Why Cue lives on the right Option key, why the orb collapses when idle, and what we learned about interfaces that must never get in the way.
An assistant that lives everywhere has a design problem an app never faces: it is always present, so it must be almost invisible. Every pixel it occupies is a pixel over someone else’s work. Every accidental trigger is a betrayal. The bar for “calm” is absolute.
Why the right ⌥ key
We needed a trigger that exists on every Mac keyboard, is reachable without moving your hands, and is essentially unused. The right Option key is all three. Your left thumb owns shortcuts; your right thumb rests next to a key most people have never deliberately pressed. Tap it and Cue drafts. Double-tap it for a live conversation. Hold it and Cue listens. The key was already there, waiting for a job.
Detecting it took care: macOS reports the right Option key with a device-dependent modifier bit, and getting that wrong would hijack every ⌥ shortcut on the machine. The left key keeps its life. The right one gets a new one.
The best trigger is a key you already own and never use.
An orb that knows when to disappear
The floating orb went through three designs. The lesson from all of them: state changes must not move things. If the idle chip and the listening indicator are different sizes, the window shifts as you speak, and a moving target under your cursor reads as broken. Today every orb state renders inside one fixed, invisible footprint. Idle, it collapses to a slim bar. Listening, a small waveform and small text. Same place, same width, no jumps.
The same principle drove the hover behavior. The window must never resize on hover, because a resize moves an edge under the cursor and the hover collapses in a flicker loop. These are the invisible details that make an always-on tool feel trustworthy: you notice none of them, and that is the point.
Never send
One rule survived every redesign: Cue drafts, you send. There is no code path that presses send on your behalf, not a setting, an architecture. An assistant that lives in every app has to earn the right to stay. Guarantees like that are how.