Stone of Life

A playful place to explore living patterns.

Stone of Life began as a small Swift Playgrounds experiment and grew into a friendly space for drawing, importing, watching, and learning. It stays approachable, but there is now plenty to explore once you want bigger patterns, more visual flair, and more ways to play.

Big Pattern Play Glow & Color Built-in Guide
Stone of Life showing a Stone of Life pattern on macOS

Recent Highlights

Stone of Life kept growing in clear, player-facing ways across the last two updates.

Version 1.2

This update opened the door to rule changes beyond the classic rules. It also added saved rule presets and made the in-app guide more useful, so experimenting with new kinds of behavior felt inviting instead of confusing.

Version 1.3

This update made the app feel roomier and more expressive: richer settings, custom colors, glow effects, expanding worlds, support for more pattern file types, and much better handling of very large patterns.

Bigger Worlds

Patterns no longer have to feel boxed in. The board can grow with the action, and the app is much happier dealing with huge creations than it used to be.

A More Personal Look

Settings now go beyond speed and size. You can tune colors, choose themes, make the background shine through, and add glow that gives busy patterns a more alive feeling.

More Ways To Bring Patterns In

Stone of Life can now read more kinds of pattern files, which makes it easier to bring in discoveries from the wider Game of Life world without extra conversion steps.

Still Easy To Learn

Even as the app got deeper, it kept the helpful book, examples, and tap-to-explain help that make it comfortable for curious newcomers.

Tune the Board, Not Just the Speed

The settings view is now a real part of the experience. You can shape the look of the board, decide how the view behaves, and keep everything readable even when patterns get large or busy.

Stone of Life grid settings and color schemes on macOS

Mini Life Lexicon

Oscillators. Spaceships. Methuselahs. Still lifes. Stone of Life explains the vocabulary inside the app, so you can move from poking pixels to understanding the patterns you are seeing.

Also built in

Rules, examples, RLE help, and tap-to-explain control overlays.

How It Came To Be

Stone of Life began during a seven-hour train ride in late December, when a 10-year-old discovered Conway's Game of Life. Parent and child spent the ride building an early version in Swift Playgrounds on iPad, partly by hand and partly with help from an LLM.

Since then, evenings and weekends have gone into steady iteration. A few days before release, they decided to submit it to the App Store, and now it is approved: Stone of Life.

The project has intentionally stayed as a Swift Playgrounds app so it can be improved from an iPad anywhere, even though most development happens in Xcode on Mac. That constraint limits a few possibilities, but the flexibility has been worth it for this project.

The app is very much a collaboration between parent, child, and LLM agent, and it continues to receive regular fixes and improvements.

Stone of Life tab switcher on iPhone

Send Feedback

Found a bug or have an idea? Tell me what you ran into at stoneoflife@dll.nu.

Helpful details

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