Posts in reviews

On This Day: My New Favorite Way to Revisit Old Photos

If you’ve followed my work for long, you’ve probably picked up on the fact that I’m a nostalgic person. I love to relive old memories, share old stories, and look at old pictures. It’s just the way I am.

That’s why I’m a big fan of Apple’s Memories feature built into the Photos app. You’re telling me my phone can deliver a slideshow of great pictures from my library anytime I want, and with a cheesy soundtrack to boot? Count me in. Photos is an amazing app for resurfacing pictures that otherwise might have been forgotten.

But there’s always been one feature I felt was missing from Photos: a roundup of every picture you’ve taken on a particular date in past years.1 While automatically-generated memories are great, I don’t want to limit my nostalgic photo viewing to the pictures my phone thinks are the best. I want a way to review all my pictures from the past, and an “on this day” approach is one that works well in other contexts, like journaling. Why not photos?

Enter a new app for the iPhone and iPad from developer Florian Grossmann fittingly called On This Day. It’s a simple, nicely-designed way to revisit photos you took on a particular date in previous years, and it’s quickly become a go-to for me. In fact, On This Day is now a part of my regular morning routine because it enables me to quickly do something I love to do: look at old photos and reminisce about fun moments, amazing trips, and milestones in the lives of myself and my loved ones.

The app’s UI is a simple grid of pictures, much like the one you’re used to seeing in Photos, except instead of showing every picture in your library, the app only includes images and videos from a particular date, which is displayed at the bottom center of the screen. The grid is broken up into years by headings that stick to the top of the screen as you scroll, ensuring you always know which year you’re browsing. By default, scrolling down the screen moves you backwards in time towards older photos, though you can reverse this order in the app’s settings.

Tapping on a picture will open it in a full-screen view that not only allows you to see the photo in finer detail, but also to learn more about it and act on it. I like how much information and functionality is packed into this simple screen. At the top of the screen is the photo’s time and date (as well as a count of how many photos you took on that particular day), and at the bottom of the screen, the app shows the location of where the photo was taken on a map. If you prefer to view your photo without these overlays, a single tap will dismiss them, and you can swipe left and right to move between photos in the full-screen view.

In the upper-right corner of this view, there are four buttons: Info, Favorite, Share, and Delete. Favoriting a picture in On This Day adds it to your Favorites collection in Photos. This can come in handy since the app doesn’t have the ability to actually open an image in Photos; the developer says this is due to technical limitations of the Photos app itself. But at the very least, you can favorite a photo to refer to later in the Photos app as a workaround.

The Photo Details pane includes a variety of technical information about a photo.

The Photo Details pane includes a variety of technical information about a photo.

If you want to dig into the technical details of a picture, you can tap the Info button to open the Photo Details pane. There, you’ll find the photo’s resolution, camera and lens information, focal length, and more. It’s great to have this data close at hand when reviewing photos, especially if you want to see which iPhone you were using at a particular time in the past.

This core functionality is all I’ve ever wanted out of this kind of tool. It’s fast, it’s easy to use, and it’s designed well to help me find the photos I want and then get out of the way so I can fully enjoy them. It fits right in with current iOS aesthetics, as well, with Liquid Glass headings and buttons that blend naturally with your photos and adapt to the varying content behind them. The experience of reviewing pictures in On This Day is simply great, and I enjoy opening the app every day to see what memories it has to offer.

If you want to review photos from other days, you can do so by tapping the arrow buttons on either side of the date at the bottom of the screen or by tapping the date itself to open up a calendar to select from. Once you’ve navigated away from the current date, the app will offer a Today button above the calendar to quickly get you back to your starting point.

The app’s settings include a number of customization options, too. There, you can adjust the density of the photo grid, change how images are ordered, disable the optional streak count, and schedule notifications to remind you to review your photos each day. On This Day also offers the unique ability to decide what content the app sends when you share a photo; you can include the date in various formats, customized text, or no text at all. For me, part of the fun of looking at old photos is sending them to other people, so I appreciate the option to customize what gets shared.

Finally, On This Day also offers widgets in small, medium, large, and extra-large sizes so you can see photos from past years right on your Home Screen. You can adjust how many pictures appear within a widget, and photos can be displayed in full color even if, like me, you’re a user of the Clear or Tinted appearance for app icons.

