Blue Hour vs KotoRoku

Blue Hour turns time into light: a sun sinks toward the horizon as your timer runs, so you can feel how much is left without reading a number. Built kindly for ADHD and time-blindness, calm enough for classrooms and kids. No account, no ads, no streaks. Free forever, with a tip jar in Settings. RAISE THE SUN Drag the sun up to set your time, one minute to three hours, with soft detents you can feel. Prefer numbers? Tap the readout for a keypad. Three preset chips keep your rituals one tap away. THE SETTLING DUSK As the last light falls, the sky deepens and the screen dims a few gentle stops. At zero: two slow breaths of glow, a soft haptic, and an optional two-note chime. No alarm slam. Ever. THE LIGHT FOLLOWS YOU A Live Activity keeps the sinking sun on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island. An optional nudge can tell you when time is up, even if you have looked away. Off by default. CYCLES, GENTLY Pomodoro in Blue Hour's language: work while the sun sets, then the break is a sunrise. The sky returns to morning, and the next round starts when you do. Rounds are counted in little suns, never quotas. START FROM ANYWHERE A Home Screen widget starts your usual timer in one tap. Siri and Shortcuts can start, pause, and resume without opening the app. FOR CLASSROOMS One tap opens the big display: a wall-sized countdown calm enough for a whole room, with a classroom preset set from one to twenty minutes. A QUIET LINE EACH DAWN Every day the idle sky carries one line from 412 public-domain quotations. Seneca, Thoreau, Lao Tzu, old proverbs. One per day. No feed, no push, no hustle. CALM BY CONSTRUCTION • Optional halfway and final-minute cues • Keeps the screen awake while the light falls, if you want • Wall-clock accurate: background it, come back, the light agrees • VoiceOver, Reduced Motion, and Dynamic Type are first-class FREE FOREVER Every feature, free. No premium tier, no subscription. If Blue Hour earns a place on your Home Screen, there is a tip jar in Settings. It unlocks nothing. PRIVATE BY ARCHITECTURE No account. No analytics. No tracking. Blue Hour makes zero network calls, and its App Store privacy label is "Data Not Collected," the rare kind that means exactly what it says. The light keeps track for you.

Record your meetings, transcribe them as you go, and turn them into finished minutes. The developer operates no servers at all. Your recordings, transcripts, and minutes never reach the developer. Transcription runs entirely on your iPhone or iPad. Whether anything leaves your device is entirely your choice. RECORDING AND TRANSCRIPTION - Recording starts only when you tap Start. It never starts on its own by detecting sound. - Transcription appears in real time as people speak. - Speakers are separated automatically and shown in different colors. - Switch to an external microphone. The app shows which one is in use. - Stop automatically after a period of silence (1, 3, 5, 10, or 30 minutes, or never). BUILDING MINUTES When you stop recording, the app builds minutes in eight sections, including decisions, to-dos, and the full transcript. Choose one of three ways to summarize: - On device (Apple Intelligence) Runs entirely on your device. No setup required. - Local AI Download Qwen3 or Gemma to your device. No network, no API fees. - Cloud AI Works with Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and DeepSeek for the most detailed minutes. To use cloud AI, you supply your own API key. Before anything is sent, the app shows you which provider, which host, and exactly what will be transmitted - and sends nothing unless you agree. Your audio file is never sent. Only the transcript and the title, location, and participants you entered are. You can also point the app at an OpenAI-compatible server on your own network, such as LM Studio or Ollama. WHAT YOUR DEVICE SUPPORTS Which summarization options you can choose depends on your device. - On device (Apple Intelligence) Available on devices that support Apple Intelligence and have it turned on in Settings. - Local AI The models you can choose depend on your device's memory. iPhone: Qwen3 1.7B (lightweight) only iPad with 8 GB of memory or more (M1 and later): Qwen3 4B and Gemma 3 4B, plus any MLX model from Hugging Face Devices with around 3 GB of memory: local AI is not available - Cloud AI Available on every supported device. WORKING WITH YOUR MINUTES - Search within the minutes by keyword - Export and share as a Word file (.docx) - Save automatically to a folder you choose - Optionally export the recorded audio (.m4a) alongside the minutes (off by default), to the folder or share target you pick MANAGING YOUR DATA - See, replay, and delete the recordings and minutes kept inside the app - Set a retention period for automatic deletion (off by default; you see how many items will be removed before enabling it) - Deleting the app removes all of its data from your device BUILT NOT TO LOSE RECORDINGS If the app quits while writing, it finds the recording on the next launch so you can recover it. Original audio is kept until the minutes are safely saved. REQUIREMENTS - iPhone and iPad - Japanese and English - iOS 26 or later Please inform participants and obtain their consent before recording.