samya
ongoinga vedic daily app whose background is the real sky over you. the phone computes the facts, claude writes one line from them.
screens
an android app that gives you one line a day. the colour of the screen is the actual sky where you are standing: night, dusk, golden, day. the phone works out the moon, your chart and the day's table itself, and a writer turns those facts into a line, a do, a don't, and a few sentences on home, people, love and work. it says what is computed and what is only the tradition's reading of it.
how it works
- 1the phone computes everything: sun altitude, sidereal positions (lahiri), nakshatra, tithi, whole-sign houses, vimshottari dasha. a vendored astronomy engine, no ephemeris api
- 2the ground colour is eight stops keyed to the sun's altitude, blended in oklab. it is never a mood, only the sky
- 3the facts go up as one signals object: sky, chart, sleep, steps, weather, what you said about today, how yesterday's line landed
- 4a cloud function hands them to claude sonnet with a cached style guide and a strict schema. a validator rejects anything too long or out of voice, retries once, and falls back to a line the phone writes itself
- 5a job runs every 30 minutes and writes the line for anyone whose sunrise is next, then pushes it, so it is on the lock screen before the app is opened
- 6four places: today, days, sky, you. each shows one picture and a few lines, and keeps its working on a sheet of paper one link away
- 7a few nights a year the sky does something you can see with bare eyes. the phone finds them (a planet at its closest, two planets side by side, a lunar eclipse), works out where to look from where you are, and makes a card to send
key decisions
the phone computes every fact, the model only writes
a model asked where the moon is will make something up. so it never is. it gets a list of facts and may only say them well. the maths is checked against swiss ephemeris to the arcminute.
colour is the sky, never the mood
every astrology app is purple. this one is whatever the sky is outside your window, so opening it at 6am and 6pm are two different apps. it also means there is no theme to design, only the sun.
sonnet over opus for the writer
half the token price and the lines read the same. the thing that keeps quality is the validator and the style guide, not the bigger model.
say what is known and what is tradition
where saturn is tonight is a fact. what that means for you is a reading. the app labels the second kind as the tradition's, and the writer may not promise outcomes or give medical, legal or money instructions.
one json file per day over a database
the history is 'load the days'. a few hundred small files list instantly, there is nothing to migrate, and a broken file loses one day, not the lot.
take the behaviour, not the library
saw hairline (lucasmarkes), line drawings that answer the pointer. the package is web and its figures are laptops and vaults, so none of it fits. the idea does: you can drag the sun across today's sky and the colour, the time and the line follow. the line goes back through the day but never ahead of now.
a card that is true for whoever gets it
a share card usually only makes sense to the sender. the look-up card says 'it rises as the sun sets, wherever you are', which holds in any city that night. the link goes as text beside the image, because a url on a picture can't be tapped.
sky events stay out of the reading
saturn being 1.26 billion km away is a fact. what it means for your tuesday is not. so it leads the sky page and the notification, and the writer never hears about it. no solar eclipses either: the app should never send anyone to look at the sun.
working on paper
it was meant to be calm and it got cluttered. so each place shows a few things, and the whole table, the whole chart and how a line was made live on a sheet one tap away.
what i built
- sky maths on device: sun and moon, nine grahas, houses, panchang, rahu kaal, dasha and sade sati, verified against swiss ephemeris
- the writer: cloud function, cached style guide, schema, validator with one retry, local fallback
- lines written on the server before each person's sunrise and pushed to the lock screen
- today: the line by hour of day, do and don't, a strip that replays the sun from sunrise to now
- the day by part of life: home, people, love, work, each with landed or missed and the one fact it came from
- days as rings, one per day, drawn from what the phone kept
- a wheel of twelve houses with the planets at birth and today
- a home screen widget, three notifications, an evening check-in, a share card
- the sun on today can be dragged through the day: one frame loop, paced along the drawn arc
- nights worth going outside for: oppositions, greatest elongations, conjunctions, lunar eclipses, checked against the 2026 almanac
- a look-up card with the planet's real path over your city, and a dusk notification that says when and where
- navigation as a horizon: a hairline with a small disc on the place you are in
- every screen tested at 200% text and on a 360dp phone
timeline
pilot. birth date in, 'you're not a leo' out, and a ground that is the colour of the sky
the sidereal sign is usually one behind the one people know. that is the hook, and it is just arithmetic.
the writer on firebase, haptics, the widget
play console, closed testing, 0.1.0
birth time and place in the first run, skippable
evening check-in, and days drawn as rings
a list of past lines looked like a log file. rings look like something you would want more of.
warmer grounds: eight stops, so the day is not blue from nine to five
you, sky, and lines written on the server before sunrise
cut the clutter. each place keeps its working on paper
writer moved to sonnet. the day by home, people, love, work. the wheel
the sunset in the replay made one continuous motion
the sun popped out at -6 degrees and the colour lagged by a second. now it sinks behind the line and twilight lingers.
a critique as a real user, then fixes for it one by one. weather, steps and usual sleep to the writer
/samya on this site, in the app's own type
the sun on today can be dragged. the sky, the time and the line follow
the first version stuttered: every frame rebuilt the whole app state. the altitude now goes to the background colour alone.
look up tonight: saturn at opposition leads the sky page, the notification, and a card to send
an instagram post about saturn had 26.8k sends. the app already knew where saturn was, it just didn't know tonight was the night.
the row of places becomes a horizon, with 'you' at the right edge