There is a fox on the FoxLeaf icon. Her name is Foxy, the catalog inside the app is called Foxy's Library, and she is the reason the app is not called something sensible and forgettable like AudioVision. This post is a short introduction to her, which is a strange thing to publish about software, so it is worth explaining why she exists.
Foxy started as an answer to a tone problem. FoxLeaf is built on genuinely difficult engineering, all of it the work of Tom Moore: real-time generation on a phone, characters held consistent across an eleven-hour book, a rendering engine running on the device in your hand instead of in a data center. Every honest description of that work sounds technical, because it is. But nobody curls up on a couch with a technical achievement. They curl up with a story. We needed the app to feel like the second thing while being the first thing, and a friendly fox does more for that in one glance than three paragraphs of copy ever will.
A fox in particular because of what a fox is doing when you picture one: watching. Alert, quiet, at the edge of the scene, taking it in. That is exactly the posture of the app. FoxLeaf does not narrate, does not interrupt, does not summarize the book back to you or offer opinions about it. It watches the story alongside you and shows you what it sees. Foxy is the character version of a piece of software whose entire job is to pay close attention without getting in the way.
She shows up where a companion is useful and stays absent everywhere else. Foxy's Library is her shelf: the browsable catalog of public domain audiobooks from the Internet Archive and LibriVox, free to listen to, there so you can start immediately without owning or buying anything first. An empty shelf is the fastest way to lose someone in the first minute of a new app, and a shelf with a name and a face is a friendlier place to start than a search box. While a book is actually playing, Foxy gets out of the way entirely. The screen belongs to the story.
The leaf half of the name is the other side of the same idea. A leaf is a page, and it is also the thing that puts the fox somewhere: a wood, a season, weather, a place rather than an interface. Between the two words you get most of what the product is, which is a quiet companion for the books you are already listening to. That was worth more to us than a name that explained the technology.
FoxLeaf is coming soon to iOS and Android. On launch day Foxy lands on your home screen, and the shelf will already have tens of thousands of books on it.