Athlytic 5.0: AI Fitness Trainer
With the release of watchOS 11, the Vitals App and Workout Load have been in the spotlight, which in turn has led to a slew of exercise monitoring apps that, at least for the time being, offer a more scientific approach to exercise without the risk of upgrading to a beta version of the system. Athlytic has years of experience in this area, along with the Gentler Streak, which won this year’s Apple Design Award, and it automatically analyzes all the data collected by the Apple Watch to help you find the right balance between exercise and rest, and to guide you to a safer way to improve your fitness.
Unlike the Gentler Streak, where the main screen is dominated by text-based representations, Athlytic has a more traditional circular design. The first screen gives you an overview of your recovery, sleep, exercise and energy expenditure for the day. Based on this data, you can determine if it’s a good day to exercise and how much you need to do. Each ring can be tapped to see how the data was analyzed in more detail and the results, and if you don’t know anything about a particular piece of data, you can swipe to the bottom for a description of the term. The recently updated version 5.0 further enriches the presentation of sleep, in addition to the original sleep performance score, Athlytic also calculates the user’s sleep quality, and you can click on it to see a graph of the sleep quality history as well as other related indicators.
Below the ring is the health assessment, which will determine whether your body is in a healthy state based on your recent heart rate, blood oxygen, and respiration data. At the bottom of the health items are green checkmarks, so you can click on them to see why they are abnormal.
The last part of the first screen shows the stress condition. The data source here is not from positive thinking, but a result of combining heart rate and resting heart rate data, which can reflect the intensity of cardiovascular activity to a certain extent, and is considered as “real psychological stress”. Stress conditions are marked in three colors, blue for low stress, orange for medium stress, and red for high stress. With the help of the histogram, you can see how stressed you are at various times of the day. If you’re under pressure, you can slide to the bottom of the page for stress-relieving tips to protect your cardiovascular system.
The Trends section is highly similar to the Gentler Streak in that it displays 7/30 day exercise trends, and you can use the blue volume curves and zones to see if you’ve met your exercise goals in the near future. In addition to the exercise data, Athlytic also displays an additional recovery curve, with a green flag for good recovery, a yellow flag for average, and a red flag for when you’re struggling, reminding you that it’s time to take a break.
This column also shows you the exercise load curve, which is very similar to the one in watchOS 11, and uses a combination of graphs and text to show you how you’ve been exercising recently. For someone like me, who only relies on swimming once a week to support my workouts, exercise is naturally cardio-based, and loads and injuries are very low. In addition, the app will also show multiple curves for heart rate, aerobic exercise, exercise adaptations, etc., which can provide more detailed data to support users in adjusting their exercise programs.
Password App: a New, Upgraded Standalone App from Apple
With the launch of the new generation of systems at WWDC 2024, we’re not only seeing a lot of smarter system features, but also a number of system app updates, such as the new standalone Passwords app, which has been upgraded from Keychain.
In addition to password management, the Passwords app also summarizes a number of previous system-related features, such as Wi-Fi password management, Sign in Apple-related accounts, and more, all of which are presented in a list on the app’s interface. Truth be told, I’m not a big fan of keeping passwords in the cloud. I don’t trust the security of the cloud, and I usually create and memorize my important passwords using my own password logic. Password management tools for me are just shortcuts that I look for because I don’t want to manually enter them myself. The Password app is a great shortcut. I’ve been using the iCloud keychain to manage all my streaming account passwords for convenience, and whereas previously I had to go through multiple layers of clicks in system settings to view those passwords, the standalone Passwords app makes it a lot easier and quicker to do so.
The password app’s security checks are also very useful. For example, I keep passwords for a lot of test registration sites for my studies and work, such as JLPT, TOEIC, and Goethe. I took the first two in Japan, where such sites are characterized by a very simple website, very old password rules, and even do not support punctuation. So the probability of being cracked and leaked is very high. The password app helped me to detect the leakage of passwords on the darknet, so that I can change them in time.
However, so far, there are still some basic deficiencies in Password app compared to other apps on the market. For example, it doesn’t support the watchOS platform, and lacks some necessary categorization capabilities. For example, Sign in Apple displays all account and password information in a list at the same level, with no corresponding categories to view them individually, and it lacks the ability to categorize and retrieve information such as tags.
For example, Sign in with App is the information that is automatically stored in the password app after you choose to sign up in that way in the app, and currently there is little ability to edit this type of account in the password app. For example, if you have an existing X account associated with Sign in with Apple, and you want to store X’s password in the Passwords app, you’ll have to create a new entry to store it, which will be displayed alongside your existing Sign in with Apple account, making the logic a bit confusing.
Just as importantly, the Passwords app doesn’t support storing activation information or authorization files related to the management software, so those who need to do so won’t be able to migrate to the app yet.
To experience the latest Passwords app, you’ll need to upgrade your Apple device to the latest developer beta. We don’t recommend upgrading your primary device, as there may be bugs that could affect your ability to use your device normally, so please use caution when trying out the app.