Apps

Some things read better as a screen than as a paragraph. Your calendar, your to-do list, the articles you follow — Pepper keeps each of those as a small app you can open in the web chat, without leaving the conversation.

What there is

Sixteen, today:

• Todos — your action-item list. See Todos.
• Notes — everything you've written down, as a list or a board you can read and edit, plus Voice (notes you speak), Journal (a page a day) and Add notes (notes from Google Docs, Asana, email and files). See Artifacts.
• Booking — the pages people use to book time with you, and what's been booked. See Booking pages.
• Answering — the calls Pepper answered for you, and the rules for how it handles different callers. It's a native screen in the iPhone app; opening its tile on the web tells you that and points you there. See Answering.
• Calendar — what's coming up across the calendars you've picked. See Calendar.
• Meal plan — this week's meals and the preferences Pepper plans from.
• Recipes — recipes you've saved as ordinary artifacts.
• Shopping — what to get, plus the kitchen lists that show what you already have. See Meals for all three.
• Workouts — the week you're training to, today's session set by set, and your streak. See Workouts.
• Following — the teams, shows, podcasts, feeds, sites, schools and people you follow, in one list with what's new on each, a player for podcast episodes, and the daily feed briefing. It replaces the separate Sports, Feeds and Podcasts apps on the web. See Following.
• GitHub — what's waiting on your review and what's assigned to you, oldest first, if you've connected GitHub. See GitHub.
• Brief — your briefs: today's, the ones you haven't read yet, and a conversation of its own for asking about them. It's also where you set the time, add a second edition, and run one on the spot (see Reminders & scheduling).
• Artifacts — the reports, notes, recipes and links you've saved. See Artifacts.
• Images — every picture Pepper has made or been sent, plus the ones you've named for it to draw from. See Images.
• Skills — the playbooks you can run, and the ones you've written. See Skills.
• Help — the same answers this guide gives, as a page you can browse and search.

The profile Pepper keeps about you — your dossier — lives in Settings now, not the grid; see Memory & preferences.

A room can have its own apps too. Everything above is about your own apps, which are yours alone. A room that began as an email thread or a group text starts with none, and you can ask Pepper in the thread to add one ("can we have a shared shopping list?"). What it adds belongs to the room: everyone in the thread can use it, and it's separate from your private copy of the same app. See Rooms for how that works.

Opening one

In the web chat, tap the grid button next to the message box. It opens a panel showing the apps worth opening, each with a line about what's in it — how many todos are open, what's next on your calendar, how many unread articles have arrived. That's the point of the panel: "is anything worth looking at?" is a glance rather than opening ten things.

Chat always leads the grid and Help always trails it, with everything else alphabetical in between — the same order every time, on the web and on the phone, so a tile is always where its name says it'll be.

You can also just ask — "show me my calendar", "open my todo list" — or type a slash command. Every app has one, and it's the app's own name: /calendar, /todo, /meal-plan, /recipes, /shopping, /following. Typing / opens the panel and narrows it as you keep typing, so you don't have to remember which is which — the command is written on each tile, arrow keys move through what's left, and Enter opens it. You don't have to click the message box first: / works from anywhere on the page, including from inside an app you're already reading, so jumping from one app to another is four or five keystrokes and no mouse. /chat is there too. A few places aren't in the grid but still answer to their name — /skills, /artifacts and /scheduled don't take up a square, because you reach a skill or a saved thing by naming it rather than by browsing to it, and your scheduled tasks have their own section in Settings. Type the command and each opens exactly as it always did. A few slash commands are things to say rather than places to go — /remember starts a note for your dossier, /morning runs your brief, /email summarizes what's arrived — and those fill the message box for you to send. Every skill is a command too, named after the skill (/meal-planning, /find-todos, and anything you've saved yourself); taking one fills the box with the request so you can add a detail before sending. Tab completes the name you've started — as far as the candidates agree, or the whole name once you've arrowed onto one — while Enter is what actually takes a command, so a half-typed name tabbed out of habit never fires something you didn't read. Some apps have a page of their own you can bookmark or open in another tab (/apps/todo, /apps/calendar, and so on), and there's an Apps page with all of them. It starts with Yours — a full card for each app you have something in — then Shared with you, every app installed in one of your rooms, marked with the room's name, and then Other apps, the ones you haven't put anything in yet, with a line on what each is for. The Filter apps box at the top narrows all three as you type — by an app's name, what it's for, or the room it's shared in — on the phone too. Anything you open from there has a ‹ Apps button to take you back (the browser's Back button works too), and a room's app says which room it's shared in, with a button to open that room.

