The apps share a navigation pattern, while each keeps the controls its job needs. The available controls depend on the current view and the width of the window.
Choosing a destination
The sidebar holds your main destinations and collections: Orbit’s planning buckets and Spaces, Circle’s people and circles, Beacon’s feeds, Echo’s lenses and Watchlist’s queues and channels.
On iPhone, use the sidebar button or the back control to return to those destinations. On iPad and Mac, the sidebar can sit beside the content when there is room. A narrower window may hide it until you open it again.
Finding View and Sort
In Orbit and Watchlist on iPhone, open More (the ellipsis) for View and Sort. They may appear as separate toolbar controls on a wider screen. Orbit also folds them into More in a narrow Mac window.
These options depend on the destination. A read-only or historical view may not offer the same sorting or editing actions as an active list.
Search
Use the search control for the current app or view. On Mac and with a supported hardware keyboard, ⌘F opens search. Search works the same way in every app:
- Where you are or Everywhere: the choice under the search field decides whether to search the list you are in or the whole app. Each app remembers your choice.
- The words you typed are shown in bold in each result, with a short line saying where they matched, such as in the notes or a tag.
- Put words in quotation marks to find them together as a phrase.
- In Orbit and Circle, your recent searches are there before you type.
- If nothing matches, the app offers to search everywhere, or suggests a spelling it does find.
On Mac and iPad, choosing a result shows it beside the list, with the matches marked so you can step between them.
Settings
Open Settings from the gear in the sidebar. On Mac, the app menu also offers Settings. Search within Settings to find an option by its name, rather than remembering which section holds it.
The apps share Appearance, Sync and About sections, but some section names differ. For example, Watchlist puts queue preferences under Lists & Sorting, while Echo keeps writing reminders under Reminders.
Help & Tips
Every app has a Help & Tips section in Settings:
- Take the Tour: a short walk round the app’s main controls. The rest of the window fades so you can see which control each step is about.
- Guides: short how-tos for the app, inside the app.
- Version History: what changed in each release.
- Show Tips Again: brings back the small tips you’ve already seen or dismissed. They return the next time you open the app.
Tips are kept occasional: none in your first session, at most one a day, and no tip more than twice.
If a control seems to have disappeared
Open More, show the sidebar, or widen the window. If a view still looks different from a screenshot, check your app version and selected layout. Screenshots show one window size and appearance; they do not list every available control.