Commercium is a small studio in London. We make apps for iPhone and the browser: a card duel, a daily writing ritual and a presentation maker. This is the first post on our new site, so it is a good place to say how we think about what we make.

A studio of small, specific apps

Each of our apps does one thing. Three Seals is a card duel against three masters in a night temple. 369 Zone helps you write one intention, three, six and nine times a day. SlideForge turns a topic into a finished presentation.

They have very little in common on the surface. One is a game with karate animals. One is a calm journal. One is a tool for work. That is on purpose. We would rather make three apps that each do their job well than one app that tries to do everything.

Why each app gets its own world

An app is a place you visit, sometimes many times a day. So we give each one a world of its own: a palette, a typeface, a way of moving and, where it fits, characters.

• Three Seals lives in a night temple. Lanterns sway, fireflies drift and the masters, a squirrel, a tortoise and an owl, sit across the table. The type is round and friendly, and the gold of a winning seal is the brightest thing on screen.
• 369 Zone is quiet. Warm white, one orange, lots of space. A breathing exercise sets the pace before you write, so the whole app feels slower than the rest of your phone.
• SlideForge looks like a clean studio. Neutral light, crisp type and Kai, its mascot, who keeps a tool for work friendly.

The home page of this site shows this directly. Each app has a chapter, and as you move into it the page takes on that app’s colours, type and motion. The studio frame around the chapters stays black and white, so each world can land on its own.

What stays the same in every app

Worlds can be different. Some rules should not be. These three hold across everything we release, and we wrote them from the apps’ own store listings rather than from a wish list.

Free to start. Every app is a free download. Where something costs money, the price and the terms are shown before you pay.

Offline where it matters. A card duel should work on a train. Three Seals plays fully offline, keeps your progress in your own iCloud and has no ads, no accounts and no data collection.

Your words stay yours. 369 Zone and SlideForge can draft with AI, and every line can be edited, refined or replaced before you keep it.

How we build

We are a small team, so we keep the loop short: build, test on real devices, ship, listen, repeat. By 24 September 2026 we had shipped 375 builds to App Store Connect, the service Apple uses for app releases. Most of them were test builds that never reached the store; that is the point. Small, frequent releases are how we catch problems before you do.

We apply the same care to this website. It moves one step per gesture, respects the reduced motion setting on your device and shows every word even without JavaScript. We wrote up how that works in One gesture, one step.

What you will find on this blog

Notes from the studio, in plain English:

• guides to our apps, such as how to play Three Seals, the 3-6-9 method and how SlideForge builds a deck;
• how we design and build, including the parts that did not work the first time;
• news when an app reaches a new platform or a new version.

If you would like to follow along, there is an RSS feed. If you have a question for the studio, write to us.

Three Seals: Dojo Duel is a card game about three elements and a lot of nerve. You sit across a low table from a master of the night temple, play one card a round, and try to complete your shelf of seals before they do. A duel takes a few minutes. Learning it takes one. Getting good takes longer, which is the fun of it.

This guide covers everything you need for your first duels. If you would rather learn by doing, you can play it now in your browser.

The element cycle

Every card has an element: fire, wood or water. The three beat each other in a circle:

• Fire burns wood.
• Wood soaks up water.
• Water puts out fire.

No element is strongest. Each one wins against one and loses against the other, so every card you hold is both a threat and a risk.

How a clash is decided

Each round, you and the master each choose a card. Then the two cards clash.

1. Different elements: the cycle decides. Your fire against their wood wins; your fire against their water loses.
2. Same element: the higher number wins. A fire 11 beats a fire 9.

The winner of the clash puts their card on their shelf; a card that loses its clash never reaches a shelf. The game shows every clash with its own small scene: flamethrowers for fire, tsunamis for water, sprouting wood and earthquake fissures, so you always see why a card won.

The seals: how to win

Every card also carries a seal in one of several colours. Your shelf is where the duel is decided. You take the duel as soon as your shelf holds either:

• three different seals of one element, for example three fire cards with three different seal colours, or
• one seal of each element in three different colours: a fire, a wood and a water card, each with its own seal colour.

The rule in both cases is that the seals must all be different. Three fire cards with the same seal colour do not win. So a strong card is not enough: you also want the right card for your shelf.

Peek, Redraw and Power

You have three special moves. Each can be used once in a duel, so timing is everything.

