Stillcraft / Apps / Horae
A medieval book of hours divided the day into hours of prayer, counted by the sun and rung by a bell. Horae keeps the frame and gives you the rest: how many hours, when they ring, and what each holds, from breathing, meditation and beads to a reading, a question, a candle or silence. What you keep is written onto the day's page in rubrics and ink, with initials that turn to gold and creatures in the margins. Free, no ads, no account, no internet.
Android 9.0+ · Free · English & Русский
As in the old reckoning, twelve hours from sunrise to sunset and twelve from sunset to sunrise, worked out offline from where you are. A summer day hour runs past eighty minutes, a winter one under fifty. The dial shows both halves, your hours on its rim and the sun where it stands.
As many hours as you like, each set by the sun (sunrise, the third hour, noon, sunset), by the clock, or opened by hand. Weekdays for each, and a bell: great, small, a handbell, a singing bowl or a zen wooden board, rung its own strokes or the hour's number. Or start from a ready rule: Benedictine, Stoic, zen, Hesychast, metta, five minutes with no religion.
Breathing (box, 4-7-8, even, alternate nostril or your own), meditation with interval bells, metta, beads moved by a tap or the volume keys, readings, a question, thanks, an evening review (Ignatius, Seneca, Franklin or your steps), bows, slow walking, a candle, silence that counts only face down, and steps of your own. Each with its settings, in any order.
A kept hour is written onto the page: the answer, the reading, the chosen word in red, the thanks. The practices leave marks in the margin, a vine grows along the edge, and the opening initial goes from red ink to lapis to burnished gold as more of the day is kept. A snail, a hare scribe, a cat, and the noonday demon on days noon was kept.
Every hour can carry a one-minute version for a busy day or the road. A missed hour stays an empty space on the page, with no reproach.
Yesterday's page can't be rewritten, only glossed in the margin: a note from the future in red.
Each month opens with its leaf: the labour of the month and the zodiac arch with the sun where it really stands. Your own red-letter days in red, seasons of your own (forty days of something) colouring the pages, day rules ticked on the page.
After the last hour of the day the book closes until the first bell tomorrow. A long press breaks the silence, and the page remembers. On 31 December the year is bound in leather and goes on the shelf.
| Hour | When | In the Benedictine rule |
|---|---|---|
| Vigils | Before dawn | A psalm and five minutes of silence, face down |
| Lauds | Sunrise | Thanks, even breathing, a psalm |
| Terce | The third hour | What you start your work with |
| Sext | Noon | The noonday demon: what feels dull |
| None | The ninth hour | The desert fathers, Thomas à Kempis |
| Vespers | Before sunset | A candle, a psalm, three thanks |
| Compline | After sunset | The examen, then the great silence |
Nothing here asks you to believe anything. The frame is a monastery's, but the hours can hold a psalm, a stoic's question, a zen sitting or three breaths with no religion at all.
JDK 17+ (Android Studio's bundled JBR works) and the Android SDK. Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Room, DataStore; the manuscript is painted in code and the bells are synthesised.
git clone https://github.com/bigdevwhale/horae.git cd horae ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest assembleDebug ./gradlew assembleDebug -Pdemo # app.horae.demo: six weeks of a Benedictine rule kept ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest -Prender --tests '*RenderArt*' # every screen and the logo to PNG
It borrows a monastery's way of dividing the day, not its faith. The ready rules include Benedictine and Hesychast ones next to Stoic, zen and a five-minute rule with no religion, and every hour can be rebuilt from scratch.
Keep one. A rule can be a single evening hour, and every hour can have a one-minute short rule. A missed hour is just an empty space on the page.
On silent the bell only vibrates, unless you turn on “Ring even on silent” in the settings. On Xiaomi, Huawei and similar phones also allow autostart, or the system may cancel the alarms.
Nothing. The app has no internet permission; the sun is calculated on the phone.
How many Saturdays you have left, and what you'll do with them.
The mindfulness multi-tool: breathing, Wim Hof, a bell, practices and a journal.
A strict focus timer that actually blocks distractions.
Don't drift apart from the people who matter.
Quit a habit, one day at a time.
Turn your days into a quest.
A quiet place for your mind.
Intermittent fasting, made warm and simple.
Your city, hidden in mist. Walk to reveal it.
Letters to your future self. Sealed until the day comes.
Every win deserves a little praise.
Goals under a night sky: 17 methods in one app.
Earn obols with useful apps, pay Charon for the feed.
One light, many colours: choose who you are in every part of life.
Cold water, contrast showers and the sauna, tempered like steel.
Chores as spells in a wizard's tower: keep the floors bright, wake the helpers.
A pixel-art familiar that feeds on the pages you read.
Photos and clips struck into pixel-art treasure in a dragon's cave.
A film camera for the family: shoot now, see the prints tomorrow.
They grow up faster than the photos do.
A merry app about death and growing old, in the spirit of the Day of the Dead.
Vows sealed with wax, and a ladder that makes them hard to break.
A scriptorium for what you learn: your own words, fading ink, and memory that holds.
About 940 Saturdays until they're eighteen. Spend them together.
