Project Chandra — Panchanga App
A Hindu almanac where the sky on screen follows the calendar — in five languages, on iOS, Android and the home screen.
A Panchanga is the traditional daily almanac — tithi, nakshatra, yoga, karana, auspicious windows and observances. Project Chandra rebuilt an institution's official Panchanga as a native-feeling app in five languages, with a living sky, a shader-rendered Moon and home-screen widgets, on top of an editorial system the institution's scholars control.
Where the complexity lives
The almanac itself is authored by the institution's scholars, and the app never second-guesses them. The engineering is everything around that data — time, rendering, language and editorial trust.
A day that starts at sunrise
A Panchanga day runs from one sunrise to the next, not midnight to midnight. A phone's calendar, notifications and widgets all assume the opposite.
A tested day-boundary engine decides which almanac record is live, schedules the next refresh at the exact sunrise, and drives the same switch-over in the iOS WidgetKit and Android widgets — including an alarm-based scheduler on Android.
A Moon drawn on the GPU
The API sends almanac facts as text — it has no idea what the sky looks like.
The app parses tithi and paksha into a phase and illumination value, then renders the Moon with a custom GLSL fragment shader — phase terminator, halo and earthshine. The same values tint a sky backdrop that moves through eight moments of the day, shaded by season.
Five languages, four Indic scripts
Translating the interface is the easy part. The almanac values themselves — nakshatra, yoga, karana, masa names — arrive in English and must read naturally in every script.
A dedicated value-localisation layer maps almanac terms into Kannada, Telugu, Tamil and Hindi, with bundled Noto typefaces per script, locale-aware dates and a test that keeps every language in step.
An editorial pipeline scholars can trust
A year of almanac data arrives as a spreadsheet. One wrong row means a whole community observes a fast on the wrong day.
A staged import wizard maps, validates and flags duplicate dates before anything is saved. Every change moves Draft → Preview → Publish with revisions, an audit log and roll-back by import batch, and observance calendars are cross-checked against the printed almanac.
Part of the digital ecosystem we build and run for a major religious institution.
← All workNeed something similar? Let's talk.
Booking systems, ERPs, dashboards — if your bottleneck looks anything like this one, the first conversation is free.
Book a free project consultation