Since the release of Siri Shortcuts in iOS 12, and even more-so since iOS 13 opened up Shortcuts parameters to third-party developers, “Shortcuts utility apps” — apps who by their nature rely entirely on Shortcuts integration to function — have exploded in both number and quality. Apps like Toolbox Pro and Pushcuts all build on what Shortcuts has to offer with otherwise-unavailable features or useful add-ons to the functionality of the Shortcuts app. Joining their ranks today is the super-handy data visualization app Charty, from developer Rodrigo Araujo

Charting, of Course

Charty is built entirely around the goal of plotting data generated via Siri Shortcuts so you can more easily visualize your habits, health data, and other graphically-oriented information. Through a pair of crucial Shortcuts actions — Create Chart and Add Series to Chart — you can create a blank canvas to plot data generated by a series of Shortcuts action as a line graph, scatter graph, bar graph, pie chart, or donut chart. The easiest example to provide is a simple Shortcut that pulls in your heart rate data for the last month and plots it on a scatter plot.

Disregard all of those days where I neglected to wear my Apple Watch.

After plotting all of the points, you can fine-tune the settings of your chart in the Charty app itself (or automate this process too with advanced actions like Style Axis and Style Line Series). Custom minimum and maximum values for both the X- and Y-axes, the option to add a secondary Y-axis for multi-series graphs, customizable X-Axis labels when needed, as well as the ability to create stacked bar charts are all available through Charty and the power of Shortcuts. Charty also allows you to plot data imported directly from a .csv file — expanding its capabilities beyond data strictly generated by or connected to Shortcuts. Simply point your Shortcut at a .csv file and tell Charty which column headers you want plotted and you’re off to the races. I’m looking forward to see how Rodrigo continues to expand Charty’s functionality — as a researcher, I’m hoping to see boxplots, trendlines with regression equations, logarithmic corrections, and other more advanced plotting methods added in future releases.

There are lots of Shortcuts actions and routines that generate data and could easily benefit from a simple bar graph or pie chart to provide useful insights more quickly and effectively. One example that comes to mind is graphing time-tracking data from Toggl once every week, let’s say, to see what tasks or projects you’ve been the most busy with — all without having to open the unpleasant Toggl app or the clunky web client from your iOS device. Charty is the perfect companion for those who accumulate lots of meta-data about their lives and want to frequently revisit and reassess the areas they are seeking to improve — whether that be calories burned, books read, or tasks completed, Charty plugs right into your existing Shortcuts routines and allows you to quickly turn those datasets into easily-digestible graphics. The option to create default chart format settings and custom “Export Profiles” of chart size, font size, and background color both help to add consistency in how your charts are formatted before saving them for yourself or sharing with the world.

The ability to create custom export profiles is a great way to standardize how your charts look when ready to share.

Charty also comes pre-equipped with a library of Shortcuts that serve as idea-fodder for what things you can graph as well as mini-tutorials on how to create complex Shortcuts that integrates even Charty’s most advanced actions. And, naturally, two dozen or so custom app icons and a wide variety of chart themes are pre-installed for the colorfully-oriented among us.

Charty’s custom icons, graph theme options, and extensive collection of example Shortcuts each add a nice touch.

Useful, Given a Usecase

The only major complaint I’ve had while beta-testing Charty is the sense that it just isn’t an app that I personally have a use for. This doesn’t make Charty a bad app — quite the opposite is true, in fact. Charty is an excellent app in its very niche sliver of the market. The nature of what I do as a PhD student might make you think that I am making charts and graphs all the time, but in reality the data analysis work I often need to do is well beyond what Charty (or any other iOS app I know of) can provide. Unfortunately, this is an area where I still rely heavily on my Windows PC to accomplish the things that my iPad can’t. In addition, once you are comfortable with different tools — whether it’s Shortcuts, Excel, Numbers, etc — you’ll feel drawn to the ones that give you the highest return for the least effort. I am extremely comfortable with spreadsheet software like Excel, so there were many instances while using Charty where I said to myself “I know exactly how to do this in Excel in 1/10th the time.” This isn’t a criticism of Charty; it’s understanding my own needs, my own proficiencies, and Charty’s unique place in the market of graphing tools. Let me explain what I mean with, well, a chart:

Finding where you land on each of these lines will give you an idea of how useful Charty might be for you.

