A medieval book of hours divided the day into hours of prayer, rung by a bell and counted by the sun. Horae keeps that frame and lets you fill it: how many hours, when they ring, and what each one holds (breathing, meditation, beads, a reading, a question, thanks, a review of the day, bows, a candle, silence or your own steps). Everything you keep is written into an illuminated manuscript. Free, no ads, no account, no internet.
- Unequal hours. As in the old reckoning, the light from sunrise to sunset is twelve hours and so is the dark, worked out offline from where you are. A summer day hour runs past eighty minutes, a winter one under fifty. The dial on the first screen shows the day's twelve and the night's twelve, your hours on its rim and the sun where it stands.
- Your rule. Choose one to six or more hours. Each one is set by the sun (sunrise, the third hour, noon, sunset, an hour and a half after it), by the clock, or opened by hand. Pick its weekdays and its bell: a great bell, a small bell, a handbell, a singing bowl or a zen wooden board, rung its own number of strokes or the hour's number.
- Practices, one after another. Every hour is a list you put together and reorder:
- breathing: box, 4-7-8, even, long exhale, alternate nostril or your own, by minutes or cycles;
- meditation: on the breath, a body scan, noting or open awareness, with interval bells;
- metta: your own phrases round the circle of people;
- beads: lestovka, mala, tasbih, rosary or plain, any count and marker, moved by a tap or the volume keys;
- reading: psalms, Ecclesiastes, desert fathers, Thomas à Kempis, stoics, Tao, Dhammapada, zen, sufis or your own texts, with lectio divina;
- question: your own, a rotation, or a bank (the noonday demon included);
- thanks, review of the day (Ignatius, Seneca, Franklin or your steps), bows, slow walking, gazing (a candle or a window), silence (counted only while the phone lies face down), and your own steps with timers.
- The short rule. Every hour can carry a one-minute version for a busy day or the road, so a minute counts instead of a blank.
- The manuscript. A kept hour is written onto the day's page in rubrics and ink: the answer, the reading, the chosen word in red, the thanks. The marks of the practices sit in the margin. A vine grows along the edge, and the opening initial is red, then lapis, then burnished gold as more of the day's hours are kept. A missed hour leaves an empty space, with no reproach. Drolleries come to the margins: a snail, a hare scribe, a bird, a fish, a cat, and the noonday demon on the days noon was kept.
- The ink dries. A past page can't be rewritten, only glossed in the margin, a note from the future in red.
- The calendar. Each month opens with its leaf: the labour of the month, the zodiac arch with the sun where it really stands, and the month's count. Your own red-letter days are written in red; seasons of your own (forty days of something) colour the pages violet, green, white, red or rose. Day rules (no meat, no feeds) are ticked on the page.
- The great silence. 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 it.
- The shelf. On 31 December the year's book is bound in leather and goes on the shelf.
- Ready-made rules to start from: Benedictine, Stoic, a zen day, Hesychast, a day of metta, five minutes with no religion, or a blank page.
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest assembleDebug
./gradlew -Pdemo assembleDebug # app.horae.demo with six weeks of a Benedictine rule kept
./gradlew testDebugUnitTest -Prender --tests '*RenderArt*' # every screen and the logo to app/build/art
python tools/shots.py app/build/art # README screenshots from the renders
Everything is drawn in code: initials, vines, margin marks, drolleries, the dial and the candle in ui/art/Illum.kt. The bells are synthesised from bell partials in sound/Sfx.kt. The sun is the NOAA approximation in domain/Sun.kt. The readings (app/src/main/assets/readings.tsv) are our own renderings from public-domain originals; the questions are in questions.tsv.
Font: EB Garamond, SIL Open Font License.
Bugs, ideas and updates go through the StillCraft bot on Telegram; the links are in the app's settings.
MIT