New Year, New Apps
Gentler Streak, Day One, and Endel are three indispensable apps for me heading into 2024.
I strive to ensure that all the apps I carry around add value throughout my day. I hate having fugly apps freeloading on my device that take up space and serve an annoyingly narrow purpose (looking at you, Microsoft Authenticator). With the new year upon us, I want to highlight three applications that, for me, are the cream of the crop in terms of the value they bring to me on a daily basis: Gentler Streak, Day One, and Endel.
Gentler Streak
A compassionate approach to closing your rings and improving your fitness.
Gentler Streak was born in 2021 and, in its short existence, has garnered tons of accolades - including being an Apple Design Award finalist in 2023 and winner of the Apple Watch App of the Year in 2022. I must confess that I overlooked the app for years because I was relatively content with the Fitness app on my Apple Watch and iPhone. But even though I pretended not to care, I was anxious, ensuring I closed my rings daily. It sounds stupid, but when you have a 500+ day streak, breaking it because you were sick, or travelling, or didn't feel up to it felt unacceptable. I had wished for a long time that the app that recorded my fitness data could help me be more flexible with my health, acknowledging the need for breaks and making slight suggestions for exercises to improve my fitness.
This is when I was cued towards adopting Gentler Streak. The app opens to a dashboard showing a trend line of the past ten (or 30) days, allowing me to visualize my fitness and decide if I want to add more. If I do, Gentler Streak makes recommendations based on recent workouts (e.g., adding a 30-minute cycle is within my normal range, but 50+ minutes would be longer than average).
Gentler Streak also recognizes that we all need breaks, become sick, or get injured, and there's an option to set your status to one of these three options. Toggling these statuses on feels compassionate, allowing me to slow down and adjust until I recover and return to my routine.
Photo 1: Home Page in Gentler Streak shows current activity progress relative to the past 10 or 30 days.
Photo 2: Change your status to pause your trends when recovering from an injury or illness.
Photo 3: Advanced activity data showing recent workouts and trends across time.
The app also connects with health and collates data to show weekly, monthly, and yearly trends. Each month, it shows a recap with delightful statistics like that in December, I was active for 43 hours, 43 minutes, or 2.2x the length of the entire 9-movie Star Wars Saga!
I'd strongly recommend Gentler Streak as a, dare I say it, gentler way of visualizing your fitness that helps you make compassionate decisions towards your fitness - whether that's to go a little easier one day or encourage yourself to give a tiny bit more towards your fitness goals.
Gentler Streak is available for the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Free to try with limited functionality, a subscription to Gentler Streak costs $7.99/month or $49.99/year. Family sharing is available, and a $139.99 lifetime purchase option is available.
Day One
A versatile veteran journalling app with over a decade of refinement…
If I could only keep one app, it would be Day One. Daily journalling has become a staple in my life, helping me to untangle my mind after a day, document momentous events, and even keep track of the weather, recipes, and random facts as I go through life (four years ago, I had two oreos for lunch - perhaps not my healthiest choice).
I've used Day One in the past in a very unstructured way to vent about what's on my mind, and more recently, I have also started to create templates to create a more structured approach to my writing. My wife isn't as religious with daily journalling, but she appreciates the prompts added to Day One to help her reflect and structure her entries. Recent prompts have included: What was the biggest risk I took this year? And, if I review this past year, what was the best thing that happened each month? These prompts, in addition to regular prompt challenges, offer refreshing ways of ensuring journalling fits the person.
Day One also allows you to add photos, videos, audio, and drawings to enrich your entry and suggests entries from calendar events or places. Additionally, it taps into location and motion to document the weather, tags, device, moon phase, music being listened to, step count, and activity for each entry. You can keep journalling as simple as you want, or you can add this bevy of metadata to each and every entry. The choice is yours (I choose bevy of metadata).
Photo 1: Optional daily prompts can provide a great bank of ideas or inspiration for journalling.
Photo 2: A beautiful media viewer shows all the sketches, photos, and videos embedded into your entries (these photos are from a 2021 trip to The Netherlands).
Photo 3: Easy to create templates for daily journalling, storing recipes, and other life areas.
With the option to end-to-end encrypt my journals and passcode lock the app, I feel secure that my private writing remains private. However, the data is your own, and options exist to export your entries and even send them off to be bound into a physical book exist.
Apple recently got into the Journaling game with a fledging app as part of the 17.2 iPhone update. However, with over a decade of refinement, 6,800+ entries, and apps across all my Apple devices, Day One will continue to be my go-to application.
Day One is available for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Free to try with limited functionality, a subscription to Day One costs $5.99/month or $34.99/year.
Endel
Endless ambient soundscapes never sounded so good.
The final application is one I've written about on a couple of occasions in the past: Endel. Endel creates personalized ambient soundscapes to help with sleep, focus, and relaxation. I work in an area with loud intercom announcements, a whooshing white noise machine blasting 24/7, and colleagues walking by and talking throughout the day; every one of those things is either an unwelcome interruption or an invitation to avoid work. Endel, paired with noise-cancelling headphones, helps keep me focused and in a state of flow for long periods.
Recent updates to Endel over the past year have introduced a completely redesigned Mac app and even more finely tuned options for the sounds I listen to. For example, Dynamic Focus lets me position a marker between mellow and energetic on the X-axis and bright and spacey on the Y-axis. In contrast, the Natural soundscape lets me add soft environmental elements like water, rain, thunder, or wind. And because everything is algorithmically generated and based on location and time of day, the soundscapes are non-repetitive, which has been a distraction using other apps once I notice the repeating loop to each sound. Endel also lists that it uses the Pentatonic scale in its soundscapes to create a more pleasant, nondistracting ambience and sound masking to blur out more distracting environmental noises.
Photo 1: Now playing screen show currently paying soundscape.
Photo 2: Minimal navigation page for moving between various ambient moods, setting timers, and tuning sounds.
Photo 3: Many of the recent soundscapes now allow you to tune the sound to fit your preferences.
I use Endel for 2-6 hours daily, primarily to focus at work but also when writing at home and unwinding before bed. And while I do like to intersperse my Endel binges with other ambient tracks that I love, I have been using Endel consistently for years because it's been my favourite app for enhancing my focus and relaxation far and away.
Endel is available for the Mac, AppleTV, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. Free to try with limited functionality, a subscription to Endel costs $14.99/month or $89.99/year. A lifetime option is also available for purchase for $249.99.
In Sum
Feel free to check out these applications and see if they fit with your needs at this time. They might be for you; they might not. I accidentally stumbled across both Endel and Gentler Steaks and grew to love them by taking a chance on both. If you're interested in reading more about the apps I use, let me know, and I'll devote more entries across 2024 to time-test apps that have added a lot of value to me over the years.
