Hi Product Hunt 👋 Sundial started with a word. Its Chinese name is 岁时 (suì shí). 岁 originally meant Jupiter: ancient astronomers saw it circle the sky about every twelve years and counted years by where it stood. 时 meant the four seasons. A year, at first, was something you saw, not something you counted. That is what I wanted from a time app. Not another place that tells me the date, but a picture I can glance at: today, this week, this month, this year and my whole life, drawn as rows of marks. What has passed is ink, right now is one vermilion stroke, what is ahead is light grey. It lives mostly in widgets, so you see it without opening anything. A few things that went wrong along the way: • The name. My first English name was the romanization, SUISHI. "ui" is rare in English, so the eye quietly corrects it to "sushi", and searching for it returns restaurants. I renamed it Sundial, the oldest object people built to make time visible. The Chinese name is the result, the English name is the tool. • The icon. My first icon was seven bars on a cream background with one red bar. Then I found an app from 2015 with exactly those three traits. I rebuilt it several times, and darkened the "not yet" grey, because at Home Screen size my three states quietly collapsed into two. • The typeface. The app is set in Source Han Serif, about 11.6 MB per weight. I trimmed it to China's standard character list plus what the app uses (about 3 MB), renamed it Sundial Song as the license requires, and added tabular figures so widget percentages stop jiggling every minute. Everything stays on your device and in your own iCloud. No accounts, no ads, nothing collected. I'd love to know which style you end up keeping on your Home Screen.

Sundial: Time Marks

Your year and your life, drawn as quiet marks of ink

Your year and your life, drawn as quiet marks of ink