About
A room, not a tab.
Sukon takes the idea behind a full-screen window onto somewhere calm — and builds it around recitation instead of scenery alone.
There is no shortage of ways to play the Qur’an on a computer. There is a shortage of places to listen to it.
Most of them are a list. You pick a surah, a file starts, and the window goes back to being a window — one more rectangle among the forty already open, competing for the same attention the recitation was meant to gather.
Sukon starts from the other end. A photograph or a rendered scene fills the display. The ayah being recited rests over it, set in the hand the muṣḥaf is actually printed in. The transport fades when you stop reaching for it. What is left is a room you are sitting in rather than an application you are operating.
That is also why playback is scheduled one ayah at a time rather than one file at a time. It costs more to build, but it is the only way the words on screen and the voice in the room can stay in step — and the only way repeating an ayah, looping a range or resting between them becomes possible at all.
What it is built on
Four commitments.
Stillness is the feature
Every decision is measured against one question: does this add to the quiet, or take from it? Badges, streaks, counters and congratulation have no place here. Nothing in Sukon asks you to come back tomorrow.
Small, and staying small
The whole download is under eight megabytes. Seven scenes are computed by the GPU rather than shipped as files; the ambience is synthesised rather than sampled; the photographic scenes are fetched only when you pick one. Nothing is downloaded on your behalf.
Nothing leaves your Mac
No account, no analytics, no telemetry. Scenes and ambience are generated locally. The only network requests Sukon makes are for the recitation and translation you asked to hear, and what it fetches it caches for you to keep.
The text, as it is printed
The muṣḥaf text ships in the app in the QPC Hafs encoding the bundled type was cut for — not the generic Uthmani encoding, which sets the small high rounded zero as an oversized ring sitting in the line. The Arabic is right before it is anything else.
Under the hood
How it is put together.
A native SwiftUI app for macOS 14 and later, built as a plain Swift package — no Xcode project, no web view, no cross-platform runtime. Shaders are compiled at launch from a single Metal file, so editing a generated scene is a rebuild away.
Qur’anic translations and recitations are fetched from the public Quran.com API as you listen and cached on your Mac; the reciter catalogue comes from mp3quran.net. Nothing scriptural ships inside the app but the muṣḥaf text, the surah names and the ayah counts.
App/ the app, menus, wallpaper windows
Core/ models, settings, session state
Quran/ API client and the library cache
Audio/ ayah player, cache, ambience synth
Scenes/ catalogue, Metal, video and stills
UI/ the stage, the ayah, five panels
Resources/ Scenes.metal, surahs.jsonWho made it
One person, quietly.
With thanks
Standing on other people's work.
Qur’anic text, translations and recitation timings from the Quran.com API. The reciter catalogue from mp3quran.net.
The ayah is set in KFGQPC HAFS Uthmanic Script, from the King Fahd Glorious Qur’an Printing Complex.
The scenes are live wallpapers under free licences. Each one carries its credit on its own page inside the app.