Compose

Composing on Lanai is one of the places where the app’s posture is the most visible. The rule is small and absolute: what you type is what you post. The composer never quietly transforms your words on the way out. The cleanup we apply to other people’s posts as we display them is never applied to yours as you write them.

If we get nothing else right about composition, we get that.

The porch pause

The signature compose feature is the one that asks the least of you. Turn it on and the post button gains a small delay before the post actually leaves — three seconds, thirty seconds, or two minutes, your choice. Off by default. There when you want it.

It’s not a confirmation dialog. There’s no are you sure?, no second tap, no checkbox. The post is already on its way. You can stop it, edit it, or let it land. For the moments when you’d rather read it back once, that’s the moment. For the moments you wouldn’t — the pause stays at three seconds and effectively disappears.

The opposite of a streak. The opposite of post a thought before you lose it. A small, optional friction that pays for itself the first time it does.

Alt text where it belongs

Alt text is a first-class field on Lanai, not a buried secondary affordance. When you attach an image, the description prompt sits next to the composer, the keyboard lands on it by default if the post body is empty, and the absence of a description doesn’t disappear into a row of tiny icons.

For the times when you’ve already posted and remembered too late, a quiet follow-up prompt appears: Posted. Want to add a description for screen readers? It’s not too late. Never blocking. Never shaming. There when you want to say yes.

And when you tap Suggest a description, on-device Vision offers one. You accept, edit, or reject. It never fills the field on its own.

Reading-Mode preview, from the composer

Some posts deserve a second look at what they’ll feel like on the other side. Long-press the post button and your draft renders in Reading Mode — full editorial typography, hanging punctuation, generous leading. The post you’re about to send, set as it will read.

It’s a quiet feature most users will never invoke. It’s there for the ones who will.

A thread that’s actually a thread

The thread builder lets you compose more than one post at a time, drag to reorder, and preview each piece in Reading Mode before publishing. Each post in the thread is its own post; the builder just makes the sequence easy to compose, easy to revise, and easy to read back as a single piece of writing before any of it ships.

What the composer never does

• It never modifies your post mid-typing. Curly-quote conversion, em-dash substitution, whitespace cleanup — none of it touches what you type. The display layer handles those at read time, never at write time.
• It never adds a hashtag suggestion you didn’t ask for.
• It never tells you the best time to post this. There is no engagement prediction.
• It never warns you about character count in red.
• It never asks you to upgrade to remove a watermark, save more drafts, or post longer.
• It never inserts itself between your thought and the network.

The composer is a room with a chair and good light. The writing is the work.