Blue Hour vs Skein Notes

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.

Skein is a notes app for people who want to keep their own files. Your vault is a folder of plain Markdown on your device or in iCloud Drive. Skein reads and writes those files directly — the same folder you open in Skein for Mac, or in any other editor. Nothing is locked in a database, and there is no service in the middle. Write it down before you lose it The app opens on a capture field. Type the thought and send it; the first line becomes the note's title and Skein files it where you told it to. No dialog, no folder picker, no naming a file before you have written anything. Find it again Search matches titles the moment you start typing and searches inside every note once the index is ready, ranked, with the matching lines and their line numbers — tap one and land on it. The Vault filters by name, by #tag or by folder in one field, and tags are real: tap one anywhere in the app to see everything carrying it. Real Markdown, properly Headings, lists, task lists, tables, footnotes, code blocks, callouts, ==highlights== and [[wikilinks]] — read cleanly and edited as text. A keyboard bar puts the things you actually reach for above the keys, including arrows that move by character and by word, and you can choose which of them appear. Type / for a command, #for a tag it already knows. Canvas Open a JSON Canvas board, move cards, connect them, colour them and write on them. The same file, the same format Obsidian writes, so a board made on the Mac opens here and back again. It keeps your writing safe Skein keeps earlier versions of a note as you edit, so you can go back to what you wrote this morning. When the same note has been changed in two places, Skein keeps both and asks — it never picks a winner quietly. Also Share text from any app straight into your vault. Four themes, including one for reading at night. Dynamic Type throughout, and full VoiceOver support. Skein does not have an account, a subscription for the basics, a server, or telemetry. Your notes never leave your device except through iCloud Drive, which is yours. Skein for Mac is a separate app on the same purchase.