ActiveMind

Your check-in, next to what your body was doing. Finish a check-in and you now see the fortnight it asked about: how you slept, your heart rate variability, your resting heart rate, your steps and your own mood, each against your previous six weeks. It stays quiet unless a gap is big enough to be worth a sentence, and it says these things turned up together rather than claiming one caused the other. All of it is read on your phone and sent nowhere. A stress check that reads three things at once. The stress check now returns three separate readings from one set of questions: stress, anxiety and low mood. Every scale in the app credits the researchers who wrote it, on the result itself. Your rings, and what they actually mean. Home shows exercise minutes and stand hours, plus flights climbed, resting energy and blood oxygen. Tap it for the part Apple never explains: exercise minutes are not time spent exercising, they are minutes your watch judged were at least as hard as a brisk walk. Stand hours are not hours spent standing, they are a count of hours you got up in. Twelve is an ordinary day, not a feat of endurance. Each ring gets a week of history, and days your watch spent on the charger are drawn hollow instead of as a zero, because not wearing it is not the same as not moving. A check-in that takes one second. Mind opens with the question it was already asking. Slide once to say how the day feels, and add a few words about what put you there. Those words stay on your phone. Apple Health has no room for them, so this is the only place they live. The mood chart shows a fortnight instead of a month. Thirty bars on a phone are three pixels each, and nobody remembers a reason from four weeks ago. Weather that looks like weather. The backgrounds were washing out to near white, which made a clear day and an overcast one look identical. Every sky is rebuilt: real colour that holds, stars on a clear night, and clouds you can actually see. Explore finds things it was missing. Museums, Libraries, Cinema, Historic, Parks, Gym, Coffee, Bars, Bowling and Spa were all coming back empty in places that had plenty of them. The searches behind those buttons now ask the question the right way round, and they answer faster. Also fixed: a message that said "Nothing within 30 miles" above a list of places 13 miles away. And a lookup that could not reach its server used to take over a minute to admit it. Now it takes seconds. Day trips. Three trips could never appear at all, because of a rule they could not satisfy. They can now. Asking for pizza no longer sends you to a bar, and there are new itineraries built around burgers, pizza and barbecue. A few trips also ended on advice rather than a place, and those steps are real stops now. Your Sunday letter, shorter. Every number in it was printed twice, once as a tile and again in a sentence underneath. The tiles keep the numbers and the writing says the part numbers cannot. Sleep also used to get two verdicts at once, calling 7.1 hours "a good average" and "not quite enough" in the same breath. It picks one now.