Gyroscope 1.10 Release Notes
New features to keep you healthy in 2018!
V1.10 is now available in the App Store & Play Store! Here’s what’s new…
The Helix Theme
Since the Gyroscope app came out a couple years ago, the amount of data that can be tracked has exploded. Originally everything fit in just 5 cards for the day — computer activity, heart rate, weight and steps — but now there is much more.
To highlight all these items and give you more tools to manage them, we’ve added this new view which shows a better overview of everything that happened. This new view makes sense for those who have too much data to fit in the Simple view, but if you’re only tracking one or two data points then you may prefer to use the other views.
This new report style brings together all of the other Pro features— goals, mood tracking and sleep tracking—so you don’t forget to manage them and get the health benefits of tracking them regularly.
Sleep AI for everyone (free!)
We’ve had Sleep AI as a Pro feature for over a year now, and have been constantly making adjustments and improvements to how it works.
Now it is available for everyone in the app for free—if you don’t have a sleep tracker, this is the easiest way to start measuring it.
In the latest version, it takes just a couple taps to save or adjust last night’s sleep from the main screen. It is much easier than using any other sleep tracker and trying to sync that data, since it can be easily edited in one place.
Every day, you should review your sleep and hit the “save” button. If you don’t, it won’t actually be saved and you won’t be able to get insights or graphs later. If you’re tracking your computer activity and heart rate, then it should be pretty obvious from the graphs when you were actually asleep.
If you’re already using another sleep tracker, HealthKit data will be prioritized and used automatically. Many other common sleep tracking apps have quality issues though—the most common are false sleep entries showing up throughout the day (since they don’t have as much context for what you were doing), or badly split up data, with dozens of possible sleep segments at night instead of one clean session with a defined start and stop. If you are running into these issues, you may want to switch to using Sleep AI instead.
Faster Mood Tracking
Now that the Helix theme brings the mood tracking (literally) front and center. There is a big + button to easily add new mood entries, so you can track it much more frequently and have an accurate history over time.
Now there is a 10-second option in addition to the 40-second detailed mood survey. It is a bit lower lower resolution and may not capture all the nuance of the full tracking, but is a quick way to get some of your ups and downs throughout the day.
In addition to “quick” and “full” mood tracking, there’s also a third “guest” mode—in case you want to test it first or let someone else try it without saving the score to your account.
24-hour time option
Many of our users are in Europe or countries that don’t use AM/PM for time. So instead of 5:00pm, some people want to see 17:00. I’ve been personally using this type “military time” for years, but across the app we still defaulted to the standard AM/PM display.
In this update, the app will now reuse your phone’s settings and show time that matches however your clock is set. If your phone is set to show 24-hour time, then Gyroscope will also do that.
Annual Reports
Speaking of time, can you believe 2017 is almost over?
The new 2017 reports can be previewed on the website for an in-depth exploration of your year, and previewed in the app to easily generate shareable cards.
Some of you may be very close to hitting a milestone—400 miles run, 5 million steps, 500 hours spent on Twitter—so these last few days are your chance to edit these stats before you get your final report.
Please note that viewing the annual report can involve fetching hundreds of millions of data points for the year—so it can take a minute or two to load.
And if you’ve been using the app since the beginning of the year, now’s your last chance to order the 2017 book with a preorder discount ($249).
Stealth Mode
A new Pro feature, the logo in the corner can now be completely hidden—just tap twice! You can use this to generate compositions of your top 4 or 9 photos from the year, or any of the other cards in the report.
Improvements to Goals
In the Helix theme, we break down your week’s goals into simple daily objectives—go to the gym, meditate 5 minutes, run a mile. They are all pretty simple things, but being reminded of them throughout the day is key otherwise they can easily get skipped.
We’ve also improved the goal creation options. The 10% increments work well in some cases, but were suggesting unreasonable goals for people who were already at their peak. Now most of the goals can be set to repeat last week’s activity or increase by just 5%.
The amount of goals that can be set at the same time has also been increased, from 3 to 5. Now you can set a desired amount for everything and balance them all at the same time.
Having 5 separate goals sounds like it is hard—but setting a lot of goals can improve your success. Many of these end up reinforcing each other. For example, if you fulfill your meditation goal, you’ll probably also be more focused at work. If you go for the workout or run, then your step count will also be up. If you do all those things, your weight goal may also be magically reached.
Remember, the goals reset each Monday along with the new weekly reports—so don’t forget to review your progress and set new goals each week!
Heart Rate Zones
The New Year is coming up and some of you will start working out a lot more, while others have already been working every day and logging your heart rate each time. Whether you use an Apple Watch, Fitbit, or any other HealthKit enabled heart rate monitor — you can now see the heart rate zones breakdown for all your workouts.
This also applies to older workouts, so you can go back through your history and see your heart rate zone history.
One more thing…
We’ve been making improvements to our own location tracking, and will be releasing that as a beta soon for Pro members to start testing.
Everyone should still use Moves for now to maintain their complete history, but soon that won’t be necessary!
See you next year!