• Peek shows you the master’s hand for that round.
• Redraw throws away your hand and draws five new cards.
• Power adds 3 to your card for that round.

Power is at its best in a same-element clash, where the number decides. Peek is at its best when you are one card from winning and cannot afford a loss. Redraw is your way out of a hand that cannot finish either kind of shelf.

The masters and the clock

You face the masters of the temple in order, and each one has a personality and a clock.

The clock is real: if you hesitate for too long, the master picks a card for you. Peanut is quick and a little scattered. Tosby reads your shelf and closes the doors you are trying to open. Huma looks less at your cards than at your habits, so playing the same way every time is the quickest way to lose to her. After the black belt, the shadow masters arrive, and the ladder does not end.

Belts and ranks

Winning earns belt points. You climb from the white belt to the black belt, then through the dan ranks, and the belt you hold shows on your character. You can choose from 13 karate animal avatars.

Two rules keep the climb friendly: losing never costs points, and winning streaks earn bonuses. On iPhone and iPad, Game Center has two leaderboards, Belt Points and Total Wins.

Tips for your first duels

• Count the shelf, not the score. Before you play, look at which seals you still need. A card that wins the clash but gives you a seal you already have may be worth less than it looks.
• Watch the master’s shelf too. If they are one seal from a win, the clash in front of you matters more than your plan.
• Save Power for a same-element clash. Plus 3 is decisive when the numbers decide.
• Do not freeze against Huma. Six seconds is short. Decide what you need from the round before the cards are dealt.

Where to play

Three Seals runs in any modern browser at play.sealduel.com, free, with no sign-up. It plays fully offline, has no ads and no accounts, and collects no data. It is available in 11 languages. The iPhone and iPad version is coming to the App Store soon, with progress kept in your own iCloud.

For news, the game’s world and its characters, visit threeseal.com. We wrote about why each of our apps gets its own world, including the night temple, in Every app is its own world.

The home page of this site tells our story in steps. The hero, a short statement, then one chapter for each app. Every gesture moves you exactly one step: one notch of a mouse wheel, one swipe on a trackpad, one press of an arrow key, one swipe on a phone. This post is about how that works, and about the times it deliberately does nothing.

The problem with scroll stories

A pinned, scroll-driven page looks lovely in a screen recording and often feels wrong in the hand. The usual failure is a trackpad. A single two-finger swipe on a Mac produces a burst of wheel events and then a long, fading tail of inertia events. If every event can advance the story, one swipe skips three chapters. If the page ignores events for a fixed time, a fast reader feels stuck.

Scroll-jacking libraries solve this by taking over scrolling completely. We did not want that. The page should scroll natively everywhere outside the pinned story, and the story should hand control back the moment you reach either end.

What counts as a new gesture

The controller listens to wheel, touch and key events. For the wheel, it first normalises the delta: a browser can report it in pixels, lines or pages, so a line becomes 40 px and a page becomes the viewport height.

Then it decides whether this event starts a new gesture or belongs to the one already moving. An event counts as new if:

• more than 250 ms have passed since the last wheel event, or
• the direction has changed, or
• at least 320 ms have passed since the last step, the delta is at least 18 px, and it is at least 1.75 times the previous delta, or
• the same timing and size hold and a short moving average of the last 10 deltas has risen above the long average of the last 70.

The last rule is the one that matters most on a trackpad. Inertia decays: each event is a little smaller than the one before, so the short average sinks below the long one. A real second swipe rises. Comparing the two catches a quick second swipe that arrives before the first one’s tail has finished.

const isNew =
  gap > NEW_GAP ||                       // 250 ms of silence
  dir !== this.lastDir ||                // a change of direction
  (sinceStep >= MIN_STEP_GAP && abs >= MIN_DELTA && abs >= RISE * this.lastAbs) ||
  (sinceStep >= MIN_STEP_GAP && abs >= MIN_DELTA && rising);

Swallow, then settle

Once a step starts, every further event is swallowed until it finishes. That single rule is what stops inertia from skipping a chapter. We test it with a simulated trackpad swipe of 73 wheel events with a long decaying tail: it moves the story exactly one stop.

On a desktop, the step itself is a scroll tween of 0.6 seconds with a gentle ease in and out, and the scene’s animation follows the scroll position. On a phone, scrolling is frozen while locked and the scene’s timeline is tweened instead, over 0.5 seconds. Phones get the quicker, simpler motion because a finger expects the page to answer at once.