Choose what's in the launcher. Every app is listed on the Apps page, whether or not it's in the launcher. Open an app's menu there (the ⋮ on its card or tile, or press and hold on the phone) and choose Remove from launcher or Add to launcher. In the launcher itself, right-click a tile (or press and hold on a touchscreen) to remove it. Nothing is deleted and nothing stops working — the app still has its own page, still answers to its name (/todo still opens Todos when it isn't in the launcher), and still shows you a card when it has something to say. It's your account rather than this browser, so an app you take out on the laptop is out on the phone too.

A handful start outside the launcher, for everyone. Booking, Meal plan, Recipes, Shopping, Workouts, GitHub and Images aren't in the launcher to begin with — for every account, not just new ones, since these are the ones fewer people reach for every day. Answering starts outside the launcher on the web and inside it on the phone. They're all on the Apps page like any other app; choose Add to launcher on one and from then on it's an ordinary tile.

Type to jump straight to something. Start typing in the message box and the panel narrows to what matches — not just app names, but the things inside them: a todo by its text, a skill, a scheduled task, something you've saved to artifacts. Arrow keys move through the matches and Enter opens the one you're on, which lands you on that item rather than the top of its app. It's the quickest way to reach one thing out of a long list.

An open app fills the screen, and the message box tucks away behind Pepper's icon in the bottom-right corner. Tap it to talk to Pepper about what you're looking at; the box stays open while you move around inside that app, and tucks back into the icon when you close it with its ✕ or open a different app. What you send doesn't close the app; where the reply lands is covered below. Close the app with the ✕, the Escape key, or the Chat tile in the panel.

The browser's Back button works too. It retraces the apps you opened — from Following back to Briefs back to the conversation — and it steps back inside an app as well, so if you opened one brief out of the archive, Back returns you to the archive rather than closing the whole thing. Forward works the same way. Just reading around inside an app doesn't pile up entries, so Back stays a short path rather than a walk through everything you glanced at.

Every app page carries the same menu button in its top corner, including the standalone /apps/… pages — so there's always a way back to the rest of Pepper, whichever route you prefer.

Pictures open. Press any picture anywhere in Pepper — in the conversation, on an app's card, in the Images grid, in a brief, on any app's page — and it fills the screen at the largest size that fits. Escape or a press outside closes it and puts you back exactly where you were, with the conversation still behind it. When several pictures arrived together, the arrows move between them without closing.

If something has gone wrong in an app — a feed that stopped fetching, say — the app's own tile says so, in its tint and in its line, and it keeps its usual place in the grid so you always know where to find it. Nothing is flagged above the grid: a problem that only clears when you do something about it would otherwise sit there as a notice on every page load. An app that's waiting on you to connect something is tinted the same way; that's a suggestion, not a problem.

On iPhone

Apps aren't only a web thing — the iPhone app has them too. The launcher lives in the message box at the foot of the screen: open it and you get a grid of tiles — Chat first, then every app in your launcher, the same ones and the same order as the web panel, except that Sports, Feeds and Podcasts keep tiles of their own on the phone alongside Following. Tap one and it opens right there, not a jump out to Safari. (Settings and signing out are at the foot of the home screen rather than in the grid.)

An app link or app card in a chat reply works the same way on iPhone as it does on the web: tap it and the app opens. The message box stays with you while it's open — which is the point, and the reason asking about what you're looking at works on the phone too. Pepper knows which app you're in, same as on the web. To leave, open the launcher and tap Chat.

