Equanimity Project

I’ve just released the latest version of the Equanimity iPhone app. This adds two major features which go together - journaling, and a detailed log of your sittings.

A number of people who have been using the tracking features of the timer have told me that they wanted to know exactly when they stopped their daily practice. They wanted to find out if there’s a specific kind of event in their lives that interferes with meditation. The new log has a graphical ‘music tie’ that connects together the sittings that were part of a run, so you can see exactly when it started and ended.

Journaling was the first feature request I got when I showed a much more basic version of the timer to a friend and long time meditator almost a year ago. I was unsure about the idea because I have been to various meditation schools which discourage people from taking notes - they see a risk of encouraging discursive thinking rather than meditative awareness.

In working on this project, I have decided that I don’t want to impose my own view of what meditation should be on people who use these tools. Since I kept getting requests for the journal, I decided to experiment with it myself so that I could learn how to make it work well.

I found that most days, I don’t feel like making a journal entry, but sometimes when there’s a change in my habits, or things feel different, I feel like writing it down. Because of this, the note-taking interface is designed to invite you to take a note at the end of a sitting while allowing you to ignore the invitation if you aren’t interested.

I also found that I do occasionally like to reflect on the notes I’ve made, and that when I do, I generally want to glance at the text of a series of notes to get a feel for them. I’d be lost if I had to remember which day I wrote a particular note in order to find it. To support this, the note listing shows a large preview of the text of each note so you can read through the notes just by scrolling. Many short notes fit completely in the preview, so you only have to open individual notes when they are particularly long.

Because notes are valuable and people have now started to build up a significant history of meditations, I’ve added export options. You can now export your complete sitting history (including notes) as a CSV file which will load into a spreadsheet such as Excel or most database programs. You can also export a nicely formatted email of just the journal entries, which is suitable for printing or copying into a wordprocessor. Finally, individual journal entries can be emailed. This is especially useful for people who want to post their sitting notes on a blog - most blog software allows you to make postings by email, so you can email individual entries direct to your blog.

I hope you find the new features helpful. If you aren’t going to use the journal, there is an option in the iPhone Settings App which lets you turn it off completely.

Please review and or rate the new version in the App store, and feel free to send me any feedback!