Welcome to this episode of Pai Review. You can use the table of contents to quickly jump to the sections you’re interested in. If you’ve discovered other apps worth checking out, or topics you’d like us to cover, feel free to join the discussion in the comments.

New Apps Worth Paying Attention To

Although SSPAI has long been dedicated to discovering and introducing quality apps across platforms, there are still many excellent apps—impressive in design, functionality, interaction, and overall experience—that we haven’t yet covered. They might be long-standing apps, or newly released ones, and we’ll introduce them to you here.

Bauhaus Clock: A New macOS Screensaver Option

• Platform: macOS
• Keywords: screensaver, clock

@PlatyHsu: Screensavers already sound like a concept from a bygone era. Today, their role is more about visual decoration and temporary screen masking. Especially on larger external displays, a good-looking screensaver tends to draw quite a bit of attention. Perhaps because macOS already comes with a rich set of built-in screensavers—and because the screensaver development framework has long been neglected—it’s been rare in recent years to see truly good third-party screensavers (those cash-grab listings on the App Store don’t count).

Bauhaus Clock is the first genuinely good macOS screensaver I’ve discovered in a long time. If you’ve used iOS 6, you probably still remember the Swiss railway clock in the Clock app back then. Bauhaus Clock follows a similar idea: its core function is simply to display a realistic Bauhaus-style clock on the screensaver screen.

Displaying a clock isn’t difficult in itself, but Bauhaus Clock gets the details remarkably right. From the metallic sheen of the hands, to the shadows cast on the dial, to the recessed luminous coating on the markers, everything is rendered with great fidelity. There are three movement styles to choose from: quartz (one tick per second), mechanical (one-quarter tick per step), and digital (smooth movement). In quartz mode especially, the developer even recreated the subtle wobble of the hands as they move.

The dial comes in 13 color themes. When switching themes, the markers, numerals, and hands all change to matching colors along with the dial. I especially recommend Glacier blue, Pistachio green, and Lavender purple—color combinations that make you want to steal them outright for a blog theme.

At night, Bauhaus Clock automatically switches to dark mode along with the system theme. The effect resembles a wall clock after the lights go out: luminous markers glow softly with a grainy texture against a pure black background (14 colors available), faintly outlining the hands.

The other “small touches” in Bauhaus Clock are equally well executed. For example, none of the controls in the settings panel use standard system styles; instead, they’re custom-drawn, with highlights and shadows that feel distinctly skeuomorphic. Another detail is that the clock markers subtly jitter at intervals to prevent burn-in (even though Macs don’t currently use OLED displays—perhaps this is for users with OLED external monitors, or simply preparation for future OLED MacBooks).

If there’s one downside… anything with “Bauhaus” in its name is rarely cheap, and Bauhaus Clock is no exception. At $19, its price is already on par with many indie apps. The developer spends quite a bit of space in the FAQ explaining why it’s worth the price—no need to read it to guess the reasons: meticulous craftsmanship, free updates, never discounted, and so on. At this price, it’s hard for me to strongly recommend it. If it perfectly matches your aesthetic, or can serve as visual material (à la MKBHD), then this clock is genuinely beautiful and worth what it costs. Otherwise, saving the money might already buy you a month’s worth of emotional value from ChatGPT.

Bevel: An All-in-One Health Assistant That Covers Both Fitness and Nutrition

• Platform: iOS / watchOS
• Keywords: health data, fitness training

@Vanilla: Bevel is a health app on iOS that also offers an Apple Watch companion, enabling integration across health monitoring and workout training. Recently, Bevel made its core features free to use, keeping only Bevel Intelligence as paid, unlockable content. As a health app, Bevel offers an extremely comprehensive feature set, covering most of our needs related to fitness and overall health. Let me walk you through it.

The Bevel app is divided into four tabs: Home, Journal, Fitness, and Vitals. As the name suggests, the Home tab serves as a dashboard, aggregating data such as stress, energy, nutrition, and various health metrics. The Journal tab allows us to manually log health-related behaviors such as caffeine intake, mood, added sugar, ketogenic diet, hydration, alcohol, device usage in bed, and pre-sleep meals. It also displays automatically recorded data, including steps, strength-training time, and cardio duration.

The Fitness section presents workout-related data such as monthly views, activity summaries, effort output, muscle balance, and training frequency. This is also where you can add, manage, and sync strength-training modules. The Vitals tab shows metrics like VO₂ max, HRV baseline, resting heart rate baseline, body weight, and body fat percentage.