Charty is an app that is tailor-made for advanced Shortcuts users who very frequently want to graph the same set of data quickly with minimal fuss over the details — things like graphing how many steps you’ve taken or glasses of water you drank in the last week. Charty is also capable of graphing much more advanced datasets with its .csv import actions...but often times when generating those .csv documents you’re already in an application far more capable than Shortcuts and Charty when it comes to handling tables and graphs. If you’re like me and are very comfortable in applications like Numbers and Excel, Charty might feel like a lot of extra fiddling for the same end results.

Pushing The Limits That Should Not Exist

Ultimately, I think there are a lot of people who will be extremely happy to have Charty integrated into their Shortcuts routines and available to quickly and repeatedly graph data on their iOS devices — and I’m quite happy for them. The developer has made a very well-designed app and an excellent addition to the growing array of Shortcuts utilities pushing the limits of what Shortcuts can do. Although I myself may not be someone who will use Charty every day, I’m always happy to see new apps that keep the pressure on Apple to continue expanding Shortcuts’ functionality and third-party integrations. Despite my own lack of uses for Charty, I still highly recommend giving it a try for yourself — it solves a set of problems I do not have, but you just might! Charty is available on the app store today for free with a portion of the Shortcuts actions and features, and the full app experience can be had for a one-time payment of $2.99 for a limited time.

Over the holidays, Destin Sandlin from SmarterEveryDay released a video demonstrating how many popular smart home devices (like Google Home, Amazon Echo, and even Siri) can be fed voice commands from afar with a laser. If you haven't seen it yet, go give it a watch — it's a fascinating video. Importantly, as Destin points out, this exploit likely doesn’t present much risk to the average consumer — precisely aiming finely-tuned lasers, converting a voice message into the correct beam sequence, and having proper line of sight to the target device’s MEMS microphone all present roadblocks that make this strategy pretty impractical. That being said, understanding what access your smart assistants have to your light switches, locks, and garage doors — and how secure those assistants are — is important information you should equip yourself with. So, let’s see what options we protect Siri and your iPhone from attacks like this one, as well as others.

Disabling “Hey Siri” (or Siri Entirely)

The way the laser exploit in Destin’s video works is by targeting the MEMS microphone that listens for the “Hey Siri” summon phrase and the subsequent command. Naturally, the easiest way to prevent this laser hack — or just prevent someone with a similar-enough voice from activating Siri — is disabling “Hey Siri” entirely. This means you’ll have to long-press the side button to activate Siri manually, but nothing less than physical access to your device will allow someone to trick Siri into unlocking your doors. Navigate to Settings > Siri & Search and turn the "Listen for Hey Siri" toggle off. Now, even a precisely aimed laser with encoded voice instructions aimed at your phone won't be able to trigger any action by Siri. If you are extra concerned about someone misusing Siri (despite it's many useful features), you can also disable it entirely by toggling off both "Hey Siri" and "Press Side Button for Siri".

Disabling “Hey Siri” (or Siri entirely) will also protect you from anyone hijacking your voice assistant.

Limiting Access to Your Locked Device

Siri already restricts certain actions and requests if your phone is not unlocked — for instance, asking “Where is my wife?” to find their location using Find My always requires your iPhone to be unlocked. As Destin found out in his video, unlocking a smart lock or opening a garage door also requires your iPhone to be unlocked — the operating system understands that access to a physical location is being requested, so it rightly asks for some authentication.

These toggles will allow you to restrict access to certain features of your phone while it is locked.

When it comes to less sensitive requests (like turning on a smart lightbulb), Siri is more lax by default. Luckily, some granular control exists if you’re worried about covert efforts to dim your lights. If you navigate to the “Face ID & Passcode” page in Settings, there is a section called "Allow Access When Locked" with various toggles for different tools and features. As you might guess, toggling any one of these off means that feature cannot be accessed while the phone is locked. If you toggle "Home Control" off, voice commands involving smart home devices will require you to set up a HomeKit pin to control the devices with Siri — that is, unless you unlock your phone. Disabling HomeKit access from the lock screen prevents malicious actors equipped with either laser beams or good vocal impression skills from adjusting your thermostat without permission.