This is the sort of app that I’ve been wanting on my devices for a long time, and the fact that it’s been made with such care and attention to detail just makes the experience of using it that much sweeter. I love revisiting old photos in the app every day, and if you’re the type of person who’s built up years of pictures in your library and delights in having them resurfaced for you, I think you’ll enjoy it, too. I recommend giving it a try.

On This Day is available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad as a free download, and the iPad version can also be run on the Vision Pro. The app displays photos from the past three years for free. You can unlock all past years and the app’s full range of customization options with a one-time payment of $4.99 or a $0.99/month subscription.

  1. You can technically achieve this by entering the current date (e.g., “April 7”) in the search bar and even automate this search with Shortcuts, as cleverly demonstrated to me recently by reader Miles Jefford. Personally, though, I think Photos should just include an On This Day collection. ↩

Moods Faster: Effortless Mood Tracking

I’ve said over and over that the most important feature of any habit tracker is being able to get in and out of the app quickly. For some developers, that doesn’t always come naturally. After all, doesn’t every developer want their customers to use their app more than others? Sure they do, but it’s not always the right instinct.

That’s something Nick Leith has understood for a long time. Leith is the developer of Remind Me Faster, a companion app for Apple Reminders that accelerates task entry. I’ve moved in and out of Reminders annually for my macOS reviews and every time, the first app I download after the move-in is Remind Me Faster because it makes using Reminders much easier.

Leith has been thinking about how to make data entry simple and fast for years thanks to that app, and it shows with his brand new app, Moods Faster (Get it? Moods Faster -> Move Faster). Okay, you probably didn’t need that nudge, but I like the name. It’s fun.

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Dot: The Menu Bar Calendar That’s Become My Main Calendar

Over time, I’ve gravitated towards a two-calendar system on my Mac because I’ve never found an app where both the desktop app and the menu bar version meet all my needs. That’s probably because my calendar use is a little backwards. I don’t have a lot of meetings each week; instead, my calendar is a mix of reminders, package deliveries, and a handful of work and family events. With just two or three entries each day, I’ve found myself managing events more and more often from a simple menu bar app, reserving my full calendar app for more involved event entry and planning.

On the desktop side, I’ve used Apple Calendar the most, but I’ve also used Fantastical and BusyCal for extended periods, ultimately landing on Notion Calendar. It isn’t perfect, but its Notion integration can be handy at times. On the menu bar side of the equation, I used Dato for many years. It’s an excellent app, but even it is a little more than I need, which is why I was excited to recently discover Dot.

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Creator Studio Review: Redefining Pro for the Modern Era

Starting today, Apple is offering a subscription bundle of its creative apps called Creator Studio. Some of what’s included is exclusive to the subscription package, while other parts of it remain available à la carte. It’s a lot to absorb, and I’ll get to all the details in due course.

However, what’s most exciting to me is the fact that Apple is clearly repositioning these apps to appeal to a broader cross-section of creatives. Apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are no longer just for Hollywood and music studios. By filling out the iPad lineup and adding Pixelmator Pro along with enhanced versions of their productivity apps, Apple has taken the first steps toward realigning its apps with what it means to be a creative professional in 2026.

This transition isn’t the sort of thing that happens overnight, which is why it’s easy to spot the gaps in Creator Studio’s offerings. I ran into a couple of bugs along the way, too. However, by and large, I think the bundle of apps hits the right notes and is heading in the right direction. Let’s take a closer look.

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Two Months with the Narwal Freo X10 Pro

In the depths of the pandemic, I bought an iRobot Roomba j7 vacuum. At the time, it was one of the nicer models iRobot offered, but it was expensive. It did a passable job in areas with few obstacles, but it filled up fast, had a hard time positioning itself on its base and frequently got clogged with debris, requiring me to partially disassemble and clean it regularly. The experience was bad enough that I’d written off robot vacuums as nice-to-have appliances that weren’t a great value.

So, when Narwal contacted me to see if I wanted to test its new Freo X10 Pro, I was hesitant at first. However, I’d seen a couple of glowing early reviews online, so I thought I’d see if the passage of time had been good to robo-vacuums, and boy has it. The Narwal Freo X10 Pro is not only an excellent vacuum cleaner, but a mopping champ, too.

