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Four Cairn screens in a row: the home screen with Start New Sort, a sort in progress with the Family card above three earth-tone piles, the shape-of-your-cairn category summary, and the shareable My Cairn ranked list.

Project · iOS · 2026 · in beta

Cairn

Stack what matters: a calm, private values card sort

Sort a deck of 100 personal values into three piles, narrow to the handful you care most about, and rank them into Your Cairn: your top values, stacked. Each comes with a gentle reflection and one small step. Free, fully unlocked, everything on-device. Built in Swift 6 and SwiftUI for iOS 26's Liquid Glass design language.

  • One card at a time: drag or tap into Very Important, Important, Not Important
  • Your Cairn: a ranked result with a Reflect deck, a category-distribution view, and a shareable summary card
  • A browsable library of all 100 values, descended from the public-domain Miller card sort
  • No accounts, no analytics, no ads: the App Store label reads Data Not Collected

Swift 6SwiftUIiOS 18+No dependencies

Origin

Tesserae taught me how to build an iOS app. Cairn is what happened when I asked what else deserved one.

The Personal Values Card Sort is a therapy-room classic: a deck of value words you sort into piles until what matters most to you is sitting in front of you in your own handwriting. The original instrument (Miller, C'de Baca, Matthews, and Wilbourne, University of New Mexico, 2001) is public domain, and almost every digital version of it feels like a clinical worksheet.

I wanted the opposite: a version that feels like stacking stones at a trailhead. One card at a time, three piles, no score, no streaks, nothing watching you. When the deck runs out you narrow, rank, and meet Your Cairn: your top values, stacked, each with a gentle question and one small step you could take.

What's underneath

Swift 6 strict concurrency, SwiftUI, iOS 26's Liquid Glass design language with a graceful fallback to iOS 18. No third-party dependencies, no backend: preferences live in UserDefaults and sort history in a small JSON file, all on-device. The App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected because there is nothing to collect it with.

The palette is a grounding nine-stop teal-to-terracotta ramp, one color per category of values, and the piles are a muted earthy stoplight that never judges: the terracotta pile means "cooling off", not "wrong".

Support

Cairn is in TestFlight beta, headed for the App Store. Stuck, curious, or found something odd? Write to [email protected] and a human will read it.

Common questions

Do I need an account? No. Cairn has no accounts, no sign-in, and never asks who you are.

Where does my data go? Nowhere. Your sorts and settings live only on your device. The privacy policy says it in full.

How do I delete my past sorts? In the app, open Settings from the home screen and delete past sorts there, or swipe to delete individual cairns in Previous Cairns. Removing the app deletes everything Cairn ever stored.

Can I change my ranking later? Yes. Open any cairn and use Edit to reorder your values. You can also tap any value, anytime, to read what it means.

Can I share my Cairn? Yes. Your Cairn has a Share button that renders your stack and top values as a clean image, with a plain-text version for places an image will not fit. Nothing leaves your device unless you choose to share it.

How do I see the welcome intro again? Settings has a Help section with "Show the welcome intro again".

What are the tips? Optional, one-time thank-yous (a Pebble, a Stone, or a Boulder). They unlock nothing and there is nothing to restore; the app is identical after tipping.

What does Cairn require? An iPhone running iOS 18 or later.

Is Cairn therapy? No. Cairn is a reflection tool. It is not therapy or medical advice, and it is no substitute for professional care.