Detour: One Hour Wander

Your maps app has one opinion about a walk: the fastest way there. Eleven minutes, head down, arrived, saw nothing. Detour has the opposite opinion. Tell it how long you have and what sort of hour it is. It hands you a compass bearing and a distance. North east, three hundred metres. Which street you take, which side of the road you cross, which alley you cannot resist: yours to decide, over and over, the whole way round. When you have walked it, the next bearing arrives, composed from where you actually ended up. A BEARING, NOT A ROUTE Detour has no street map and gives no turn by turn directions. It is a compass with an opinion, and the opinion is built from where you are, how much time is left, and which ground you have never stood in. Five moods change its character. Surprise me takes wide turns and leans hard toward unfamiliar ground. Quiet takes long legs and few decisions. Lively turns every corner it can. Architectural snaps its bearings to the grain of the streets you have walked. Melancholy barely turns at all. WHEN THE WAY IS BLOCKED A bearing will sometimes point at a canal, a motorway or a locked gate. Press "Not that way" and another arrives. Wander off and nothing is scolded: the walk you are on is always the walk, and the next bearing is composed from wherever you turned around. Ask to be taken back and the last bearings close the loop toward where you started. 362 LITTLE QUESTS FOR NOTICING Two to six cards arrive on an hour's walk, written to be done in under a minute, in public, without spending anything. Find something older than you. Stand where two smells meet. Find a sign that has been corrected by hand. Find a puddle worth photographing and do not photograph it. Answer with a line of writing, or simply do it and tap done. Star the ones you want back, and read the whole deck whenever you like. A JOURNAL, DRAWN IN INK Every walk closes with your own trail drawn as an ink sketch on cream paper, with the quests you finished marked where you finished them, one whispered line of numbers, and a place to write what you noticed. The ground covered view shades in every forty metre square you have stood in, so months of walks stack into a private atlas of your own city. Nothing in it is a target, and nothing is ever missing. HAPTIC BEARINGS A short pulse in your pocket says a new bearing has landed. Six patterns, about two minutes to learn, with a trainer in settings. The point of the whole app is that the phone stays in your pocket. NO SIGNAL REQUIRED Everything is computed on your phone. Detour works in a foreign city with the data switched off, in a basement, on a plane. There is no map to download and nothing to wait for. WHEN THE FIX WILL NOT COME Indoors, or where location is refused, Detour offers to hand you bearings you walk by eye and confirm with a tap. It draws the shape you were given rather than the one you took, and says so. YOUR WANDERING STAYS YOURS Detour does not request the internet permission. It cannot upload where you walked, because Android will not let it open a connection at all. No account, no sign up, no analytics, no advertising ID, no crash reporter. Location is read only while a walk is open on your screen, and the receiver is switched off the moment you leave the app. Export everything as JSON or as a plain text journal, put a copy back from that same file whenever you like, and erase the lot in two taps. WHAT IT WILL NOT DO It will not tell you which streets are lit, busy or safe. It has no map, so it cannot know. If a street feels wrong, turn around, and Detour will compose the next bearing from there. Walk with the same judgement you would use without it, and watch the traffic rather than the screen. Free and complete. Every mood, all 362 cards, the journal and the coverage map, with nothing to unlock and nothing to subscribe to. Follow a cat for one block, if a cat appears.