季遇
Jiyu
中文
Tap a photograph and today begins.
Sunrise 5:32
Today is still empty. The colours nearby are waiting to be taken in.
田 seats four colours and the earliest keep their seats. The desk behind it holds the whole day. Keep going, and see how a day is lived.
A few photographs of whatever is near you, once a day. Keep enough days and the season shows up on its own.
Enough days make a season
what this is
A small, quiet ritual
Not an album, not a journal, not a feed. Nothing is scored, no streak is counted, and it will never ask where you have been.
It does one thing. It takes the light that was near you today and sets it down as a few colours on a sheet of paper. What it keeps is not what happened. It is the complexion of the day.
the day's three motions
A minute is enough
Whatever is close by
Nothing to frame, nothing to choose between. The tree at the corner, the cup on the desk, the sky on the way home. If the light is right, the photograph is right.
The photograph becomes colour
Jiyu draws two colours out of each one and lays them on today's paper. The photograph itself stays exactly where it was, untouched.
田 keeps the day
Four panes, and the day has a mark. Enough marks and the calendar stops being dates. It starts being weather you lived through.
feeling the season
It keeps time by the sun
立秋, the start of autumn, is not "the seventh of August". It is the moment the sun reaches 135° of ecliptic longitude. Jiyu solves for that moment rather than looking it up: the solar position formulae find it, and an ephemeris checks the answer.
On the day a term arrives, its name stands alone in full ink. Every day after, that ink steps quietly back while the next term's name surfaces beside it, until it takes over and stands full in turn.
So the season is not a label on the page. It is something you can watch moving.
This year 立秋 fell on the seventh of August. Next year it falls on the eighth. That is the point.
overhead
A real tree, every day
On Jiyu's main screen, the shadow of leaves moves softly over the paper. It is the shadow of a real tree, chosen by the date: one close by, and one further off. On any given day every phone has the same two, and tomorrow brings others.
Each one grows the way its tree does. A maple's leaves come in opposite pairs, a ginkgo's fans crowd onto short spurs, a willow's hang in long thin blades, and a palm opens one ring of fronds at its crown.
- Japanese mapleAcer palmatum
- GinkgoGinkgo biloba
- Weeping willowSalix babylonica
- CamphorCinnamomum camphora
- Chinese banyanFicus microcarpa
- KatsuraCercidiphyllum japonicum
- Hong Kong orchid treeBauhinia × blakeana
- OakQuercus
- Horse chestnutAesculus
- RowanSorbus
- Flame treeDelonix regia
- BambooPhyllostachys
- Coconut palmCocos nucifera
your photographs
They never leave your phone
No account, no cloud, nobody looking. The photographs stay on your own device and Jiyu keeps only the colours it drew out of them.
Place is never noted more finely than a neighbourhood of about a kilometre. The exact coordinates are not kept.
The only thing that ever leaves is an email address, and only if you choose to leave one further down this page. It is used to send a single letter.
on the App Store
Come through the first season with it
Jiyu is out now on the App Store. Made for people it might actually mean something to.
Which of the twenty-four do you feel most?
季遇
Jiyu