Examined: A Question a Day

Yijun Kim

About this app

One question arrives each day, together with the passage it came from.

■ Not a quote-card app
Every line carries its author and a citation you can go and check: Meditations 4.3, Pensées Brunschvicg 277, Analects 2.15. All 156 of them.

■ The other side answers back
A Stoic question is followed by an Existentialist objection. You do not get to nod along to one voice. You read both, then write your own answer.

■ It does not end with reading
Ten practices, each lifted straight from a school's own procedure: the dichotomy of control, the three kinds of desire, finding the mean, the universal law test, the eternal recurrence, where you are forcing it, where your attention went, the three examinations, revolt and freedom and passion, the two gates. You fill them in; you do not read them.

■ What you write stays
Streaks and full-text search. After 156 days a question comes round again, and you can add a line underneath the old answer instead of editing it. That is where the you of a few years from now answers the you of back then.

■ No account, no server, no network
No sign-up. No ads. The app does not even hold the internet permission. What you write stays on this device and can be carried out of it verbatim at any time.

■ What is inside
29 philosophers, 156 questions, 10 practices, 113 hand-drawn illustrations.
Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Heraclitus, Montaigne, Pascal, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, the Buddha, Toegye Yi Hwang, Yulgok Yi I, Dasan Jeong Yakyong, Yeonam Park Jiwon, Wonhyo, and more.

■ The drawings
School emblems, portraits, and a drawing for every listed work: 113 pictures made for this app. They follow the surviving iconography; they are not photographs. Each one is re-inked for light and dark.

■ Ten languages
English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian.

■ Reading comfort
Four text sizes, Korean line breaking that keeps words whole, and screen-reader labels on every question and quotation.

Free. No purchases, no subscription, no advertising.

What’s new

• If saving fails (say, the phone is full), the app tells you and keeps what you wrote.
• Several quotations and source references were corrected against the originals.
• Read the privacy policy inside the app, in Settings.
• The home-screen widget follows the language you chose in the app.
• Saving to a file is sturdier: oversized files are refused safely, and saving over an old file leaves no old text behind.
• The daily reminder keeps its time across daylight saving changes.