(While you're flipping these toggles anyway, consider securing your device further by turning off USB Accessory access.)

There is no shortage of diet and nutrition apps on the app store — apps designed for specific and rigorous dieting systems, services that harvest all of your dietary data to sell to third parties, and calorie-counting cudgels that all too often brow-beat their users over the smallest deviations from Ideal Intake™. Moderation — developed by Dominic Williams — is a food diary app that removes all of the least-pleasant aspects of diet tracking apps and focuses in on one simple question: Was your meal healthy or not?

Logging meals is as easy as tapping “Healthy” or “Unhealthy” — whatever that means for your goals.

Removing the Friction from Meal Tracking

Moderation's best feature is its simplicity — no need to scan barcodes or record calorie counts after every meal; all you do is click "Healthy" or "Unhealthy" in four daily categories (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and Snacks). What you consider to be a "Healthy" meal vs an "Unhealthy" meal is completely up to you and your diet tracking goals. For example, I have been trying to reduce the amount of sugar I add to my coffee every morning, so lately I have been rating my Breakfasts as "Healthy" or "Unhealthy" based on that metric. Folks who are trying intermittent fasting might rate a meal as "Healthy" if they ate nothing, and folks trying a plant-based diet might rate a meal as "Unhealthy" if they sneak in a little bacon. That's the beauty of Moderation: you can self-evaluate your daily meals based on what changes you are trying to make in your eating habits, or what dietary system you are trying to follow. This relieves much of the pressure that other diet and nutrition apps put on their users to meet a certain target, or stack up against some arbitrary standard — the same pressure and sense of judgement that so often causes people to give up on making healthier diet choices.

Useful features like rich notifications and Siri Shortcuts support make logging your meals as low-effort as possible.

Moderation also makes it easy to log your meals with custom-set reminders, rich notifications to quickly record a meal, and Siri Shortcuts support that allows you to integrate meal tracking into any of your custom Shortcuts routines. I often find myself struggling to consistently use habit-tracking apps because, well, I don't get into the habit of tracking my habits. Moderation's built-in reminder system has made it easy for me to quickly log a meal right from the notification, and Siri Shortcuts support has helped me make sure I log my healthy (or unhealthy) eating habits every day.

Design Aligned with Purpose

Moderation's simple and straightfoward premise is packaged with an appealing, elegant design as well as intuitive, clear feedback mechanisms. Each day in a month-view calendar is given a gradient from green to red based on what proportion of that day's meals were rated as "Healthy" or "Unhealthy". Streaks of all-healthy days are celebrated in the month-view, and used as a goal to beat in the "Keep Motivated" section (notably, "Unhealthy" streaks are not as prominently displayed, in keeping with the apps positive and encouraging style). Even the button design for each meal reaffirms the relaxed nature of Moderation, with clever use of Emoji to visually represent both "Healthy" (🥑,🥗,🍲,🍏) and "Unhealthy" (🙈,🍕,🍔,🍩) meals.

My worst eating day tends to be Friday, because Friday night is D&D night — AKA fast food and candy night!

Basic metrics are maintained on-device to give you insight on what days of the week you often struggle to eat healthy, and which meals usually trip you up on any given day. A running percentage of healthy meals provides a quick glimpse of your eating habits over the last seven days and the current month. Importantly, Moderation has a user-first privacy stance; all of the data you log in Moderation is kept on-device, and there are no ads or other data-harvesting components in the app — making it a great choice for the privacy-conscious.

"Moderation in All Things"

I've been using Moderation for about a month to track my own diet, and I've never had more success with habit tracking in any other app. However, there are some features (some apparently on the horizon) that I wish Moderation would add to really flesh out the experience. Repeating reminders (like those offered by Due) would make it even harder to forget to log a meal. Additional data visualization options, custom goal setting, and the ability to export your data would all be welcome additions to an already excellent app.

There are many good diet tracking apps out there — Moderation is a great diet tracking app because of the uniquely positive, balanced, and affirming way in which it is designed. Scanning food barcodes is laborious, counting calories often brings feelings of shame and failure, and strict definitions of "Healthy" and "Unhealthy" often don't fit with a person's unique goals. Moderation avoids all these pitfalls while still delivering useful metrics for self-evaluation and motivational encouragement to continue improving your diet. Tracking your eating habits has never been so easy, or more importantly: so painless. Moderation is available for free on the app store.

