I’m quite happy to announce that I now have another app available on the App Store!1 Before you click, I’ll warn you, this one isn’t free, but the App Store has always encouraged trying a variety of business models, and “paid up front” was next on my list;2 $0.99 seemed a fair asking price for a lightweight utility.
The core concept of Meditime came from a podcast I was listening to.3 The idea is this: why do all the meditation apps have to be guided meditation, or come with ten million different settings, or decide what you should be listening to while you meditate? The point of the whole thing is to clear your mind, after all, and personally I’ve never had any luck with doing that while somebody is talking at me, and the lovely sound of water in a creek mostly just makes me feel like I need to use the restroom.
So, as with my previous app, having found nothing that I actually liked, I muttered “fine, I’ll do it myself” and opened Xcode.
The result is what I honestly believe I can call the simplest meditation app out there; swipe up or down to adjust the timer, double-tap to start. Adjust the time while it’s running if you like, or double-tap to stop; and if you don’t want a timer at all, drag it all the way down to zero, and it’ll run as a stopwatch, instead. At the end, the app will automatically log the session to the Health app, so you can keep track of it all nicely.4
As I said, the app is $0.99, but there’s no ads, no in-app purchases to ‘upgrade’ anything, and that one purchase will work on iPhone, iPad, and the iPod Touch, assuming Apple still makes those.5 And I’m already planning to update it to work well on iOS 12, including a little bit of support for the fancy new Siri Automation things. So, hopefully you can see the value, and if you’ve got a buck to spare, I’d quite appreciate it if you’d give it a try.
- In case you missed why that says “another,” have a look here. ↩
- Still to go: free with in-app-purchases and subscription-based; I’ll be skipping the ‘free with consumable in-app purchases’ because apps made that way are generally terrible and at least a little bit immoral. ↩
- And no, that isn’t a direct link to the episode, because I’m not certain which episode it was, although a reasonable guess would be this one, although there’s also a chance it was this one; either way, Do By Friday is a great podcast and I recommend it. Although not, I should add, to children, everyone involved does enjoy swearing. ↩
- It’ll work without doing that, though, too; if you don’t want it saving to the Health app, just don’t give it permission to do so, and it won’t bug you about it. ↩
- It requires iOS 11.4 to run, so hopefully you’re all up-to-date, as you should be.
And saving to the Health app will only work on devices that have it, so the iPad won’t do that, but if Apple does decide to add the Health app to iPads, it’ll start working there, too. (I can’t comment on whether or not the iPod Touch can do that, because I genuinely have no idea if they support Health or not. Seriously, does Apple even make those anymore?) ↩