ontolabe
Instrument your surroundings
$4.99 · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
Look up, and out. A ship's-bridge console for your world — pressure, sound, magnetism, the ISS overhead, space weather, quakes. One panel, yours, no subscription.
An instrument panel for what's around you.
ontolabe turns your iPhone and iPad into a live instrument console for the world around you — one panel of tiles, each reading a different sense of your immediate environment.
SENSE
• Barometric pressure with a rolling 72-hour chart — watch a front roll through
• A live sound spectrum from the microphone, analyzed into frequency bands
• Magnetic field strength, device attitude, and a compass heading
• GPS position, altitude, and speed
SKY
• The International Space Station, its position computed on-device — plus a heads-up when it's genuinely visible overhead in your night sky
• Aurora outlook from the planetary K-index
COMMS
• Live feeds: earthquakes (USGS), space-weather alerts (NOAA), local weather alerts (US National Weather Service), and NASA mission news
A PRIVATE RECORD
Every reading is logged to an on-device history in SQLite. Your pressure chart and trends stay on your device — nothing is uploaded, and there is no account.
BUILT TO BE HONEST
When a sensor is missing, a permission is off, or a feed is unreachable, the tile dims and tells you why — instead of showing a confident zero. What you see is always the real state of the instrument.
BUILD THE PANEL YOU WANT
Rearrange tiles, and add or remove instruments from the library. The layout is yours.
RIG YOUR OWN COMMS
Every bridge runs the channels it needs. Add any RSS or Atom feed and its headlines join the ticker beside earthquakes, space weather, and NASA — the wire, tuned to your world.
GOOD TO KNOW
• Alerts — ISS overhead, pressure drops, space-weather thresholds — are computed while the app is open. ontolabe is designed as an always-on console for a dock or bridge display, where the screen stays awake and alerts fire in real time. It does not run in the background or use push notifications, so it won't alert a phone asleep in your pocket.
• Some tiles need specific hardware. Wi-Fi-only iPads have no GPS receiver, so location-based tiles show their unavailable state on those models.
NO STRINGS
• One-time purchase — no subscription, ever
• No account, no sign-in
• No ads, no analytics, no tracking
The sun and moon tile drew the same crescent at every phase. The illumination percentage and the phase name beside it were always correct — only the icon was frozen. It now draws the moon's actual phase, mirrored for viewers south of the equator.
The developer, Brian Alden, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Brian Alden
- Size
- 4.5 MB
- Category
- Weather
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 17.6 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 17.6 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 17.6 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 14.6 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.3 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 Brian R Alden
