As a learning exercise, and because it was something I wanted to have, I created a simple meditation timer application for Android called JustSit.

The name is derived from a quote attributed to Zen Master Unmon:

If you walk, just walk, if you sit, just sit, but whatever you do, don’t wobble.

This quote is a tongue-in-cheek admonition to focus on the task at hand. There are plenty of timers for Android already, but this one does something special — it optionally helps to shut out the outside world by silencing the phone’s ringtone and/or turning off all of the network connections.

There are still a few things I want to add to the application, namely, options for sounds marking the beginning and end of the meditation period (currently mandatory), and options for vibrating notifications or no notifications. I’d also like to allow users to select the sounds to be used — currently they are hard-coded. Finally, it would be nice to allow people to save various profiles and timings. Nonetheless, at this point I find the application perfectly useful for its intended purpose.

For now, I’m not putting it on the Android Market. I don’t feel like it’s been tested enough to withstand the brutal onslaught of the Market users, and I am waiting to charge a small fee in order to recover my developer registration. The application will always remain open source, and will always be available for free on the project website. However, the majority of users will neither know how to nor want to download and install the app from there, so I’ll make it available with the aforementioned ‘convenience fee’ from the Market. The ability to charge for apps is not currently available on the market, and one is not allowed to charge later for an app that is initially given away for free. I may post it to other Android application sites.

Please let me know if you try this and find it useful, and submit any feature requests or bug reports on the project Issues page.