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The words

cat(a)log has a small vocabulary and sticks to it. These are the words you meet on the first day; the glossary has every one.

Catalog#

Everything one body of work holds: its cats, its homes, its fields, its photos and the partners it syncs with. A device can hold several catalogs and nothing crosses between them, so Berlin and Paris stay apart. One catalog is open at a time; its name is the title of the home screen.

Clowder#

A place where cats live, with an address and a responsible person: your home, a foster home, a shelter, a barn, a vet clinic, the home a cat was adopted into. The app says "home" where it fits. In pet mode the word is "household"; the thing is the same.

Cat#

One animal: a name, photos, fields whose values change over time, a history of all of it. Where it lives is a field too, so a move is a dated change like any other.

Stray#

A cat that lives in no clowder right now: a found cat, one that ran away, one known only from a poster. Not a kind of cat but a state; it ends with a move into a clowder. Strays are tracked by positions on the map instead of an address.

Field#

A typed attribute on cats and clowders: text, yes or no, a date, a number, a measurement with a unit, a choice, a place, an ID, a reference to another cat. The starter fields come with the app, your own are added on any page. Every value carries a date and the author who wrote it, and every change is kept.

Author#

The name a device carries. Every change is attributed to an author; there are no accounts. Partners see a short key code next to your name, so nobody can write in your name.

Moment#

A point the catalog can go back to. One is recorded before anything that changes a lot at once, an import, a sync, a merge, an archive, and you can mark one by hand. Going back removes everything after it, having written that to a file first.

Shared folder, bundle, in person#

Three ways to get your knowledge to a partner, none of them through a server. A shared folder is a folder both devices see, on a cloud client or a USB stick; every sync writes your changes there and reads the others'. A bundle is a .catsync file with everything a device knows, sent through any messenger. In person connects two devices in the same room over Wi-Fi, encrypted, after one scans the other's code.