A museum for what you want to remember: dig it up, clean it, put it on show.
Race your own ghost at everyday tasks: splits, medals and the Games.
Intrusive thoughts as ships: the lighthouse beam, the evening watch, forecasts checked.
A magic lantern deals the glass; parent and child make up the bedtime tale.
A date night for two on a night train: a conductor's questions, the phone as the table between you.
The same questions to your child, yourself or a grandparent, year after year, laid as a mosaic.
Your mind is a kite on a string. A few soft tugs a day bring it back to here.
There is too much music. One album a week, a whole side at a time, on a turntable or a tape deck.
There's too much to watch. So nothing gets watched. Your watchlist as a nineties video rental store.
Every date is a quest. The two of you are a party of heroes, and the phone is your game master.
A cosy lucid-dreaming trainer. In a dream, the top never falls.
A cosy pixel-art meditation tracker. Sit still, and shy animals come out.
A valve radio for falling asleep: tune into made-up stations of rain, sea and night trains, and let it drift off the air.
Five pots for everything you've never tried: sow a seed from a catalogue of new things, water it each time you go back, and when it blooms it's yours.
A fridge door for two: the shopping list, whose turn, notes, worries face down and envelopes that open only together. The phones sync at home, with no server.
A pedometer where your steps carry the village post. You are the new postman of a small village by a river, and its letters, stories and seasons go on for years.
Befriend a real tree. Every meeting is a ring: the friendship grows only from visits to the tree itself, and over a year they build up into a sawn cross-section.
Let your wishes age before you buy them. Every urge to buy goes into a bottle on the rack; when it's ripe, you open it without guilt or pour it into the barrel of your real dream.
Every walk is an assignment from the district paper. The editor wires one ordinary thing to shoot, with a twist; you bring back a frame, it's printed as a halftone, and on Sunday the week comes out as an issue.
A diary, index cards, telegrams and letters typed on a typewriter. There's no backspace that erases: a mistake is struck out or painted over and stays on the sheet, so you write slower, and more honestly.
Every shopping trip is a run. You keep a courier office of one: the household orders on the waybill, each shop learns its own shelf order, and every delivered waybill pays in brass tokens for a sign, a bicycle, a van one day.
The things of your hobbies come alive with practice. Every session lights a candle in a little pixel-art Japanese house; a guitar, a ball of yarn or a sourdough starter shivers, opens an eye, steps off the shelf as a house spirit and keeps growing for years.
A little movement all day long instead of an hour twice a week. Nine pixel-art tin toys on a shelf, each a family of movements; a minute or three of squats, balance or breathing winds one up for two hours and puts a pin in the day's music-box drum.
Make friends the way it actually works, and keep them for years. An old sea chart of your people: small sorties of courage to meet them, bridges that grow with every hour together, and fog that rolls in when you stop.
Step out of your comfort zone a little every day. Your fears become circus acts: pick what you find hard, and the bill offers three small real-life numbers a day, from warm-up to premiere — with a drum roll before and applause after.
Over a thousand evidence-graded protocols for a longer, calmer, happier life. Your body is a blueprint with eight systems; every protocol is a mod you try on yourself for 14 days, and the lab shows whether it moved anything before it enters your firmware.
Someone already lives in your flat. Find out who — and help them leave. A slow, quiet haunting on your own photos: marks in your rooms, notes in the evening, words through the static, and after two weeks one real thing left to do.
A small present every day, from your past self. You can't surprise yourself unless you forget: fill a capsule machine with little presents for future days, let the words seal, and turn the crank for one a day.
A budget kept like a detective's case file. Spending is evidence, categories are suspects with police photos, and when the clues show a pattern, a case opens: you name the motive and hand down the verdict.
A pilgrim's pass: come to a place of power, a church, a mosque, a synagogue, a spring or an old tree, sit there ten minutes without the phone, and the book gets a stamp nobody else has.
Be drawn one of the 117 billion people who have ever lived, and read their life in a parish register: the doors that were open, the ones that were shut, and what was left behind.
Enamel pin badges for the small deeds of a day, each with an order typed out, a rubber stamp and a fanfare. Nothing to plan and no streaks: in the evening the commission asks what happened.
Put a worry on an old brass balance as a stone, and weights with arguments go on the other pan, one by one, until it tips. 1,209 concrete worries, 15,900 weights.
A pet that lives under your bed and eats fear. Horror films and books feed it, anxious news is fast food, and your own fears it guards at night.
A bookshop of books that don't exist. Every day a customer asks for one, and you find it on the shelf by writing its title, first line and blurb.
Tarot with no bad cards. The Auntie finds the good even in Death, gives you an omen for the day and asks in the evening whether it came true.
A pocket field guide to the spirits of your real houseplants. Catch them with the camera; they live by the real sun over your town, ask you to touch the soil, grow, hatch from cuttings and fight real pests.
A talk by the fire with the people close to you: hold your stones together, and sparks bring the questions.
A diary of the cafés you keep coming back to: each gets a page and a sugar packet, and every cup leaves a coffee stain on the page.
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