Every app is reached this way, Todos included — there's no second Todos screen tucked somewhere else, it's the same app in the same place. Nearly all of them — Todos, Feeds, GitHub, Images, Sports, Calendar, your Brief, Podcasts, Workouts, Shopping, Recipes, Meal plan, Notes and Booking — are drawn as proper iPhone screens rather than as the web page, so they scroll, swipe and search the way anything else on your phone does. Scheduled tasks is native too — its own list and detail screen, with pause, resume and editing the schedule right there — reached from Settings → Scheduled tasks, same as on the web, or straight from a task's own notification. It isn't a launcher tile. Following, Help, Skills and Artifacts still look like their web version. Either way it's the same app with the same information in it.

Answering is the one app that's iPhone-only in practice. It has real Calls, Rules and Setup tabs on the phone (see Answering), but its tile on the web is a pointer rather than a working copy — open it there and it tells you to use the iPhone app instead of showing you your calls.

A few of them do things on the phone the web page can't. Podcasts plays through a real player, so an episode keeps going when you leave the screen and the lock screen controls it. The Workouts timers are honest about time that passed while you were somewhere else — a rest that ran out while you were in another app has ended when you come back, rather than sitting frozen. Images opens the camera and photo library directly, and pictures pinch to zoom. Recipes takes a PDF as well as a photo when you're adding one.

Slash commands work on the phone too. Type / in the message box and it lists the apps and skills that match what you've typed; tap an app to open it, or a skill to fill the box with its request. The web panel's keyboard conveniences — arrow keys, Tab, the Back-button history — are web-only; on the phone you tap instead. See The iPhone and iPad app for the rest of the phone app.

Asking about what you're looking at

While an app is open, whatever you ask is understood in front of it. Standing in front of your calendar is what makes "move the 1:30" mean something, so the app stays put and the answer arrives in a small panel beside it rather than replacing it. On a phone there's no room beside it, so the conversation grows inside the panel instead.

Two things follow from that:

• Suggestions change to match. The prompts offered next to the message box become that app's — "find me 30 minutes this week" while the calendar is open, not the generic ones. In an app with several screens they narrow further to the one you're on, since "add something by hand" is a strange thing to offer while you're looking at the week's meals.
• Some pages hand you the sentence. Where an app knows what you'd want to ask about the thing in front of you, it offers it as a small chip you can press. A chip always fills the message box rather than sending it, so you can change the wording, or think better of it, before anything goes to Pepper.
• The app updates itself. If what you asked for changed something — "add milk to the list" — the app refreshes so the screen and the answer agree. You don't have to reopen it.

Everything you said while the app was open is still in your ordinary conversation, marked with where it was asked from, so closing the panel loses nothing.

Asking about a room's app is private too. Over a room's shopping list — in its room or from the Apps page — what you ask is between you and Pepper and lands in your own conversation, not the room's. Pepper reads and changes the room's list, since that's the one on screen; anything else you ask it to change is still your own.

The same message box is on the Apps page (behind Pepper's icon, as over an app) and the Scheduled tasks page too, and asking there answers you in place rather than sending you to the chat. Each page knows what it is, so "what is this?" on the Apps page gets you the list of apps, and asking "why did this fail?" on a scheduled task's own page gets an answer about that task's recent runs.

Making one your own

The apps themselves are part of Pepper — their layout isn't something you change, and asking for "a different look" won't rewrite one. What they do remember is your preferences, and you set those by saying them: who you're cooking for and what you don't eat (Meal plan, see Meals), what you follow — teams, leagues, sites and podcasts (Following, see Following), when your brief arrives and where (see Reminders & scheduling). Say it in plain language, in the conversation or with the app open in front of you, and the app reflects it next time you look.

Good to know

• Apps are yours alone. They're only served to you while you're signed in — there's no shareable link that lets someone else see your list.
• Times in an app are in your own time zone, the same as everywhere else Pepper shows you a time.
• Apps live in web chat and the iPhone app (see On iPhone above). Over text message, WhatsApp, or email you get the written answer instead — nothing is unavailable, it just arrives as words. See Ways to reach Pepper.