A slow, monochrome gallery for Android — a calmer way to look at beautiful things.
FirePlace is the anti‑Instagram: a quiet, black‑and‑white gallery that pulls real images — fine art, cars, cats, watches, tech, photography — from public collections, and shows them like framed prints on a wall. No accounts, no ads, no algorithm, no bottomless scroll. Just the things you like, on purpose.
Social feeds are built to be endless — they win when you look more. FirePlace is built the other way: to help you look less, and enjoy it more.
- Curated batches, not infinite scroll. Each batch ends on purpose, with a designed stopping point.
- No vanity metrics. No like counts, no followers — nothing to chase.
- A gentle session limit. A tiny tabular readout of today's time against a limit you set; browse past it and a quiet "step away" sheet appears.
- You own the shape of it. Follow the rooms you like; everything you save lives on your device.
A strict monochrome system: near‑black #0A0A0B and bone‑white #FAFAF7, a wide Space Grotesk display paired with Space Mono wall‑labels, hard edges, a tight grid, and crisp snap/crossfade motion. There is no accent colour — the artwork is the only colour on screen, and emphasis comes from weight and inversion (an ink block with paper text) rather than a coloured rail. Everything's a typed ThemeExtension (context.c.ink), with a full light theme too.
Every image is real and attributed. FirePlace routes each category to the right source:
| Source | Powers | Wall‑label metadata |
|---|---|---|
| The Met — open collection | Painting, Impressionism, Japanese, Sculpture, Ancient, Modern | title · artist · date · medium |
| Wikimedia Commons | Cars, Watches, Tech, Dogs, Motorcycles, Keyboards, Sneakers, Aircraft, Space, Architecture, Food, Interiors, Nature | title · photographer · year · license |
| The Cat API | Cats | — |
| Lorem Picsum | Photography + a resilient fallback | — |
Adding a new room is one line in constants.dart:
Interest(id: 'guitars', label: 'Guitars', source: Source.wikimedia, query: 'electric guitar'),- 🖼 Feed — a single column of framed plates (art is matted whole; photos fill the frame) with a Space Mono wall‑label; double‑tap to like, quiet save.
- 🔎 Explore — a tight grid with category filters that invert when active.
- 🔬 Detail — the work full‑width with a museum‑style label beneath, pinch‑to‑zoom, and a link back to the source.
- 🧭 You — today's session against your limit, a bare week chart, friendly presets, the rooms you follow, and your saved wall.
- ♿ Honours OS reduce‑motion; screen‑reader labels on the controls; WCAG‑minded monochrome contrast.
UI screens/ + widgets/ stateless where possible; one component library
State providers/ (Riverpod) feed, explore, follows, saved, session + limit
Data services/ MetService · WikimediaService · CatService ·
PicsumService · GalleryService (the blender)
Model models/ + Hive + Prefs FeedItem, categories; local saves & screen time
Design design/ GalleryColors tokens, Type, GalleryTheme
Engineering notes
GalleryServiceis the blender — it samples the categories you follow, fans out to each source in parallel, dedupes by id, and shuffles. Each source lives behind its own small client and fails soft (a dead source returns[], never crashes the feed).- Resilient by default — Met search retries once on an empty body; if everything is unreachable the feed falls back to photographs so it's never blank.
- Wikimedia needs a User‑Agent — image requests carry one (
kImageHeaders), or Commons 403s them. - Collision‑safe Hero tags — because all three tabs stay alive in an
IndexedStack, hero tags are namespaced per surface (feed_…,explore_…,saved_…).
Flutter · Riverpod (state) · Hive CE + SharedPreferences (local) · http (four public APIs, no keys) · cached_network_image · google_fonts (Space Grotesk + Space Mono) · flutter_animate · shimmer · intl · url_launcher.
flutter pub get
flutter run # a connected Android device or emulatorNo API keys required — every source is public. Everything you save stays on your device.
flutter analyze # clean
flutter test # unit tests for the model
flutter build apk # release build- More rooms (guitars, interiors, typography, maps…) — each a one‑liner.
- Cache fetched Met objects to cut repeat network on paging.
- Bundle the two fonts for a fully offline first launch.
- A "shuffle everything" mode that ignores follows.
Images belong to their institutions and creators — The Met (open access), Wikimedia Commons contributors (CC/public‑domain), The Cat API, and Lorem Picsum; attribution and a source link are shown on every work. FirePlace is a personal, non‑commercial project, not affiliated with any of them.
Released under the MIT License.
Look at fewer things, more slowly.