As ambient noise machines find their way into more corporate offices, retail spaces, and infant nurseries, ambient noise apps have also grown in popularity. Joining that list today is Dark Noise for iOS — an excellent ambient noise app developed by Charlie Chapman.

Why All The Noise?

Ambient noise machines and apps like Dark Noise have numerous uses and benefits. Some people find that they or their infants sleep better when playing ambient noise. Others, myself included, find that ambient noise helps them to focus on the task at hand, or remain productive in a noisy environment (for the nerdy: here is one of the many studies highlighting the cognitive benefits of ambient noise).

Dark Noise caters to these needs with a comprehensive list of over 30 sounds to choose from, and a simple UI that lets you pick a sound and get back to what you were doing — be it sleep or work. While beta testing Dark Noise, I have experienced first-hand the productivity benefits of ambient noise; Dark Noise has quickly become one of my most-used apps.

Integrations and Customizations

Although at its core Dark Noise is just a list of looping soundbites, it supports many useful features and integrations that satisfy the needs of power users as well. As you might expect, Dark Noise has an optional sleep timer with both countdown and fixed-time support, a Favorites feature to keep your most-used sounds easily accessible at the top of the list, and AirPlay support (with full AirPlay 2 support on the way).

Beyond the basics, Dark Noise also has a customizable widget that allows you to quickly start any noise from the Widget page (or perhaps the iPadOS home screen). In addition, each sound in Dark Noise has its own action in Siri Shortcuts, allowing you to integrate Dark Noise into any number of your Shortcuts routines. I myself have used the Shortcuts actions to incorporate Dark Noise into my simple Bedtime shortcut, kicking off ambient Campfire noises before I head to sleep.

Sleep timers, Siri Shortcuts support, and a customizable Widget each add a useful way to interact with Dark Noise.

Not Just Nice on the Ears

A good ambient noise app has a quality selection of sounds to choose from — a great ambient noise app has a beautiful design to match. This is where Dark Noise distinguishes itself from many other apps in the category — the developer has invested so much time and care into the artful details of this app that you can't help but appreciate them. Dark Noise has eight custom Themes and 22 custom app icons (many of which are creative takes on some of my favorite podcasts' artwork), and the developer doesn't seem eager to stop adding new ones any time soon.

All eight of Dark Noise’s custom themes, with no signs from the developer that the list will stop growing.

However, it's the little things that I've appreciated most about Dark Noise's design. For example, when favoriting a sound the Favorite heart is filled with a subtle but whimsical animation. Each sound has a unique minimalist icon designed by Charlie himself — but by far my favorite details are the animations on the Now Playing screen. Each of the custom-designed icons also have custom animations that move almost rhythmically as the sound plays in your ears. I only wish iOS supported animated lock screen thumbnails so I wouldn't have to leave my phone unlocked to enjoy them.

Each sound icon has its own custom animation that pleasantly loops on the Now Playing screen.

Wishlist and Outro

I can't overstate how much I've enjoyed adding Dark Noise to my workflow (and sleepflow!), and I'm looking forward to some of my wishlist items making it into future releases. For example, an upload feature for adding my own sound files to the app would be a welcome addition. Folders and/or collapsible sound categories would also be a nice touch to clean up the main table view, especially as the list of out-of-the-box sounds naturally grows with each update. Perhaps my most wished-for feature are some spooky dungeon sounds to use as ambiance during D&D sessions — the moment I gave Dark Noise a try I knew it would be a killer addition to my Dungeon Master toolkit.

Dark Noise is a simple and elegant ambient noise app that strikes just the right balance between beauty and function. The developer has also done an excellent job at communicating with his beta testers and incorporating that feedback into the app — foreshadowing similar responsiveness as the app is pushed out to a public audience, which I find incredibly valuable. Dark Noise has been an incredible addition to my home screen, and has single-handedly refocused my attention on many pressing projects over the last few weeks — perhaps it could have the same effect on your productivity. Dark Noise is available today for $3.99 on the app store.

