For sixteen years, I’ve kept my phone alive on Shabbos with the same app: Rusty Brick’s Shabbos Clock. I downloaded it on April 17, 2009. It was a meaningful moment, the first time my iPhone felt like it could belong in an Orthodox Jewish home on Shabbos without being a distraction or a temptation. You set your alarms, you lock it in a clock face, and it becomes an appliance. It was a genuinely clever idea, lovingly executed.
Rusty Brick is still there, still making apps for the Jewish community. But Shabbos Clock is old, and the iPhone has changed around it. For years, I’ve been thinking: if someone were building this from scratch today, how would they do it differently?
So, a few weeks ago, I decided to find out.
What Shaoneg Is
Shaoneg (שעונג — a portmanteau word that combines עונג (delight) and שעון (clock), is an iOS Shabbos alarm clock, built to my tastes: you put it on your nightstand on Friday afternoon, and from candle lighting until tzeis on Motzei Shabbos, it's a clock. Not a phone.
Before Shabbos starts, you set your alarms: morning wake-up, latest time for Shacharis, a reminder to head back for Daf Yomi... whatever matters to you. Then you tell the app to begin
Shabbos Mode. The clock face comes up: big, readable, dark. It features a list of the Zmanim throughout the day and tells you if there’s anything special about the day. Alarms fire and then shut themselves off. Nothing requires you to touch it. You never see a notification. You never have to interact with it. It just works.
The technical trick is that iOS notifications aren't used as notifications. They're used as silent timers. The app handles the alarm entirely in-process: it plays audio through AVAudioSession in .playback mode (which bypasses the silent switch), and it dismisses itself after a duration the user sets. The system presentation — banners, sounds, lockscreen entries — is suppressed. The clock face stays active.
It knows your location and calculates Zmanim (Jewish times) for your community. It knows what day it is in the Jewish calendar, whether there's Yom Tov, what the liturgy is for that day. On a three-day Yom Tov, it understands you're planning three different days that may each have different needs.
How It Was Built
I’m not an iOS developer. I’m not a designer. I’m not a programmer.
I’m a tech enthusiast, and I built Shaoneg through a collaboration with Claude, Anthropic’s AI. I describe it in the credits as: “Designed and directed by Seth Dimbert. Built with Claude by Anthropic.”
That framing is intentional, and I think accurate. I knew what I wanted. I made every product decision. I wrote the PRD, designed the flows, and decided when something wasn’t right and needed to change. Claude wrote the Swift. It navigated SwiftUI idioms I didn’t know, debugged notification scheduling edge cases I never would have found, and caught a race condition in my Shabbos-exit logic that would have produced false Tzeis exits. We went back and forth — sometimes many rounds on a single problem — until things worked.
It was a genuinely new kind of collaboration. I’m still figuring out what to call it.
What I can say is this: the app works. It runs on my phone. The alarms fire. The clock face is beautiful. And tonight, I uploaded the first beta to TestFlight.
The First Beta
Version 0.9.3, build 1. There were lessons along the way.
App Store Connect rejected my first upload for a missing orientation key in the `Info.plist.`` It rejected my icon for having an alpha channel. (Apple requires a 1024×1024 PNG with no transparency. Who knew?) The version number was wrong because I had a hardcoded string in the wrong place, overriding the build settings. The archive had to come from my own Terminal, not from the Claude Code process, due to a system permission restriction affecting SPM package resolution.
Each of these was a small obstacle. None of them was meaningful. They were the normal friction of getting something through Apple’s pipeline for the first time.
One interesting part, brand-new to me, was the use of open-source software libraries specifically designed for Halachic calculations. Shaoneg uses KosherSwift, an open-source library by Elyahu Pines (based on the legendary KosherJava by Eliyahu Hershfeld). The short version is that these are the software libraries that can calculate the Zmanim. These fellows have done all of the hard work and made it available so that people like me can leverage their work in new ways. They make it freely available as long as I credit them and make my source code available to others upon request.
So the credits screen in Shaoneg says exactly that: “Application source code is available on request per LGPL 2.1 Section 6.” Satisfies the requirement. And it forced me to actually read the license, which I think is a healthy thing.
What's Next
The beta is in internal testing. As of right now, it works. But there is still real work ahead:
- Alarm sounds: the current sound is a placeholder beep I generated with a tone generator, and that won’t do. I think we may try to use some music.
- Shaoneg+: the premium tier, gated behind StoreKit 2, for features beyond the basic clock functionality.
- Lots of other cool ideas
- Eventual App Store release
But the core is done and working. Sixteen years of thinking about it. I finally built the thing.