Entering and leaving the story

Two edge cases decide whether a step lock feels trustworthy.

Entering. If you scroll towards a pinned section from outside it, a gesture that would carry you past its first stop lands exactly on that stop and locks. You never arrive halfway through a chapter.

Leaving. At the first or last stop, one more gesture in the same direction releases the lock and normal scrolling carries on. A large jump, such as dragging the scrollbar or pressing End, releases it at once. The controller remembers your last direction for 800 ms, so when it has to choose which end of a section to land on, it chooses the one you were heading for.

While locked, a small loop on each animation frame puts the scroll position back if momentum drifts it. On touch screens the page sets touch-action: none only while the story is locked, and restores it on release, so pinch zoom and normal panning work everywhere else.

When the answer is no motion

The best motion design includes a way out.

• Reduced motion. If your device asks for reduced motion, the page never pins, never locks and runs no ambient loops. The chapters render as calm stacked sections with the same words, links and still images.
• No JavaScript. The same stacked layout is what the server sends. Scripts only switch the motion layout on after they have started, and if the story has not taken over within five seconds, the page falls back to the stacked layout rather than leave anything hidden.
• Pause. A Pause motion button stops every loop, scene and video on the page, in line with WCAG 2.2.2 (pause, stop, hide).

Keyboard users get the same steps as everyone else: the arrow keys, Page Up and Page Down, Space, Home and End. The dot rail on the side is labelled, marks the current chapter for screen readers, and each chapter has a link of its own, such as /#three-seals.

The budget

A scroll story is easy to make heavy. We set a budget before we started and test it on every build: the home page’s HTML, CSS and JavaScript must stay under 200 KB compressed, and its JavaScript under 90 KB. At launch the home page’s JavaScript is about 74 KB compressed, and around a third of that loads only as you approach the chapter that needs it. Only transforms and opacity are animated, blur is applied to one layer at a time and never to video, and the Three Seals scene pauses when it is off screen.

What we would tell anyone building one

Test with real inertia, not just single wheel events; a synthetic swipe with a long tail finds bugs a mouse never will. Decide what happens at the edges before you tune the middle. And build the stacked version first: if the story reads well with no motion at all, the motion is a bonus rather than a crutch.

The rest of the site follows the same rules. If you want to see the result, the home page is the whole demonstration.

Most of the time spent on a presentation goes on things that are not the message: choosing a layout, lining up boxes, fixing fonts, making slide seven look like slide three. SlideForge takes that part away. You tell it what the talk is about, and it gives you a finished, designed deck you can edit, present, export or share.

What SlideForge does

SlideForge is an app for iPhone and iPad. It generates a full presentation from a short piece of text, with a heading, content and a layout on every slide. Every slide is built on the same design system, so the deck looks consistent from start to finish without you touching a margin.

Then the deck is yours. You can change any slide, export it as a PowerPoint (.pptx) file, or share it through a link.

How it works

1. Start from a topic. Type what the presentation is about, in a word or a paragraph.
2. SlideForge plans the deck and writes every slide. Titles, text and layouts arrive finished, in order.
3. Tap any slide to change it. Rewrite a line, fix a fact, remove what you do not need.
4. Export or share. Save a .pptx file to open in PowerPoint or Keynote, or send a link.

How to write a good topic

The quality of the deck follows the quality of the brief. A few lines of context go a long way.

• Say who it is for. “A 10-minute talk for first-year biology students” produces a different deck from “a briefing for the board”.
• Say what they should remember. One sentence on the point of the talk keeps every slide pulling in the same direction.
• Give the facts you know. Numbers, names and dates you already have are better than anything a model can guess. Your facts should stay your facts, so add them and then check them.
• Name the shape if you have one. “Problem, solution, results, next steps” or “three options and a recommendation” gives the deck its structure.

A topic like “The water cycle” works. A topic like “The water cycle, for 12-year-olds, 8 slides, ending with how clouds form and one question for the class” works better.

Editing: the deck is still yours

Generated slides are a first draft, not a verdict. Read every slide before you present it. Check any figure, date or name against your own source; that step is quick and it is the one that makes a deck trustworthy. Shorten anything you would not say out loud. Because the layout is handled for you, editing is only about the words.

