Flame Detective

Flame Detective turns the classic flame test into a complete, hands-on chemistry bench you can carry in your pocket. Load one of 24 reagent salts onto a nichrome loop, pull the burner handle, and watch the flame shift to the true observed color — lithium crimson, copper green, potassium lilac — with a haptic snap and a plain-language color note right beneath the flame. This is not a color-matching quiz. It is the procedure, including the parts that actually trip students up: • Real loop hygiene. Every run leaves residue behind. Skip the hydrochloric acid dip and the next reading is tinted by the salt still on the wire. The app explains why sodium's yellow glare masks potassium at low concentration, then lets you clean the loop and re-test for a corrected result. • Cobalt-glass filter. Toggle a cobalt blue filter over the flame to suppress sodium's yellow and reveal the lilac and green hiding behind it, with a short note on when a real lab reaches for one. • No network, no account, no purchases. Every spectrum, reagent, mineral card and challenge sample ships inside the app and works fully offline, so it is ready on classroom iPads and airplane tray tables alike. SPECTRA COMPARE Swift Charts plots each element's emission lines along a wavelength axis, directly beside its flame color. Match what you see against what the lines say, and read the wavelength of the strongest line. UNKNOWN CHALLENGE Thirty seeded unknowns across three difficulty tiers. Run as many tests as you need, commit to an identification, then read why the answer was correct — and which misidentifications make that sample genuinely hard. METAL REFERENCE LIBRARY Twenty-four entries: a flame-color swatch, the compounds commonly used in labs, line spectra, approximate detection limits, and where the element turns up in daily life, from street lamps and firework coloring to medical tracers. MINERAL FIELD GUIDE Fifteen rock, mineral and household-compound cards — borax, halite, sylvite, borax-bead behavior, clean versus contaminated samples — each telling you which test to run first and what a positive result looks like. CONFUSION PAIRS Side-by-side swatches for the identifications students mix up most: sodium versus calcium, potassium versus lithium, copper versus barium, each with the single test that separates them. BEFORE YOU LIGHT ANYTHING A six-step illustrated walkthrough covers reagent shelf layout, wire loop cleaning, ventilation and goggles, and explains why a combustion reaction belongs in a teacher-led demonstration rather than on a kitchen table. DAILY FLAME WIDGET A home-screen widget shows one element, its symbol and its flame color. Challenge scores and completed tiers are stored on device, so you can pick up where you left off — offline. Built for high-school and university chemistry students, science teachers and rockhounds, with VoiceOver labels and non-color cues on the flame readout, so color-blind users can follow every test by name and wavelength too. Chemistry, done properly — and safely.