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Serenity

A calm app of bedtime stories for adults, baked in or written on demand, each with a scene composed from its content. No navigation bar, just story cards.

Track
built
Category
experiment

Tools

  • Foundation Models

Serenity is an app for creating and serving bedtime stories for adults. It's a calm app, with calm colours, transitions and animations, made to make you less stressed.

It's a pure work in progress, and an experiment.

Try the scene lab

It started with sketches

It all started with my sketches.

  1. A hand drawn phone screen. A menu icon, a heading reading Sleep with a small arrow, and a round avatar. In the middle a navy card with the title The Tale of Altair and the whispering star written in yellow, with a few yellow four-point stars and three tags along its foot. The edges of two more cards show either side. At the bottom, two choices, Adults and Kids.
    Sketch, 2025.
  2. Serenity's home screen at night. A library icon, a filter reading All, and a round teal avatar. In the middle a card with the tags stars, lanterns and drifting, and the title Lanterns Between Stars and the slow bright river in a script face, over a purple sky with gold stars, a small planet and pink and violet hills with two small figures on top. The edges of two more cards show either side. At the bottom a button reading Weave a story.
    The app, 2026.
  1. A hand drawn phone screen in light. The title The Tale of Altair and the whispering star in yellow, a back button and a speed button reading 1x. Lines of text below, one of them filled in purple as the line being read. Under them a player bar with a progress line and a pause button, and at the foot two choices, Read and Listen, with Listen outlined.
    Sketch, 2025.
  2. A story called The Fern Hollow being listened to, in the dark theme. The title sits in gold script at the top between a back button and a text size button. The paragraph being read is lit on a violet panel, about ferns on both sides of the path that bow and spring back. The text above and below it is dimmed. At the foot a player with a pause button, a progress line, a speed of 1.0x and a sleep timer, then two choices, Read and Listen, with Listen chosen.
    The app, 2026.
  1. A hand drawn phone screen in black. A header reading The Tale of Altair, three lines of text, then a tick and the words Finished Reading, with two buttons, Save and More. Below, yellow four-point stars, and a small figure standing on three hills coloured in purple, yellow and teal.
    Sketch, 2025.
  2. The end of a story called Soft Moss Whispers, in the dark theme. The last lines of the story at the top, then a tick and the word Finished, and two buttons, Save and More. Below, a navy sky with gold four-point stars over round hills in teal, violet and gold, with contour lines and small round trees. A figure and a cat stand on the far hill.
    The app, 2026.

Made to be calm

The UI is specially crafted for that. It doesn't even have a navigation bar at the bottom. There are just story cards you go through, each with its own composition.

Stories, baked in and on demand

It has stories baked in, and it also writes new ones on demand with Apple's Foundation Models.

The scenes

It has a very sophisticated procedural visual composition system, which creates the visuals according to each story's content.

The scene lab below is a browser port of the app's scene rules, made for this page. It follows the same rules and numbers, but not the same random streams, so a title here gives a different layout from the one it gives in the app.

Nothing is drawn by hand for a story. The title is the seed, and a handful of rules place every element: the figure stands in a third, the star sits on its gaze, and the sparkles keep clear of both. Each element draws from its own random stream, so a new figure never moves a hill.

The scene lab is live and needs JavaScript. The captures above show the same scenes in the app.

A scene is a stack of layers, each with a depth. Tilting the phone leans every layer by its depth, so the land moves as one world.

The scene lab is live and needs JavaScript. The captures above show the same scenes in the app.

One soft disc of colour, centred on the star, runs three moments: out of the star at the end of a story, from a new place's star when you choose one, and back into the star when onboarding hands over to Home.

The scene lab is live and needs JavaScript. The captures above show the same scenes in the app.

The TestFlight link is coming soon.

Screens

  3. Serenity's home screen at night. A library icon, a filter reading All, and a round teal avatar. In the middle a card with the tags stars, lanterns and drifting, and the title Lanterns Between Stars and the slow bright river in a script face, over a purple sky with gold stars, a small planet and pink and violet hills with two small figures on top. The edges of two more cards show either side. At the bottom a button reading Weave a story.
  6. A story called The Fern Hollow being listened to, in the dark theme. The title sits in gold script at the top between a back button and a text size button. The paragraph being read is lit on a violet panel, about ferns on both sides of the path that bow and spring back. The text above and below it is dimmed. At the foot a player with a pause button, a progress line, a speed of 1.0x and a sleep timer, then two choices, Read and Listen, with Listen chosen.
  8. The end of a story called Soft Moss Whispers, in the dark theme. The last lines of the story at the top, then a tick and the word Finished, and two buttons, Save and More. Below, a navy sky with gold four-point stars over round hills in teal, violet and gold, with contour lines and small round trees. A figure and a cat stand on the far hill.
  9. The same end scene in the light theme, with the text size menu open over it. The menu offers Smaller and Larger, then three themes, Night, Paper and Auto, with Paper ticked. Behind it, Save and More, and the same hills and trees in softer colours under a pale sky with gold stars.

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