An enchanted diary for iPad. You write on the page with an Apple Pencil or a fingertip. The page sits blank and silent for a breath — then ink begins to appear, in a flowing hand, stroke by stroke, answering you. It remembers who you are across every opening. Ask it, and a memory rises from the paper as a pen‑and‑ink drawing.

No chat bubbles. No keyboard. No spinner. Just ink on paper — a thing that feels possessed, not installed. A love letter to Tom Riddle's diary from Chamber of Secrets, built native in SwiftUI.

A native iPadOS/iOS reimagining of the original MaximeRivest/Riddle (built for the reMarkable Paper Pro).

• Write, then rest your pen. After a pause the diary drinks your ink — your words blot and soak into the paper — reads the page with a vision model, and answers in its own cursive hand.
• It knows you. A distilled Memory Soul (your name, the words you circle, fears, wants, promises) persists across every opening, so recall feels uncanny rather than literal.
• It draws. Ask it to show you something — or just sketch on the page — and a borderless black‑ink illustration blooms up onto the cream, never a bordered "image."
• It's alive. Occasional unbidden lines when you go quiet; soft page sounds; a wax‑sealed leather cover that opens each time you return.
• All ink, no chrome. Guide, Settings, and Memory are rendered as diary pages, summoned by gestures. There is no visible UI on the writing surface.

These are the north star. Every change is judged against "does this feel like the enchanted diary, or like an app?"

1. It is a possession, not a chatbot. Charming, magnetic, quietly drawing you in. Never breaks character; never mentions AI, models, screens, files, or "drawing."
2. Ink physics. Write → the page drinks the ink → it thinks in silence (no spinner) → the reply seeps back in his own hand, drawn stroke by stroke → it fades.
3. Just ink on paper. No buttons or panels on the page. Gestures do everything.
4. He always answers — substantively, briefly — and never echoes your words back.
5. He remembers you. The live conversation clears when the app closes; the Soul remembers the person.
6. Ink, never images. Generations are borderless black ink on the exact page cream, cropped to fill.

The page is a small phase state machine driven by a PencilKit canvas, talking to OpenRouter, with a hidden‑tag protocol that lets the model quietly invoke "tools" without breaking character.

        pen/finger
            │
       InkCanvasView ──(gesture rituals: ? X Z V)── PageRitual
            │ drawingDidChange
            ▼
        DiaryView  ── phase: idle → drinking → thinking → responding
            │             (drink dissolve)   (silent)   (reply reveal)
            │
            ├── OpenRouterOracle ──> OpenRouter /chat/completions (vision, SSE stream)
            │        │
            │        └── Oracle.swift  (persona + hidden-tag directives)
            │
            ├── HandwritingText / RevealingHandwriting  (Core Text glyph outlines traced by a nib)
            ├── InkImage        (Core Image → borderless black ink on cream)
            ├── MemorySoul      (distilled persistent profile → riddle-soul.json)
            ├── DiaryStore      (kept pages + keyword recall → riddle-entries.json)
            └── DiarySounds     (ambient bundled clips)

The model returns a short visible reply, then appends hidden bookkeeping lines that the app parses and strips before display. This is how the diary reaches beyond its own memory without ever saying so.

Turns run in up to two passes: the first pass carries your Soul + a few preserved pages (so most turns need no round‑trip); a WEB/RECALL tag escalates to a second pass. Explicit intent is also enforced locally — saying "look up…" guarantees a web pass; "draw…" guarantees a sketch — so the experience never depends solely on the model tagging correctly. The app also always answers: an empty reply falls back to an in‑character line rather than silence.

Requirements: Xcode 16+ (built with 26.5), iOS/iPadOS 18.0+ (uses SwiftUI's withAnimation(completion:) and Core Text glyph paths), and an OpenRouter API key.

git clone https://github.com/rossman22590/riddle-ai.git
cd riddle-ai
open Riddle.xcodeproj

1. Select the Riddle scheme and an iPad simulator or device, and Run (⌘R).
2. On first launch you'll meet the closed diary — tap the seal to open it.
3. Write anything. With no key bound the diary "sleeps" and opens the guide → Settings, where you paste your OpenRouter key (stored in the Keychain, never in UserDefaults).
4. Write again — and it wakes.

xcodebuild -project Riddle.xcodeproj -scheme Riddle \
  -sdk iphonesimulator -destination "platform=iOS Simulator,id=<SIM-UDID>" build

Note: the built product is AIRiddle.app (bundle id org.mytsi.riddle, display name "Riddle"). Install it from the scheme's DerivedData products dir, not from any stale ./build.

Defaults live in AppSettings.swift:

Model selection is intentionally not user‑facing in the UI — the diary has one voice. Change the defaults in code.

• API key → Keychain only.
• The living conversation → in‑memory; it vanishes when the app is truly closed (by design).
• Kept pages → riddle-entries.json in the app's Documents dir (capped, background‑written).
• The Soul → riddle-soul.json (distilled facts, capped at 48).
• The page snapshot (a PNG of your ink) is sent only to openrouter.ai. Nothing else leaves the device. "Forget everything" in Memory wipes both the pages and the Soul.

SwiftUI · PencilKit · Core Text (glyph‑outline reveal) · Core Image (ink compositing) · AVFoundation (ambient sounds) · URLSession streaming (SSE) · Keychain · OpenRouter (OpenAI‑compatible vision API).

Riddle/
├── App/            RiddleApp, ContentView (root, cover gate, marks lesson)
├── Views/          DiaryView (the page + state machine), InkCanvasView,
│                   HandwritingText (the writing reveal), DiaryGate (cover),
│                   RitualMarksView, Guide/Settings/History (as diary pages), DiarySheet
├── Services/       Oracle (persona + tag directives), OpenRouterOracle (client),
│                   DiarySounds, Keychain
├── Models/         AppSettings, DiaryStore + DiarySession, MemorySoul, DiaryEntry
├── Support/        Theme, ParchmentBackground, InkImage, FontRegistrar
├── Fonts/          DancingScript.ttf (+ OFL license)
└── Sounds/         cover / drink / rustle

• App icon — not yet designed.
• Ink settling where you wrote — replies currently center on the page.
• A few quality passes remain (sketch‑intent matching, per‑frame layout caching, image‑decode robustness). Contributions welcome.

PRs welcome. The one rule: hold the north star. Before adding anything, ask whether it makes the diary feel more like an enchanted object or more like an app. Prefer gesture over button, ink over UI, in‑character silence over status text, page‑cream over white. Never ship a loading spinner.

• Original project: MaximeRivest/Riddle — the diary of Tom Riddle, built for the reMarkable Paper Pro. This repo is a native iPad reimagining of it.
• Dancing Script — SIL Open Font License (see Riddle/Fonts/OFL.txt).
• Sound effects — sourced from Mixkit (free license). If you redistribute, verify the license or swap for CC0 / your own recordings.
• Harry Potter, Tom Riddle, and the diary are the intellectual property of J.K. Rowling / Warner Bros. This is a non‑commercial fan homage. Do not ship it commercially.

Application code: MIT (add a LICENSE file). Third‑party assets retain their own licenses above.