Exporting to PowerPoint and sharing a link

When the deck is ready, you have two ways out:

• PowerPoint (.pptx). Open it in PowerPoint, Keynote or any tool that reads .pptx, and present from there or keep editing on a laptop.
• A share link. Send a quick link when someone just needs to see the slides.

Who it is for

SlideForge is made for people who need a clear deck quickly: students with coursework, professionals with a meeting at ten, founders with a pitch. It handles quick summaries, academic work, data-driven updates and full pitch decks.

Languages and price

The app is available in 13 languages, and customer support answers in several languages. Presentations can be made in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Kazakh, Ukrainian, Polish, Dutch and Hindi.

SlideForge is free to download and free to start: you can generate presentations without paying. Some advanced features need a purchase in the app, and the price is shown before you buy.

Try it

SlideForge is on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, and its website, slideforge.cloud, has help and answers to common questions. If you are curious how we think about giving a tool for work its own character, Kai the mascot included, read Every app is its own world.

The 3-6-9 method is one of the simplest journaling practices there is. You choose one intention and write it down three times in the morning, six times at midday and nine times at night. That is all. It has spread widely on social media, often with big promises attached. This guide sticks to what it is, how to do it well, and what it can honestly do for you.

What the 3-6-9 method is

The method gives a day a rhythm of three sittings, each longer than the last:

• Morning: three times. You set the intention for the day.
• Midday: six times. You come back to it when the day has pulled you elsewhere.
• Night: nine times. You end the day with it, at the most length.

The same words, written by hand or typed, eighteen times a day. The repetition is the point. It turns a passing wish into something you have looked at clearly, many times, on purpose.

How to practise it in one day

1. Choose one intention. One, not five. If you have several goals, pick the one you most want to keep in front of you this week.
2. Write it in the morning, three times. Slowly. Read it as you write it.
3. Write it at midday, six times. Set a reminder: in a busy day, midday is easy to miss.
4. Write it at night, nine times. Somewhere quiet, away from other screens if you can.
5. Repeat tomorrow. Keep the same words for a run of days, and change them only when they stop being true for you.

A short pause before each sitting helps. A few slow breaths are enough to move from whatever you were doing to the thing you want to think about.

Writing a good intention

The words matter more than the numbers. A few things tend to help:

• Make it specific. “I run my first 10 km this spring” gives your attention somewhere to go. “I am healthier” does not.
• Write it as your own. Use words you would actually say. If it makes you wince, it will not survive eighteen repetitions.
• Keep it short. One sentence you can write nine times without dreading it.
• Many people write it in the present tense, as if it were already true. Try both and keep what feels honest.

What it can and cannot do

The 3-6-9 method does not guarantee any outcome, and nothing that claims to should be trusted. What it can do is ordinary and useful: it makes you decide what you want, write it down, and come back to it three times a day. That kind of repeated attention is the basis of most journaling and habit practices. Whether you find it helpful is something only a run of days will tell you.

It is not a replacement for professional help. If you are struggling with your health, money or relationships, talk to someone qualified.

Where the name comes from

The method is often credited to the inventor Nikola Tesla, usually through a quote about the numbers 3, 6 and 9. There is no record that Tesla described or taught a practice like this, and the quote has never been traced to a reliable source. The numbers give the day a shape and are easy to remember. That is reason enough to use them.

How 369 Zone keeps the ritual simple

We make 369 Zone, an iPhone app built around exactly this rhythm. We designed it to be quiet: warm white, one orange, lots of room, and nothing competing with the words you are writing.

• Guided sessions for morning, midday and night, so you always know which sitting you are on.
• A breathing exercise before every session, to settle before you write.
• Your intention always in front of you, editable at any time, plus Home Screen widgets.
• Reminders at the hours you choose, so each sitting finds you.
• Streaks, a 21-day tracker and a full history of past intentions, so a ritual becomes a habit.
• Optional AI suggestions for affirmations and intentions. Every suggestion can be edited, refined or replaced before you save it. The words stay yours.

369 Zone is free to download. Some features need an auto-renewable subscription, and the price and terms are shown before you pay. Like the method itself, the app is for journaling, reflection and habit building: it does not promise results, and it is not medical, psychological, financial or legal advice.

Getting started

Pick your one intention tonight and write it nine times before bed. Tomorrow, do the full three, six and nine. After a week, read back what you wrote on the first day and see whether the words still fit.

If you would like the app to keep time for you, 369 Zone is on the App Store. For more on how we give each of our apps its own character, read Every app is its own world.