Full multitasking support
This means that on devices that run iOS4 (including the iPhone 3g), you can now visit other applications, and the timer will keep running and the gongs will still sound.
This might sound like a strange feature to add to a meditation timer, after all - what are people doing using other apps in the middle of a sitting? Well it turns out that quite a number of kinds of meditation involve chanting or hymns of one sort or another, and sometimes meditators want to use other apps to read from when learning a new chant or hymn, but would like the timer to continue running while they do so.
Multitasking also means that if your phone is running low on power, you can completely exit the Equanimity App, and because of the way iOS works, it will consume no power at all but still ring the gongs, which can be useful if you are meditating at the end of they day, or your sitting is very long.
Manual Addition of Log Entries
The journal now has a (+) button at the top, which you can use for making manual entries. This makes it easy to keep track of meditations in class, or if you just didn’t have your phone or iPod with you when you sat.
It’s designed to be as easy to use as possible, and it remembers your sitting time and sets the start time automatically, so if you’re in a class or retreat where you can’t have the gongs ring, it should only take a few taps to record a sitting.
Deletion of Log Entries
You can now delete sittings by swiping on them in the log. This goes naturally with the manual addition feature - since it’s now possible to make mistakes that you might want to correct. It’s also useful if you recorded a ‘test’ sitting when you first installed the app.
Sitting reminders
This is my favorite new feature. The icon badge will now count the days since your last sitting (up to 14). It’s an optional feature which you can control in the settings app. The three settings are:
1. Never - with this option, the icon will never show a badge. If you don’t like icon badges, use this to turn off the feature.
2. Only when days missed - with this option, the icon will start counting from 1 the day after you’ve missed a sitting, so if you sit every day, you’ll never see the badge. This is the default setting, so if you sit every day, you’ll never see the counter, but if you do it means you missed a day.
3. Each day until sitting completed - this is the option I use and recommend, but I set the default more conservatively because I didn’t want to disturb current users of the app. In this mode, Equanimity will start each day showing a 1 on its icon, and it will be cleared after you sit. Personally I’ve found this to be a great reminder that I haven’t yet meditated on a given day, especially if I am feeling stressed.
Before I had the sitting reminders feature, I found that it was easy for a missed day to become a series of missed days, because I’d lose count. Since I’ve had it I haven’t missed more than a single day at a time, and seeing the counter at 1 during the day reminds me to make time in my day to meditate.
I hope you like the new features. The purpose of Equanimity is to help people keep up a meditation practice, and I think all of them contribute to that, but especially the Sitting Reminders. Do let me know what you think.
As an afterword - it’s always hard to make predictions about software releases, but I have a long list of planned improvements to Equanimity and I expect to make more frequent updates this year than last year.
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