Winding the Fleas from Anywhere on iOS

Fleawinder: Living Circus now has a custom iOS keyboard. Install it once and every app you type in — Messages, Notes, Safari, anywhere — quietly winds the circus in the background. Every ten keystrokes sends a burst of energy back to the main app. The fleas don't care where the input comes from; they just want to be wound.

The keyboard itself is circus-themed: dark warm-brown keys, gold accents on the special keys, and a small energy bar at the top that fills up as you type. It shifts from red to gold to green as your keystroke count climbs. There's a tiny flea emoji next to it and a live counter so you can see exactly how much winding you've done this session.

The trickiest part was data sharing. iOS keyboard extensions run in their own sandboxed process — they can't talk to the main app directly. The solution is App Groups: a shared UserDefaults container that both the keyboard and the app can read and write to. The keyboard accumulates wind points and drops them in the shared container; the app picks them up on resume. We migrated the existing Siri Shortcuts and widget intents to the same shared container while we were at it, so everything flows through one pipe now.

To enable it: Settings, General, Keyboard, Keyboards, Add New Keyboard, Fleawinder: Living Circus. It doesn't request Open Access — no network, no data leaves your device. Just keystrokes powering fleas.