The company
Stone first, software second
The registered company is AK Kamnosestvo d.o.o., at Brilejeva ulica 13, 1000 Ljubljana, and Isaja Aksalić answers for what it publishes. The trade is stonework; the apps are the other half of the bench.
Unusually for this series of odd pairings, the two sides actually touch: a company that cuts and sets stone for a living has published a guide to the country's castles, which are the largest stonework anybody in Slovenia ever did.
How the apps are built
Whatever an app needs to remember goes into its own private folder on the handset, which Android keeps sealed off from every other app installed. No account is created, no identifier is minted, no event is counted anywhere, and no advertising library is compiled into the build.
No database to lose, nothing to hand on, and nothing that stops working the day a service is switched off.
Published by AK Kamnosestvo d.o.o.
Gradovi
Your guide to Slovenia's castles
com.grajski.gradovi
A pocket guide to the cliff-clinging fortresses, lakeside strongholds and hilltop keeps that crown the country. Each one opens to a clear profile — region and setting, roughly when it rose, its type and defining features, the stories attached to it, and a short note on visiting.
It doubles as a travel diary: mark what you have visited, keep a wishlist, star the favourites, and watch a completion ring fill as you work across the country, with a stylised regions view showing where you have been. A gentle quiz asks you to name a castle, place it in its region or recall what it is known for, and keeps your best score. Slovenian and English, offline, no account, no advertising.
Gradovi on Google PlayWhy they are all on hilltops
A castle is a machine for seeing a long way, and the limit is not the eye — it is the planet. Stand at a height h above the land and the ground curves out of sight at a distance d = √(2Rh). Air helps a little: it bends light downward, and surveyors allow for it by pretending the Earth is a seventh larger than it is, which turns the rule into d ≈ 3.86 √h with the height in metres and the answer in kilometres. Two towers see each other when their horizons meet, so the greatest gap you can bridge is simply twice one tower's reach — and the bulge of the world hidden at the midpoint of that gap comes out, exactly, as the height you built.
77.1km to the horizon from up there
154.2km, the widest gap two such towers can bridge
3towers to pass a signal the whole way
400m of world hidden at the midpoint of that gap
71.4km if the air bent no light at all
110m more stone to buy another 10 km
Not on this bench: no castles, no map, no regions and no quiz. It knows the name of nothing. It also assumes a smooth world, which Slovenia emphatically is not — a mountain in the way beats the curve of the Earth every time, so treat every number here as the best case nobody actually got.
Worth saying
A guide that cannot refresh itself
Gradovi carries its text with it, which is the reason it works in a valley with no signal. The other side of that is honest to state: nothing in it updates on its own. Opening times, entry prices, a path closed for repairs — none of that reaches the app between releases.
So check before you drive. And where the app passes on a legend, it is passing on a legend: the stories attached to these walls are worth knowing as stories, and are not the same kind of thing as the date a chronicle first mentions a name.