That said, my favorite features in Bevel are tucked away behind the plus button in the bottom-right corner. Tapping it opens an add menu, where functions are mainly split into two categories: nutrition and training. For nutrition, you can log each meal in multiple ways, including text input, image import, taking photos, scanning, or direct search. For training, you can automatically generate templates based on your needs, view existing templates, or log individual activities.

Here I want to focus on Bevel’s strength-training template feature. Whether you’re using automatically generated templates or creating your own, you can choose exercises from a large movement library and add them to your templates. Each exercise comes with animated demonstrations and detailed guides, clearly showing primary and secondary muscle groups. Once a workout starts, the Apple Watch client syncs automatically, and you can record the weight and reps for each set at any time. Doesn’t this moment remind you of the Strong app?

As a paid feature, Bevel Intelligence can chat with you in real time, offer personalized suggestions based on your condition, and even generate nutrition and training plans directly for you, which is very convenient. If you’re looking for a health or fitness tracking app, Bevel is well worth trying—it offers most features for free and is exceptionally feature-rich.

Bevel is available for free on the App Store. All features except the AI functions are free to use, with a subscription price of RMB 328 per year.

Qie Ting: Luo Yonghao Launches an AI Book Explanation Tool

• Platform: iOS
• Keywords: audiobooks, AI narration

@Snow: Last week, Luo Yonghao unveiled an AI audiobook app incubated by his team, called Qie Ting, at his so-called “Tech Spring Festival Gala.” Unlike traditional audiobooks that focus on vividly reading texts aloud, Qie Ting relies on an AI engine to first understand the full content and then reinterpret it, using scripts of 30,000–40,000 words or 1–2 hours of audio to help you absorb information efficiently.

Qie Ting carries forward the refined, light-skeuomorphic design language of Smartisan OS. Its main bookshelf screen currently includes content from more than 10,000 books. If you’re not sure where to start, you can narrow things down using the category buttons at the top, or jump to the rankings page and explore included titles from lists such as Douban Hot Picks or recommendations from The Beijing News.

As mentioned at the beginning, Qie Ting’s core feature is not “audiobooks” in the sense of word-by-word narration, but rather book “explanations.” By tapping the “Play Book Explanation” button, you can access key points distilled by the AI engine, along with supplementary background and extended information. It’s essentially the book equivalent of film or TV explainers: the AI creator helps condense the core storyline, organize the structure and logic, cite references to broaden context, and even convey its own interpretations and takeaways. Because this kind of secondary creation is constrained in length, it can only present certain facets of the original work and cannot fully reproduce it. For this reason, I don’t think Qie Ting can completely replace reading the original book. I’d recommend using it more as a way to filter interests or as a supplementary follow-up. Qie Ting currently does not support directly reading e-books; if an explanation sparks your interest, you can tap the in-app purchase link to buy the corresponding physical book via JD.com.

Each explanation in Qie Ting is available in both text and audio formats. You can choose to read the text in full screen, or have it read aloud by an AI voice. The AI narration supports basic features such as fast forward and rewind, playback speed adjustment, sleep timers, shuffle, and continuous playback. You can choose from four voice models: Xiao Wen (male), Xiao Su (female), and their respective “Late Night” versions. Compared with the standard voices, the late-night versions are deeper and more soothing, making them especially suitable for listening before sleep. You can also optionally add background music to the AI narration to further enhance the listening atmosphere. Unfortunately, the celebrity voice models and timbre-cloning features demonstrated at the tech event have not yet been rolled out in this version, so overall vocal expressiveness falls slightly short of expectations.

In addition, Qie Ting currently does not support importing or analyzing local books. Given that the existing library is still relatively limited in scope, it may not cover everyone’s reading needs. That said, considering its relatively low paywall—free users have no limits on reading volume, with differences mainly in audio quality and ads—it works well as a supplementary reading tool.

You can download Qie Ting for free from the App Store.

FunKey: Bringing Realistic Mechanical Keyboard Typing Sounds to the Mac

• Platform: macOS
• Keywords: typing sounds

@化学心情下2: Beyond the clear sense of rhythm that provides positive feedback while typing, the mechanical sounds produced by a mechanical keyboard can also bring auditory pleasure to the act of input—whether your colleagues or roommates sharing the space find it pleasurable is perhaps another matter. On Mac keyboards, the relatively “short” key travel inevitably makes some users who are already accustomed to mechanical keyboards feel that the experience lacks a certain “punch.” Fortunately, a developer has finally noticed this “problem” and released a mechanical keyboard sound effect app for Mac users: FunKey.

Although it may sound a bit like an absurd case of overengineering, after actually buying and using it, I found FunKey to be quite entertaining. The app doesn’t just offer mechanical keyboard sound effects—it even includes mouse click sounds. You could say that if you can think of it, FunKey probably provides it.

