Near Now answers one question: you are somewhere in Paris, you have an evening free, what should you do with it?
The conventional answer is a map with everything on it. We decided against that on the first day, and almost every decision since has been downstream of it.
A map shows you everything, which is the problem
A map is genuinely wonderful once you know what you are looking for. It is close to useless when you do not. Two hundred pins across the city is not an answer to "what should I do tonight" — it is the same question again, in a prettier format, with the work handed back to you.
So Near Now shows a list. About a dozen things, best first, each one telling you how far away it is and when it starts. When you have chosen, directions open in whichever maps app you already use. We are not trying to replace something you already have on your phone and already trust.
The consequence is uncomfortable in a useful way: with no map to hide behind, the order of that list has to actually be good. There is nowhere for a bad ranking to go unnoticed.
Time is one control, not two
The second decision was refusing to ship a date picker with a start and an end.
Nobody thinks "I am free between 18:00 and 23:30 on Thursday". They think "tonight", or "this weekend", or "tomorrow evening". So that is what the control says. Right now, this weekend, this week — or a specific day, narrowed to a morning, an afternoon or an evening.
One detail in there is worth more than it looks: evening runs until three in the morning. A concert that starts at one o'clock belongs to the night you went out on, not to the following day, and an app that files it under Thursday when you are looking on Wednesday night has simply lost it.
One card for one thing
A play running four nights a week for two months is one card with its dates on it. Not sixty results, and not one result that pretends the whole run is a single evening.
Meanwhile a month-long exhibition is a perfectly good answer to "what can I do right now" — but it should never be allowed to push aside the gig that actually starts in an hour when you have specifically asked about tonight. Getting that distinction right is most of what separates a list worth reading from a list you scroll past.
Everything is checked
Nothing reaches the feed unreviewed, whether it came from the city's own published listings or from a venue that emailed us. A venue submitting its own night gets no shortcut past that, which is the only way the list is worth trusting.
Where it stands, and what is next
The app runs against live Paris listings today — thousands of real events, refreshed through the day, in French and English, with saving that works with no signal.
A closed beta in Paris. Real evenings and real people, which is the only honest test of whether the order of that list is any good.
Editorial picks. One short human sentence on why a particular thing is worth your evening.
More cities, once Paris is genuinely good rather than merely working.
An ad-free tier for people who would rather pay than scroll past a sponsored card.