PLACID: Sit Still. Notice Everything.

ABHIJEETH V N — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 15:15:39 +0000

What I Built

[Replace with your real moment. Example: "Last Tuesday I sat on the bench by the gate for ten minutes. I checked my phone twice in the first three. Afterward I could name only one thing I had noticed, a crow landing on the fence. That gap is why I built Placid."]

Placid is a calm, installable Progressive Web App for sitting outside with your phone face down. You pick a spot, choose a length, and put the phone away. The app keeps time, sets the scene, and rings a bell at the start, at each quarter, and at the end. When the session ends, you write up to three things you noticed.

Every feature is designed to make the screen the shortest part of the experience:

Sit session: a timer based on timestamps, so it stays accurate when the phone is locked or face down. It includes a 12-second breathing guide and rotating sensory prompts such as "Notice the farthest sound reaching your ears."
Living scenes: Meadow (a procedurally generated grass field with wildflowers and drifting pollen), Temple (a dusk pagoda with layered mist and rising incense smoke), Local Sky (live weather and sunrise/sunset for your location), and My Place (up to five of your own photos).
Gyroscope parallax: scene layers shift with the phone's tilt at different depths, so it feels like looking through a window. Desktop falls back to pointer movement.
Procedural soundscapes: wind, forest rain, night crickets, and a stream, all generated in the browser with the Web Audio API. Nothing is streamed or downloaded.
Acoustic bells: a singing bowl, a temple bell, and a wood clapper for the start, quarter marks, and end.
Noticings and journal: three observations per sit, a mood marker, search, and a JSON export and import.
Gentle practice tracking: a seven-day chart and a consecutive-day count. Missing a day restarts the count without any guilt language.

It is for anyone who wants a short, quiet pause from their phone: on a park bench, under a backyard tree, or on a garden step.

Demo

Video: demo video
Live app: placid app

Install it on Android: open the link in Chrome, tap Download Placid, then launch it from your home screen. It opens straight into the app.

Code

GitHub: github.com/ABHIJEETH-V-N/placid

How I Built It

Open-source stack:

Framework and build: React 19, TypeScript, Vite 8.
Styling: Tailwind CSS v4, with scene animations in scoped CSS keyframes.
Audio: the Web Audio API synthesizes every nature sound and bell in real time, so there are no audio files.
Storage: IndexedDB holds spots, entries, settings, and photos on the device.
Offline: a service worker precaches the app shell and assets. After the first visit, the app runs with no connection.
Weather: Open-Meteo, a free API that needs no key. It is the only network call the app makes, and only when you pick Local Sky.
Hosting: Cloudflare Pages, with a SPA fallback and cache headers that stop the service worker from going stale.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Placid's main promise is privacy and presence, and open source makes both verifiable:

No server holds your data. Sits, notes, and photos stay in your browser. Anyone can read the code and confirm that.
It works with no signal. Trails, fields, and rooftops are often offline. The timer, bells, soundscapes, and scenes all work without a connection.
It costs nothing to run. No API keys and no per-token billing, so a daily practice can stay free.
It can be changed. Scenes, sounds, prompts, and bells are all code. Someone can add a local forest or a city park without asking permission.

A closed API cannot give you an offline timer, on-device synthesis, and a no-tracking guarantee at the same time, because each of those depends on where the code runs.

DEV Community: ABHIJEETH V N

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