Like most students, on any given day I have a long list of to-do items related to my coursework, research goals, and life in general. In the past, I have used the stock Reminders app on iOS for my many to-do items — but the problem I ran into was that I didn't actually complete the tasks after the reminder popped up. I found that I often read the notification and quickly went back to whatever activity I was doing at the time, completely disregarding the thing that I needed to do. That is, until I found Due.

Due's Distinguishing Feature

Due is a reminder app with a unique feature that sets it apart from its competition: persistent reminders. When you set up a reminder in Due, not only do you set the time you want to be reminded, but you also set up an Auto-Snooze time — the time interval you will be re-reminded of the task. In other words, Due reminders pester you until you acknowledge them in some way, either by actually marking the task as complete or snoozing it to a later time. This feature has significantly reduced the number of reminders I get a notification for but then immediately forget about on my lock screen.

Due’s key feature is that reminder notifications repeat until you snooze or complete them.

The nature of Due's pestering notifications means that I tend to use it for time-sensitive reminders or reminders for things I really don't want to do, and less for general tasks and events (which tend to wind up in Fantastical, my calendar app of choice). For example, I often use Due to remind me when an assignment for a class needs to be submitted online so I don't accidentally space it off — this has saved my bacon on more than one occasion! Full support for repeating reminders in Due also means that daily, weekly, or monthly reminders like taking my morning allergy pill or paying our rent don't slip through the cracks.

The Fine Details

Beyond its full support for typical functions like repeating reminders, Due also offers a wide variety of customizations and other useful features to its users. For example, Due uses natural language processing when creating reminders rather than relying entirely on date and time scroll wheels like many other apps. I have found that adding reminders with natural language processing is far faster and intuitive than scrolling through three different wheels to set a reminder for a specific time.

Due’s natural language parsing allows for quickly creating a reminder via text alone

The Notification Snooze menu seen when tapping a Due notification can be customized to your heart's content, allowing you to set up multiple custom snooze durations as well as set times of day that the current reminder can be postponed to if needed. The Auto-Snooze duration (i.e. how long until each reminder pesters you again) can also be set for all newly created reminders, or manually adjusted for each reminder as you create them.

Due’s settings menu allows easy customization, while it’s notification snooze options allow for quickly triaging new reminders.

Due natively supports syncing its reminders via iCloud, and can also pull its list of reminders from specific lists within the native Reminders app. Lastly, custom sound effects, haptic feedback controls, and a Dark Mode toggle are excellent user experience options baked right into the app.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Due is an excellent iOS reminder app that can be finely tailored to your preferences, and uniquely solves the problem of ineffective reminder notifications. Since I started using Due, I've missed fewer deadlines, more consistently journaled at night, and less-often kicked myself for forgetting my allergy medicine in the morning. Due is the perfect reminder app for procrastinators and "space cadets" like myself who need a little extra prodding to actually do the things on our to-do list — I certainly would be far less productive without it. Due is $4.99 on the App Store.

Airmail, a very popular email client for Mac and iOS, announced this week that it was reshuffling its pricing strategy — the app is now free to download, with numerous "optional" features locked behind a new subscription ($2.99/month or $9.99/year). I say "optional" because included in this list of pay-walled features are notifications — something most consider an essential function of any email application. Another damning component of this rollout was the fact that users were notified in the app the day the changes went into effect — no forewarning or advanced explanation of the reasons behind this change took place. Naturally, many users of Airmail are incredibly frustrated with both the way these changes were announced as well as the changes themselves. Although I don't use Airmail personally, I'm still frustrated with how this went down because it muddies the waters for other independent developers also considering subscription pricing.

There have been a lot blog posts and podcast segments about this situation (and yet here I am adding to the pile) — but I think the conversation that best captures how I feel was on this week's episode of Connected. Stephen, Federico, and (half of) Myke excellently explain the blowback to this pricing change, and even share some advice that developers considering subscription pricing plans might benefit to hear. Stephen hits the nail on the head as to why this decision hurts so badly:

Stephen Hackett sums up my feelings on this Airmail situation on the latest episode of Connected.

When your strategic advantage is being a thoughtful, independent developer with a devoted user base, mistakes like this can easily be deadly. Hopefully Airmail reassess this decision and considers what steps they can take to regain their users trust — and hopefully other developers will learn from Airmail's mistake.