iZen Garden 3 vs BadMeditator

For less than the price of a latte, iZen Garden™ gives you all the peace and tranquility of a beautiful Zen Garden without the sandy mess! Choose from 100s of objects, plants and creatures to place in your garden, then rake the sand. Now Universal. iZen Garden is available for iPhone and iPad in a single app bundle. One price gets you both platforms. New audio track, "Merced River" featuring the sounds of the Yosemite valley. ** Selected as one of the "500 Best Apps in the World" by the Sunday Times of London. ** ** TOP PICK! Featured in O'Reilly's "Best iPhone Apps" ** ** As Featured on iPhones in Apple store displays! ** ** Editor's Choice by ItaliaMac ** ** Selected as one of the Best 100 Apps by iLounge.com 2 years running! ** The tradition of the Zen Garden goes back nearly a thousand years in Japanese and asian culture. iZen Garden brings this beautiful artform to your iPhone or iPod Touch. Choose from over 100 different types of stones, shells, fossils and plants to place in your garden and then use your finger to “rake” the sand into intricate abstract patterns. All while listening to the soothing sounds of one of our 9 built-in meditation soundtracks. iZen Garden™ is perfect for long meetings, train rides, or meditation practice. It helps you to center your mind, relax your psyche and relieve your stress. iZen Garden™ was chosen as a staff favorite it's first week in the App Store. Listen to what others have said: "The best by far... a true rarity: it’s an app that we continue to enjoy many months after the initial purchase." - iLounge "Out of all the Zen Garden applications, this is clearly the most thorough and precise, and the system is clear-cut." - iPhone Alley Features: * 100 different stones, seashells, fossils and plants, all professionally photographed from real objects and beautifully rendered to place in your garden. * Add fluttering and resting butterflies to your garden which will fly around from place to place. * Rotate, scale, and move the objects to place them using a pinch gesture with your fingers. * Four different colors of sand, from beach white, to volcanic black. * Nine different soothing ambient soundtracks to help still your mind while you tend your garden. Relax to the gentle lapping of ocean waves at your feet, the quiet solitude of a forest, or the soft twinkling of bells and wind chimes. * Completely customizable rake with variable width and depth settings. * "Daily Zen" a daily Zen saying or Koan is presented when you enter your garden. * Save your design to your camera roll by holding the Home button and pressing the lock button. * Built-in documentation and help system makes using the app a breeze. * To access the Information Screen double tap anywhere on the sand, or touch the "i" button. * Meditation Timer. Create your garden and then sit in quiet contemplation until the timer finishes and brings you back with a gentle ringing of a bell. * Sleep Timer. Puts your phone to sleep after a set period of time so you can listen to the relaxation sounds to fall asleep without worrying about your battery dying. * Share your garden and your Daily Zen on Twitter, Email, or through your film roll. Includes beautiful themes that frame your garden artfully with different trays and handmade papers. * Save multiple gardens and recall them at any time to continue to tend and change them. And now, with the re-release of iZen Garden, we're offering on-going updates with new objects, new ambiance, and more! See what everyone is talking about, buy iZen Garden™ today!! A monthly subscription to iZen Garden is a doorway to daily zen, and greater peace and happiness. End user license agreement: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/

BADMEDITATOR MANIFESTO (CONDENSED) You’re bad at meditating. So are we. So is almost everyone. Here’s what happens. You download the app. You find a quiet spot. You close your eyes. You breathe. And then your brain starts making grocery lists. Planning arguments you’ll never have. Replaying that thing you said in 2007. The app tells you to notice the thought and let it go. You notice it. You don’t let it go. You think about letting it go. You feel like a failure. You never open the app again. Eighty percent of people who try meditation apps quit. Not because they lack discipline. Not because they’re too busy. Because the apps are lying to them. They’re lying about stillness. About silence. About the blissed-out person on the home screen who definitely doesn’t have a brain full of tacos and regret. We’re done with that. BadMeditator is zen for people who can’t sit still. We don’t teach you how to breathe. We don’t track streaks. We don’t have a British celebrity whispering about your inner light. We have rocks. Stack them. Watch them fall. Stack them again. The physics is real. The gravity is real. The wobble is real. When your tower collapses, it’s not a failure… it’s just what rocks do. And somehow, in the five minutes you spent balancing stone on stone, you forgot to be anxious. That’s the trick. We call it contemplative play. It’s not meditation. It’s not gaming. It’s the thing in between… what happens when you’re absorbed in something pointless and beautiful and your brain finally shuts up. You already know this feeling. Skipping stones. Raking leaves for no reason. Watching rain slide down a window. Fidgeting during a long meeting. These aren’t distractions from presence. They are presence. Sometimes you have to do something in order to do nothing. The games are simple. The philosophy is not. Stone Stack is about temporary order under pressure. You build something improbable. The world disagrees. Both outcomes are correct. Rake & Relax is about making marks that won’t last. The garden has opinions. You fix it or you don’t. Nobody’s keeping score. Drip Dream is about surrender. Water falls when it falls. You can tap. Or you can watch. The water doesn’t care. We built disruption on purpose. Every game has Rebel Mode. Wind knocks your stones. Rain flattens your sand. Leaves drift where they want. This isn’t difficulty. It’s honesty. Real calm isn’t the absence of disruption. It’s what survives it. If your peace depends on perfect conditions, it isn’t peace… it’s just luck that hasn’t run out yet. We’re not anti-meditation. We’re anti-performance. You don’t need to be taught how to be calm. You need permission to stop trying so hard. The name is the point. When you call yourself a bad meditator, the pressure drops. The performance ends. You stop pretending. And paradoxically, you get the thing you were chasing… not through effort, but through play. Here’s what we believe: Stillness is overrated. Absorption is underrated. Calm isn’t achieved. It’s stumbled into. Failure isn’t the opposite of meditation. It might be the point. Your wandering mind isn’t broken. It’s just looking for something interesting to land on. We’re building for the 80 percent. The people with meditation cushions used as footrests. The ones who want calm without a guru telling them to “simply observe.” So we’re not asking you to observe. We’re asking you to stack some rocks. Rake some sand. Watch some water. Be bad at it. And maybe, somewhere in the middle of your magnificent failure, find a little peace. Subvert the dominant paradigm. Because even bad meditators deserve zen.