Overview

Note: The app is not yet available on the App Store — Apple's $99/year Developer Program fee is a real barrier when you're a broke student. A web preview is live at the link above.

LifeCircle is an iOS app inspired by the "death calendar" concept, reimagined as a motivational reflection tool rather than a morbid reminder. It renders your entire life as a grid of dots — each one representing a year, month, week, or day — filled to show the time you've lived, and outlined to show what remains. The goal is simple: make time feel real, and live it more intentionally.

Features

Four Time Modes: Switch between years, months, weeks, and days — rendering grids of up to 29,000+ dots with lazy loading
Interactive Dot Tap: Tap any dot to see the exact date range, your age at that moment, and any life events attached to it
Life Events & Milestones: Log events across 10 categories (Career, Travel, Family, Health, etc.) with emoji, description, and category color overlays on the grid
Live Stats Panel: Collapsible summary showing current age breakdown, total units lived vs. remaining, and a progress bar
Smooth Onboarding: First-launch flow captures birthdate and target lifespan with full input validation
Settings Editor: Update birthdate or target age at any time — the grid recalculates and re-animates instantly
Zero Dependencies: Fully self-contained — no third-party libraries, no backend, no cloud sync required

Tech Stack

Built entirely with SwiftUI and Swift targeting iOS 15.0+
MVVM architecture with @StateObject, @EnvironmentObject, and @Published for reactive state management
Combine for observable data flow across the app
UserDefaults with Codable JSON encoding for lightweight, privacy-first local persistence
Pure function design via a dedicated TimeCalculator utility — deterministic, testable, side-effect-free

How It Works

Onboarding: Enter your birthdate and choose a target lifespan (default 80 years)
Visualization: The app calculates every unit of time and renders a scrollable dot grid — orange dots for lived time, white outlines for what's ahead
Exploration: Tap any dot to reveal its date range and any life events you've logged for that period
Reflection: Switch between year/month/week/day views to shift your sense of scale
Logging: Add milestones to your timeline — career moves, travel, relationships — and watch them appear as colored markers on the grid

Architecture Highlights

Lazy Rendering: LazyVStack and on-demand dot generation keep Days mode (29K+ dots) performant without pre-allocating memory
Dependency Injection: Managers are created at the app root and injected via .environmentObject() — no singletons
Single Source of Truth: UserSettingsManager and LifeEventManager own all state; views are purely declarative
Year-Based Calculations: Time is calculated by calendar alignment, not raw day counts — ensuring leap years and decade boundaries render correctly

Learning Outcomes

This project deepened my understanding of SwiftUI's reactive data model, particularly how @Published, @StateObject, and @EnvironmentObject interact to build a fully reactive UI without UIKit. I learned how to handle large dataset rendering efficiently using lazy stacks and on-demand generation — a pattern directly applicable to any paginated or virtualized list. Building the TimeCalculator as a pure-function utility reinforced clean separation of concerns and made the logic easy to reason about and test independently. The project also taught me how to design a dark, minimalist design system from scratch — typography scales, spacing tokens, and animation curves — without relying on third-party UI libraries.