The 4 a.m. problem

There’s a design constraint these two apps share that almost no productivity app has to deal with: the person using it is not fully awake.

Lucid North gets opened in bed with the lights off, and again at some point in the night when the user is deep in a sleep cycle and reaching for their phone half-conscious. True North gets opened between sets, and at the end of a session when the user is out of breath, sweating, and cognitively not at their best. Neither app can assume a calm, alert, seated reader.

That turns out to change almost everything.

One decision per screen

When you’re tired, working memory is the first thing to go. A screen that asks you to hold three things in your head while you choose between five options is a screen you’ll close.

So both apps aim for one decision visible at a time. True North’s workout view shows the current exercise, the target for this set, and one button. The full plan is one tap away but not in your face. Lucid North’s night screen shows the cue count and a single line of instruction — look at your hands, could this be a dream? — and nothing else.

No small tap targets

The Material guideline is a 48dp minimum touch target. True North uses 52 and up for anything you’d tap mid-workout, because shaky, sweaty hands miss small buttons and a missed tap during a set is genuinely annoying. It’s a tiny change that you only think to make if you’ve actually tried to log a set with a real pump.

Dark, but specifically dark

Both apps are dark-first, for different reasons that land in the same place. Lucid North because any bright light late at night pushes back your melatonin and wrecks the thing you’re trying to do. True North because gym lighting is already harsh and a white screen is a glare bomb. Neither is dark mode as a style choice — it’s dark because the alternative actively hurts the use case.

Nothing that punishes a gap

Tired people miss days. An app that greets a returning half-asleep user with a broken streak, a guilt animation, or a “you haven’t been here in a while!” modal is an app they resent. Both of these are built to pick up exactly where you left off and say nothing about the gap.

Why this is one site and not two

True North and Lucid North are separate apps with separate purposes, separate palettes, and no shared account. What they share is this: a maker who kept running into the same wall — the user isn’t at their best when they open this — and designed around it both times. That’s the whole reason they live under one roof here.

Both open betas are planned for Q1 2026. If you want in, the list is on the home page.