Next Fill
Remember what is in every pen—and give the neglected ones another turn.
Three inked · eight waiting
The clock starts at the last fill. After a hundred and twelve dry days, a pen has quietly changed from something you use into something you merely own.
Next Fill remembers what is in every pen, when it went in and how long the fill lasted. Over a year, the difference between the pens you use and the pens you merely own becomes difficult to ignore. It suggests what to ink next from what has waited longest, syncs between phone and desk, and never turns your own collection into a shop window.
What it does
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Every pen, nib and bottle
Each pen keeps the nib fitted to it and the ink inside it. Move a nib and its record follows. Inks live separately, along with the bottle or cartridge they came from and a useful—not laboratory-grade—idea of what remains.
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The life of a fill
Every fill has a beginning and an end. Flush the pen and Next Fill closes the record, revealing which pens you actually use and which inks vanish twice as quickly as expected.
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A nudge towards the neglected
A short list pairs the pens that have sat dry longest with inks that have also been waiting. Each suggestion includes its reason. It is an idea, not another schedule to disappoint.
Process
- Problem
- Any collection eventually becomes the same three pens in rotation. The rest wait clean in a drawer while their inks age in the bottle. The missing thing is not an inventory but a memory of use.
- Current bet
- The useful unit is the fill, not the pen. Record when a pen was inked and when it was flushed, and most of the questions a collector actually asks — what is dry, what is neglected, how long a fill lasts — fall out of that.
- Hard problem
- Representing ink colour honestly on a screen. A swatch is lit differently from paper, varies by nib width and drying time, and shading and sheen do not survive a flat block of colour at all. The current approach is to show a small, deliberately modest swatch and let a photograph of your own writing carry the truth.
- Status
- Building. The record and the fill history work; the suggestion list and Mac sync are in progress.