The Interface Grows With the Jar

Sprouting seeds is simple until four jars are soaking, rinsing and draining on four different schedules. Start dates blur together, and 'is this one ready yet' turns into a small daily puzzle instead of a five-second glance.

Sarj ties timing to each jar individually and rolls it up into one screen: ready today, ready tomorrow, still growing. The tracking work moves off memory and onto the app, where it belongs.

Every jar's start and expected harvest date convert into a single maturity value between 0 and 1. The app reads whichever jar needs attention first: the one ready today, or if none is, the next one due, and lets that value lead the whole screen.

Colour drifts through five moods rather than switching between them, Ébredés, Frissesség, Növekedés, Kiteljesedés, Szüreti fény, easing from cool teal-green toward warm harvest gold, with the leaves always staying green. Two of the four colour thresholds sit inside the final 30% of the cycle, so the shift visibly speeds up as harvest gets close. The screen changes most in the days when you should be paying attention.

Sarj gets used in short bursts at the kitchen counter, often with wet hands, so everything sits within thumb reach. Four tabs (Kezdőlap, Kalauz, Előzmények, Profil) stay fixed at the bottom, a new jar opens as a bottom sheet instead of a new page, and marking a jar done or adding a day is a single tap with undo built in.

Harvest reminders land the day before and on the day a jar is ready, never before 9:00 Budapest time; several jars due together fold into a single notice instead of three. The aim is to support a routine over weeks: research on habit formation puts automaticity anywhere from 18 to over 250 days depending on the habit (Lally et al., 2010), so a reminder that shows up reliably matters more than a clever one.

Rinse reminders are opt-in and off by default: two windows a day, morning and evening, each staying open for five hours before quietly expiring, and they only fire while a jar is actually growing. Commercial sprout-growing guidance treats regular rinsing as a basic hygiene control point, which is the reasoning behind the reminder, not a claim that missing one is dangerous.

The core of Sarj works without an account: jars, schedules and history are stored on the device with IndexedDB, and everything keeps working offline. Data can be exported to JSON and imported back in, and import only adds rather than overwriting, so merging two devices doesn't mean picking a loser. An email sign-in with cloud sync is there for anyone who wants it across devices, along with self-service account deletion, but it's opt-in, following the same local-first reasoning that treats the device, not the server, as the primary copy of your data (Kleppmann et al., 2019).

Sarj covers a 28-seed catalog sourced from Legeldle's growing guide, with accent-insensitive search and durations from 2 to 12 days; seed mixes are only suggested when timing and light needs actually line up. History keeps a repeat/restore action for anything grown before, and eleven recipe ideas come with a raw-versus-fully-cooked filter and a food-safety note attached.