In FunKey, there are more than a dozen mouse sound effects alone, which you can freely choose from according to your preferences. As for mechanical keyboard sounds, FunKey also offers a wide variety, with the settings menu describing the general tonal characteristics of each option. There are simply too many variations to describe one by one, so if you’re interested, it’s best to try them out yourself.

You can download FunKey from the Mac App Store. It is priced at RMB 22.

Anx Reader: A Cross-Platform Reader Integrated with Large AI Models

• Platform: iOS / iPadOS / Android / Windows / macOS / HarmonyOS
• Keywords: reading, AI translation

@大大大K: I’ve recently been reading some English novels, and quite often I still need to rely on Chinese translations for reference. Manually creating bilingual files is too much trouble, while the built-in translation tools in most reading apps feel overly mechanical and fail to capture the “spirit” of literary works. I later stumbled upon Anx Reader, an open-source and free app that supports integration with large AI models. It not only translates quickly, but also enables a range of Q&A features.

Anx Reader supports true cross-platform use and runs on Windows, Android, iOS, macOS, and HarmonyOS. The app mainly adopts a Material 3 design style, with some controls on iOS featuring a liquid-glass-like effect. Anx Reader also offers dedicated optimizations for E-Ink devices: when E-Ink mode is enabled, the app switches to black text on a white background and adapts to the refresh behavior of e-ink screens.

When it comes to reading features, Anx Reader’s standout strength lies in its AI support. There is a dedicated AI tab in the app’s navigation bar; tapping it opens a conversational mode where you can ask the AI to summarize, explain, or analyze a specific book, or to provide summaries and suggestions based on your overall reading activity within the app. You can also dive into the AI settings to define custom prompts for specific conversation types, enabling more targeted and relevant responses.

During reading, you can tap the AI button in the top-right corner to have the AI generate a mind map and reading guide for the book. You can also use word selection search or full-text translation to assist with reading foreign-language materials. The AI-generated translations are more natural than those from typical translation tools, and they do a better job of conveying the colloquial expressions often found in novels.

In addition, Anx Reader supports data synchronization via WebDAV, delivering a more seamless cross-platform experience. However, during synchronization, Anx Reader may upload your book files. If you’re using services that charge based on data usage, such as Nutstore, you’ll want to keep an eye on your bandwidth consumption.

Anx Reader is currently available for free download from its official website and GitHub. Note that iOS users need to pay when downloading via the App Store, though the developer encourages users to install it for free on iOS devices through self-signing.

App Updates You Shouldn’t Miss

Beyond “new” apps, many familiar names on the App Store continue to iterate and roll out updates, adding more interesting and practical features. SSPAI aims to help you filter through App Store updates worth paying attention to, so you can quickly catch up on the latest developments from apps and their developers.

Life Footprints 2: Annual Summary and 3D Globe Mode Added

• Platform: iOS
• Keywords: location tracking, annual summary

@ElijahLee: The location-tracking app Life Footprints has released a major 2.0 update, introducing a 2025 annual summary, a new 3D globe mode in the trajectory overview, an ink-black map style, and custom time-range viewing.

First up is the 2025 annual summary, which appears on the map on the app’s home screen. The summary consists of 10 pages, analyzing the 10 cities you visited in 2025, the total number of location points recorded throughout the year, the average number of points recorded per day, as well as various daily habits. At the end, you can generate a concise annual recap to save or share on social media. If you don’t see the annual summary entry in the app, you can tap the globe icon in the bottom-right corner to reprocess the data.

In the trajectory overview, the new version adds a 3D globe mode that displays your global footprints on a three-dimensional Earth. Notably, this is a real-time, data-rendered 3D globe that you can freely rotate to explore. It also includes small delightful touches such as stars, airplanes, and meteors. Tapping the globe lets you enter full-screen mode, where a lively BGM soundtrack plays automatically. For users who travel across countries or continents, this feature is particularly appealing—your footprints are no longer flat data points, but transformed into a kind of spatial memory.

The update also adds an ink-black map style, which—along with the turquoise green option introduced in the previous version—looks especially refined. Custom time-range viewing is available on the home screen: you can view trajectory statistics by default ranges such as a single day, a month, or a full year, or manually select start and end times to generate a trajectory map for a specific period. This feature is ideal for recording life stages such as travel or business trips, slicing your footprint data into meaningful time segments for easier reflection later on.

You can download Life Footprints for free from the App Store. Most features are available at no cost, while a subscription unlocks exclusive profiles, trajectory analysis, sports modes, and more. The subscription fee is RMB 12 per year.