What Greggle is, who made it, and what it promises.

What it is

Greggle is a web app. You name something you are working on, say what kind of thing it is, and it gives you a board of interlocking steps. Open any step and it becomes a board of its own. Keep going until every piece is something you can actually go and do, mark those as actions, and they collect in one flat list. Along the way it offers twenty-four ways of thinking, fourteen of them written up here and the rest as cards, each of which proposes a cut of your board that you review before anything is added, and a check that reads a branch back and says what is missing.

It runs in the browser and can be installed like any other app on a phone or a computer. Once installed it works with no internet connection at all. The ideas behind it are on the why page.

Who made it

Stuart Muir. Greggle is a one-person project, and the person is reachable: feedback@greggle.app goes to him. If a method is wrong on this site, if a page is unclear, or if the app does something it shouldn’t, that is the address. The app has a feedback section in its settings as well.

The promise, and what enforces it

Nothing you write leaves your device. That claim is made by a lot of software and usually means "we intend not to send it anywhere". Greggle’s version is enforced by your browser rather than intended by the author. The app’s security policy forbids outbound connections outright, so the page cannot fetch, post or send a beacon anywhere, including back to its own server. It loads no fonts, scripts, images or trackers from anywhere. An automated test asserts that the app makes no request to any other origin, and another asserts that the policy is present every time it is built.

There is no account because there is no server to hold one, and no analytics because nothing could send them. Your work lives in your browser and, if you choose, in a file you own. Putting that file in a cloud folder is how the same work reaches your other devices; choosing and writing a file is a conversation between the page and your own computer, not a connection to anywhere. It also means nothing is backed up for you, which the app says plainly rather than hiding.

What it is not

It is not open source. The app’s source is private and the product is commercial, even though the app is free to use. The methods it offers are not Greggle’s to own, and this site says where each one came from. One of them is described in the app under a plain name rather than the one it is famous by, because that name is a registered trademark for software; the method underneath is the same and belongs to nobody.

There is no assistant in this version. The app is built so that one could be added later, behind a boundary that would show you exactly what it was told before every call, and the settings screen already lets you read that. Today the honest description is: no network code, and no place to put a key.

About this website

The site is plain static pages with no scripts and no analytics. It fetches nothing from anywhere else, not even the typeface, which is served from here under its open licence. The board on the front page is a real board from the app. The method pages were checked against the definitions that actually run in the app, and the further reading on each page is the primary source where one exists.

Copyright Stuart Muir. The site is published so that people can read it, not so that it can be reused: please don’t redistribute its text or host a copy without asking. Asking is easy; the address is above.