Stillcraft / Apps / Stele
Words of a language, terms, formulas, dates, names, quotations: everything you want to keep is a find. Dust settles on it along your forgetting curve, and you brush it off by recalling it. A find memory holds longer goes from a dusty shard to clean clay, then painted, then on show. Finds on one theme glue into a vessel with gold seams. Nothing is built in: you fill the museum. Free, no ads, no account, no network.
Android 8.0+ · Free · No internet permission · English & Русский
A dig for each collection: a language, anatomy, work terms, capitals. A find is a pair, a term, a phrase with [gaps] or a question, with your own sentence, an association and a picture. Add it by voice, from text selected in any app, from the quick-settings tile, as a list, or from CSV and Anki decks.
Each find fades along its own forgetting curve (FSRS). Recall it first, typed or in your head; the brush sweeps the dust off the answer. Pairs are asked both ways and, in a language dig, by ear.
Before you look, stake one to three chisel strikes. Sure and wrong cracks the find, and it waits in the workshop; the restorer's eye shows how well your confidence matches what you know.
Finds on one theme are shards of an amphora, a krater, a mask, a coin. Missing while in the ground, dusty as shards, painted once restored; when all are clean the vessel stands whole, its seams in gold.
Every day a small test pit of finds you haven't seen for longest, with one rare find. Once a month the sealed door: twelve questions from every dig, and three in four right opens a new hall.
Tell the genuine find from look-alikes and the ones you confuse. Paste or share any text to see how much of it you know, confirm the finds met in it, and take its new words into a dig.
| Technique | In Stele |
|---|---|
| Retrieval and spacing | Cleanings scheduled by FSRS-4.5, at the retention you choose |
| Varied retrieval | Front to back, back to front, by ear, gaps in a phrase |
| Generation effect | A sentence of your own with each find; typed answers checked |
| Metacognition, hypercorrection | Chisel strikes before looking, the workshop, the restorer's eye |
| Discrimination | Forgeries built from the finds you confuse |
| Chunking, elaboration | Vessels by theme; links: kin, confused with, opposite |
| Interleaved testing | The sealed door: twelve questions from every dig |
| Transfer | Sift a text: finds confirmed in real sentences |
On Xiaomi (MIUI / HyperOS), Huawei, Samsung and some other phones, allow Autostart for Stele and remove battery limits so the evening bell rings on time.
JDK 17+ (Android Studio's bundled JBR works) and the Android SDK. The vessels, shards, ornament, temple and dust are drawn in Kotlin, nothing else to install.
git clone https://github.com/bigdevwhale/stele.git cd stele ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest # unit tests ./gradlew assembleDebug # app.stele.dev, installs next to a release ./gradlew assembleDebug -Pdemo # app.stele.demo, a museum half dug ./gradlew testDebugUnitTest -Prender # the screens, as PNGs
No. A find is anything short you want to know: a word, a term and its meaning, a formula, a date, a capital, a quotation with gaps. A dig can be set to a language so the phone speaks its words, but it doesn't have to be.
Yes: import an .apkg (newer zstd packages too) and it becomes a dig. The first field is the front, the second the back; cloze notes become phrases with gaps; pictures come along from older packages. A CSV or plain-text export works as well.
Nothing breaks: there are no streaks. Dust settles on what's due, and the next cleaning starts with the dustiest finds. New finds come out of the ground a few a day, as many as you set.
Settings → Backup saves the whole museum, pictures included, to one JSON file. Restore it on the new phone.
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Found a bug, missing a feature, or want it in your language? Tell us on GitHub.
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