Mushroom Journal

Mushroom Journal — a field journal for a mushroom you found: it records what you can see and never tells you what it is.

A mushroom field journal for the Mudita Kompakt, built for its E Ink screen.

Not a fork. Written from scratch in Kotlin and Jetpack Compose, using Mudita's own MMD design system so it looks like the apps the phone already ships with.

Kinokochō is 茸帳 — a mushroom notebook. The 帳 is the one in 手帳 (pocket notebook) and 野帳 (a surveyor's field book): a plain book you fill by going places.

What it is, and what it is not It does not tell you what a mushroom is, and it will never tell you whether one is edible. There is no edibility field anywhere in it, by design. A phone that answers that question confidently is a phone that eventually kills someone.

What it does is let you write a mushroom down properly while you are standing over it, and then help you work out what you are looking at once you get home.

In the field: record the characters you can actually see — substrate, hymenophore, gills, cap, stipe, flesh — in any order and however few of them. Add a note. Take photographs into labelled slots. The candidate list narrows as you go, and is always presented as not yet ruled out, never as an answer. At home: review the entry on a real screen with the photographs in colour, add the spore print you set overnight, and see which unrecorded character would have narrowed things most — the part that trains the next walk. Then ask someone: send the find out as plain text and photographs through whatever the phone already has — a message, an email, a forum post. It goes as a description and a shortlist of what has not been ruled out, with what you looked at and could not say said plainly, because that is the first thing anybody experienced will ask. And keep a copy: the whole journal, photographs and all, written to a zip and handed wherever you want it, and read back in on the other side of a lost phone. The database holds notes that cannot be taken again — the mushroom is gone and the season is over — and a book that lives in exactly one place is a book with a date on it. Reading a copy back in only ever adds: an old backup onto a journal that has been used since keeps both. And write down the answer: when somebody tells you what it was, there is a line to put it on. That is the whole point of keeping the book. Why E Ink is the right screen for this Colour is diagnostic in mushroom identification and E Ink cannot show it. That would be fatal for an identification app — but this is a recording app. Colour matters when you decide, and deciding happens at home, on a screen that has it. In the field what you want is a notebook that lasts days on a charge, reads in direct sun, and does not have anything else on it.

Also in it A month view. What is about now, split evenly between the ones people go looking for and the ones that hurt people — which are often out at the same time. Anything lethal is listed however rarely it turns up. "Sought after" means people look for it; it is not the app saying anything is safe. A page per mushroom. What it looks like, where and when, what it is confused with and how to tell them apart, and how what you recorded lines up against it. Reachable from a shortlist, from the month view, or by looking a name up in any month. Measurements, age and condition. Facts about the specimen rather than the species, so they are recorded rather than asked. Age earns its place: a ring or a veil that is missing from an old mushroom proves nothing, and the key stops ruling things out on it. Publishing to iNaturalist, one find at a time, from the bottom of that find's own page. It goes up with its photographs, the characters you recorded, and — the part an identifier actually wants — what you looked at and could not say, and the three characters that would have narrowed it most. The shortlist stays on the phone. What the community calls it comes back into the entry, kept apart from what you wrote down yourself, so the two can disagree. Coordinates are obscured by default; see PRIVACY.md, which is worth reading on what "obscured" does and does not mean.