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Activas: Modern Design with a Sprinkling of AI

Activas is a new health and wellness tracker for the iPhone and iPad from developer Brian Hough, who built it from the ground up with Apple Intelligence and Liquid Glass in mind. The app serves as a dashboard that brings together information from the Health app in a colorful and easy-to-understand way, using progressive disclosure to avoid overwhelming users with data. It’s a fantastic example of modern design that marries form and function to elevate the user experience.

The app has just two tabs that adopt iOS 26’s Liquid Glass design without sacrificing legibility. The default view is the Dashboard, which can display your recent health and wellness metrics for the last 7, 15, or 30 days. At the top of the Dashboard is a Momentum Score that’s calculated based on a composite of step count, sleep, resting heart rate, and BMI targets, plus your calorie goal. Unlike many similar apps, Activas links to research supporting its targets, which I appreciate. The Momentum Score and a handful of additional stats can also be tracked using one of the app’s Home Screen widgets.

The Momentum Score is followed by an AI-generated insight about your metrics. Because I haven’t been tracking my calories or weight recently, the app suggested I should. That’s followed by overviews of Activity, Nutrition, Sleep, Vitals, and Body Measurement. Each of these sections appears as a SwiftUI-style card that includes graphs showing recent trends, an insight about your metrics, and a suggested question that you can ask the Activas AI with a tap. Sections can be turned on and off and reordered in the app’s settings, too.

The Dashboard’s design is superb. By collecting individual measurements in groups of related statistics and providing a takeaway about each section, the app allows users to get a quick, understandable overview of where they’re succeeding and what needs work.

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Festivitas Brings Fresh Whimsy to Your Mac, iPhone, and iPad for the Holiday Season

Last year, Simon Støvring released Festivitas, a Mac app that lets you string holiday lights from your menu bar and across the top of your Dock. This year, Simon is back with an update to the Mac app and a new version for the iPhone and iPad.

The default set of lights consists of traditional multi-colored bulbs that blink on and off as you use your Mac. That’s the set I use the most, but Festivitas offers many more options. You can control the lights’ opacity, whether they appear along both the menu bar and the Dock or just one of them, and the colors of the lights and the cable from which they hang. You also have more than a dozen light styles to choose from, including round holiday lights, bats, clovers, eggs, stars, hearts, snowflakes, cocktail glasses, beer mugs, “2026,” “WWDC,” and more, covering a wide variety of holidays and festive events. Plus, you can control how the lights blink. It’s a lot, but it’s also just plain fun to tweak everything to suit your tastes.

This year, the Mac app adds a virtual snowstorm that you can start from the app’s settings or menu bar item. It’s a great addition that looks amazing against a dark backdrop like the Obsidian theme I often use to write. A fun touch is that the snowflakes avoid your pointer, and you can adjust the sensitivity of this feature in settings. You can also use your pointer to push around the lights hanging from the menu bar, which is handy for those times when they obscure Safari’s menu bar or other content.

The snow is lovely. I highly recommend pairing it with the Animal Crossing Snowy Day soundtrack on Nintendo Music. It’s an incredibly peaceful and relaxing combination.

Festivitas supports Shortcuts, too. Simon has created some fun example automations that you’ll find in the app’s settings to do things like turning on the snowstorm when snow is forecast and activating your lights when you play music.

Festivitas on iPhone.

Festivitas on iPhone.

New this year is a Festivitas app for the iPhone and iPad. The app lets you build small, medium, and large widgets to place on your Home Screen. You can either frame a photo with twinkling lights or create a transparent-style widget so the lights frame an element of your Home Screen. I love that the lights framing the photos are animated, an effect I know isn’t easy to do with a widget. You can also add text and make other adjustments to each widget.

Festivitas isn’t going to help you get more done. In fact, it might even slow you down a little bit, and maybe that’s the point. Taking a moment to enjoy the app’s lights and be mesmerized by the falling snow is a good reminder to slow down a little and have some fun.

Festivitas for the Mac is available directly from the app’s website for any price you want to name between $3.99 and $9.99. The iPhone and iPad version is a free download on the App Store with a range of in-app purchases from $3.99 to $9.99 to create a similar name-your-price system.