A daily-routine app for kids. Morning, afternoon and evening are three short quest lines: make the bed, pack the school bag, brush teeth. Every finished task drops a glass marble into a jar, and it clinks when it lands. Orange for the morning, green for the afternoon, blue for the evening, so by bedtime the whole day is sitting there in glass.
Finish a section and the celebration is timed to the sound. Confetti cannons fire on the bang in the morning, rockets burst exactly on the booms in the afternoon, and the evening gets shooting stars and applause. You can’t skip it with a tap. That’s on purpose: it would be a shame to brush the screen by accident and miss the whole thing.
Behind the tasks the sky is alive, with sun, clouds and birds by day and a moon, shooting stars and fireflies in the evening. The app opens on the right part of the day by itself and never switches while the child is using it.
For the statistically inclined household there are streaks and a monthly calendar where a green day means everything got done. There is a small editor so you can invent chores of your own, up to ten per section, which ought to be enough parenting for anyone. Tasks can be dragged into the order the morning actually happens in, and when that experiment goes badly there is a button that puts the original list back.
The whole thing is one HTML file, sounds included. No app store, no account, no subscription, and no data leaving the device. The product owners are children, and they do not accept scope creep.
Two languages
The app speaks Danish and English. The first screen asks which one, a Dannebrog and a Union Jack, and you can switch again in Settings. Everything follows: headings, buttons, celebrations, statistics, the calendar, error messages, even the browser tab.
The built-in chores get translated too, as long as you have not renamed them. Anything you wrote yourself is left exactly as you wrote it. The app has opinions about grammar, none about your parenting.
Chores that only happen on Tuesdays
Swimming kit on Tuesdays, bins on Thursdays, mercifully little on a Sunday. Under Tasks by weekday in Settings you pick a day and switch individual tasks on or off for that day alone, or add a task that belongs to that day and no other. A dot under a weekday means something is switched off there, so you don’t have to open all seven to work out where you changed your mind. In the ordinary list a restricted task carries a small badge with the initials of the days it applies on, which answers “why isn’t that one there today?” before anyone has to ask.
The child sees none of this. They see today’s tasks, and progress and celebrations count exactly those: switch two tasks off on Sunday, and Sunday is finished when the rest are ticked. The confetti still turns up.
From the app
Put it on a phone or tablet
It’s a web page that behaves like a real app once you pin it to the home screen.
- iPhone and iPad: open the app, tap Share, scroll down and choose “Add to Home Screen”.
- Android: open the browser menu, choose “Add to home screen” or “Install app”.
- Mac and PC: open it in a browser and bookmark it. Or use the download button, keep the file wherever you like and double-click it. It runs entirely offline.
On iPhone, iPad and Android you get an icon and a proper full-screen app.
Not losing the streak
Progress is stored in the browser on the device itself. That is what makes it private, and it used to mean that a new device started from scratch, and that clearing the browser’s data cleared the streak. The eight-year-old had strong opinions about this.
So there is a backup now. One button writes the lot, tasks, name, theme and the whole history, to a small file you can park in Drive or email to yourself. Another button reads it back in, on the same device or a brand new one. The app also asks the browser to treat its data as worth keeping, so it isn’t quietly swept away when storage runs low. Belt, braces, and a considerably calmer eight-year-old.
Versions
- v1 to v3: English and plain, then Danish and pink, then three colour themes.
- v4: The first version on this site. Frosted glass, sparks on every tick and a fanfare the browser made up on the spot.
- v5: Danish and English, a backup button, drag-and-drop, and full screen on Android.
- v6: Chores that only happen on certain weekdays.
- v7: The big redesign. It never went live, because v8 turned up the same afternoon.
- v8: Up to v6 the app did the job and not much more. So this time Claude had to come up with five completely different designs before writing any code, and number 3, “The Jar”, won, with the more cheerful colours borrowed from number 5. The sounds went too. The app used to generate them itself, and they sounded like one of the first games for the ZX Spectrum. Now they are real recordings from Mixkit, Pixabay and Freesound. The birds took four attempts. The first ones looked like an icon wobbling.