Stillcraft / Apps / Sill
With the years we stop learning new things: the same music, the same food, the same places, the same people. And almost nothing new feels good the first time. The first oyster, the first jazz jam, the first evening at a pottery wheel: strange, awkward, “not for me”. Sill is built around one honest rule: a seed doesn't come up from one watering. Sow something new, go back two, three, ten times, and only then decide. When it blooms, it's yours, and it moves out into the garden beyond the window.
Android 9.0+ · Free · English & Русский
121 seed packets in eight sections, printed like old lithographs: herbs are tastes and kitchens, flowers are music and art, roots are crafts, grains are learning, vines are people, cacti are the uncomfortable, mushrooms are the night and the strange, trees are long skills. On the back: sowing depth, by which try it usually starts to feel good, waterings to bloom, good neighbours and one concrete first step.
Sowing a seed means trying something new, and it takes a pot. There are only five, so you can't start twenty hobbies and drop them all.
Did it again? Water it, with a line about how it went and, if you like, a photo from the phone's own camera. The plant goes from seed leaves to true leaves, buds and bloom. A radish (a new kitchen) blooms in three waterings, an oak (the cello) in forty.
A plant left alone slowly droops and fades. There are no notifications: you just see who wants water when you open the window.
A bloom moves out of its pot into the garden beyond the window for good, and the garden grows over the years. Didn't take? That's a fair result, not a failure: it goes to the compost, and the next seed sown there needs fewer waterings. Or dry it and keep it in the vase on the sill.
Once a week the wind leaves a seed on the sill, from the section you've sown least. Blooms drop their neighbours' seeds. And you can put packets aside for later.
Give a friend a packet with a sticky note: “try it, I loved it”. It travels as plain text through any messenger; if they have Sill, they share it back in and it lands in their tin.
Write your own packet for whatever the catalogue doesn't have. At the end of it all there's the herbarium: every seed of the year pressed on a sheet, whatever became of it.
A five-page guide on the first run, then just the window. The window, the sky, the pots, every plant and every packet are drawn in code. No internet permission, no account, no ads.
| What it stands for | For example | |
|---|---|---|
| Herbs | Tastes and kitchens | Ethiopian food, home fermenting, oysters, gongfu tea |
| Flowers | Music and art | A jazz jam, the blues, bossa nova, throat singing |
| Roots | Crafts with your hands | The pottery wheel, wood carving, knitting, leatherwork |
| Grains | Learning | A new language, sign language, the night sky, chess |
| Vines | People | Board games with strangers, volunteering, a choir |
| Cacti | The uncomfortable | Winter swimming, an open mic, the cinema alone |
| Mushrooms | The night and the strange | A night walk, the sunrise, dinner in the dark |
| Trees | Long skills, for years | The cello, the piano, the guitar, rock climbing |
JDK 17+ (Android Studio's bundled JBR works) and the Android SDK. Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Room, DataStore; the window with its sky and garden, the pots, every plant and the seed packets are drawn in code. The catalogue is app/src/main/assets/seeds.tsv.
git clone https://github.com/bigdevwhale/sill.git cd sill ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest assembleDebug # app.sill.dev, installs next to a release ./gradlew assembleDebug -Pdemo # app.sill.demo: a lived-in sill ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest -Prender --tests '*RenderArt*' && python tools/shots.py # screenshots
That's normal, and it's the whole point. Each packet says by which try it usually starts to feel good. Water it a few more times before you decide. If it still doesn't take, the compost is an honest ending, not a failure.
So you go back to things instead of collecting them. When a pot frees up, by bloom, compost or the vase, you can sow the next seed.
No. The whole catalogue is inside the app, and it doesn't even ask for internet access. Gifts travel as plain text through whatever messenger you already use.
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.
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.
A book of hours for your own practices: the day divided into hours by the sun, a bell for each, and whatever you put into them written into an illuminated manuscript.
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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