice, not compliance.
Streaks turn reflection into homework. We don't show streaks. We don't show "best week." Hue. should feel less rewarded with use, not more.
Your data lives here.
Hue. is offline-first — your entries never leave your device. The full architecture is on the Privacy page.
Descriptive, not prescriptive.
We never tell you that grief should go down or joy should go up. The Spectrum page shows what came up. It doesn't grade you on it.
Built in evenings, by one person, for the apps no one else made.
Hue. is built and maintained by one developer with help from a small group of clinical psychology, design, and privacy reviewers. It is not a startup. There is no funding round. There is no roadmap toward acquisition.
The app is free and will remain free. The source is on GitHub. The data format is open and exportable. If we ever stop maintaining it, you will be able to take your entries with you and read them in any text editor.
We borrow gratefully from a long list of researchers and clinicians: Lisa Feldman Barrett (constructed emotion), Kuppens & Bringmann (affective dynamics), Stroebe & Schut (the dual-process model of grief), James Pennebaker (expressive writing), Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan), and the bereavement literature broadly. The footnotes will be in the eventual paper. The app is the homework.
If Hue. is useful to you, that's the whole point. If it isn't — that's also fine. We won't email you about it.