Shishi Lite: Focus Timer

About

A shishi-odoshi is the bamboo fountain you have seen in Japanese gardens. Water runs into a tube until it can no longer hold the weight. The tube tips, empties, swings back, and strikes a stone. Kakon. It has been keeping time in temple gardens for four hundred years. Shishi puts a working one on your phone. The screen is a single ink painting. Water runs from a bamboo spout into the tube. After about half a minute the tube goes over all at once, pours, swings back, and knocks. Then it starts filling again. That is the whole app. There is no settings screen, no account, and nothing to optimise. THE BAMBOO IS NOT AN ANIMATION The tipping is simulated: the weight of the water against the balance of the tube on its axle. A brim-full tube only just outweighs its own tail, so it goes over reluctantly, then whips as the water runs to the low end, and comes back faster than it went out, empty and light. The rebound usually knocks a second time, quietly. Not one frame of it is a keyframe. WHILE THE SCREEN IS OFF A Live Activity keeps the remaining time on your Lock Screen, so you can put the phone down. The knocking itself only sounds while the app is open: iOS suspends an app once it is in the background, so no app can keep making a sound every thirty seconds. When the session ends, a single notification delivers the last knock, whether you are looking or not. ADS, AND WHEN Shishi Lite is free because it shows ads, and it keeps them out of the way. There is never an ad while a session is running, or when the bamboo knocks. Now and then a full-screen ad plays before you start a new session: at most once every three finished sessions, and never on your first day. Sessions are 25 minutes. Watching one short ad unlocks 15, 45 and 60 for the rest of the day, and turns the other ads off until tomorrow. GOOD FOR ・Reading, writing, drawing. Work where you aren't staring at a screen ・Anyone who bounced off Pomodoro apps and their hurrying numbers ・Keeping a quiet stretch of time with the phone face-up on the desk THE REST ・25 minutes, or 15, 45 or 60 for the day after one short ad ・No account, no sign-up, no settings screen ・Ads are served by Google AdMob. Nothing else leaves your phone ・Want no ads at all? The paid Shishi is the same garden, for one purchase