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.

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Focast: A High-Fidelity Ambient Sound App for Focus

• Platform: macOS
• Keywords: white noise, focus timer

@ElijahLee: Focast is a focus app developed specifically for macOS. It offers a rich collection of high-fidelity natural ambient sounds combined with focus timers, helping you enter a concentrated state while studying, working, or reading.

One of Focast’s biggest highlights is its library of more than 90 high-quality ambient sounds, including rain, ocean waves, forests, campfires, birdsong, and other natural soundscapes. Beyond these common options, the app also features many unique everyday ambience recordings, such as ducks quacking, the sound of whisking eggs, or footsteps walking through thick snow. All sounds are recorded on location by sound artists and can loop seamlessly without breaks, allowing you to quickly immerse yourself and stay focused while listening.

Unlike typical white-noise apps, another distinctive feature of Focast is its mixing (Mix) function. For the built-in ambient sounds, the app offers two modes. Solo Mode allows you to play only one sound at a time, while Mix Mode lets you layer multiple tracks together—for example, rainforest (raindrops hitting leaves), birdsong (distant chirping), and backyard ambience (insects and birds at night). By combining different sounds, you can create rich, realistic soundscapes that recreate scenes from the real world. In Mix Mode, you can also save your favorite combinations for one-click playback later.

In addition to mixing its own ambient sounds, Focast supports playing alongside Apple Music, Spotify, or YouTube. The app overlays the ambient sounds in the background and allows you to control their volume independently.

With Focast, you can freely create focus and break sessions. The app provides default timers of 10, 25, 40, and 60 minutes, and also supports custom durations. You can start sessions quickly using keyboard shortcuts. Once a focus timer begins, the menu bar icon displays a visual countdown, making it easy to keep track of your session. When the timer ends, Focast plays a gentle notification sound to signal completion, and this sound can also be customized—a thoughtful touch.

The Focus Calendar View lets you review your focus days and streaks. If you’re serious about building a habit of concentration, maintaining a streak through these records can be very motivating. The app also supports iCloud sync, so your sound settings, timers, and statistics can be synchronized across devices.

You can download Focast for free from the App Store. The free version includes only very limited basic features. After subscribing, you unlock all ambient sounds, custom mixes, custom timers, and more. The price is 38 RMB per year or 88 RMB for a one-time purchase. For the annual plan, the app offers a generous 14-day trial period, so if you’re interested, you can fully experience it for two weeks before deciding.

Samsung Internet Windows Beta Update: Regional Restrictions Lifted

• Platform: Windows
• Keywords: Samsung, browser

@大大大K: Samsung Internet had previously been released on Windows, but installation was later discontinued for various reasons. Recently, however, Samsung unexpectedly relaunched a Windows Beta version, and users from any region can now download and install it via a designated link (even though the page still states that it is limited to South Korea and the United States). If you are using the international version of Samsung Internet on Android, you will also see the download link promoted on the browser’s homepage.

In terms of UI, the new client is not very different from the version released two years ago, and it still retains the highly distinctive sidebar feature. The “Synced Devices” section can synchronize the quick-access page from the mobile browser and display web content in a mobile-device view. The calendar feature syncs directly with events in your Samsung account and also supports adding a Google account to display Google Calendar. If needed, you can add new website shortcuts at the bottom of the sidebar.

The quick-access page has received a minor upgrade, now supporting background changes and the addition of small widgets such as device sync, privacy reports, and a weather clock. Notably, the device sync feature can display tabs from the mobile browser here. In actual testing, newly opened tabs on the phone sync very quickly, but syncing after closing tabs is noticeably slower.

The “Browsing Assistant” feature in the Windows Beta includes summary extraction and translation. The summary function is powered by Galaxy AI, and its performance is similar to that on mobile, allowing AI to summarize webpage content for reference. However, possibly due to network or other limitations, errors may occur when connecting to the cloud-based AI, so users with the right conditions may want to test it themselves.

The translation feature appears to be powered by Google Translate, and the browser supports a split-screen view of the original text and the translation, which is especially convenient for academic users.

In addition, the mobile version of Samsung Internet supports saving login credentials to Samsung Pass (including for users in mainland China). The Windows Beta also supports this feature, but it requires the Samsung Pass client to be installed on the computer. Since the Samsung Pass client has device restrictions, it is currently unusable for most users. That said, as the Windows Beta is based on the Chromium 136 engine and supports Chrome extensions, it is still recommended to use a dedicated password manager and browser extensions.

If you are a Samsung user and want a more complete Galaxy Ecosystem experience, you can try this Beta version via the official website. The browser is forcibly installed on the system drive, and during installation it will also install Samsung Account and Samsung Smart Service components and create Start Menu entries, so be sure to leave enough disk space.

Quiche Browser: A Browser with Customizable Layout

• Platform: iOS
• Keywords: browser

@Snow: Quiche Browser is a third-party browser app on iOS. In an era where everyone is “racing to add AI,” it doesn’t introduce an advanced conversational engine or use algorithms to intelligently prioritize tabs. Instead, it hands interaction control back to users, allowing them to freely arrange and combine a rich set of functional buttons to build their ideal browser.

The toolbar at the bottom of the browser is the area with the highest degree of freedom in Quiche Browser. However, the app doesn’t simply give you a “blank sheet of paper” to do whatever you want. Instead, it offers 16 layout presets in the settings. You can choose one based on your habits and then fine-tune it further on top of the preset.

The app provides more than 40 interactive buttons, covering everything from frequently used actions such as forward, back, refresh, and new tab, to functions usually paired with shortcuts like zoom, find, and quick navigation. You can freely select the buttons you need and arrange them within the preset framework. Taking the standard two-row layout as an example, the first row can hold up to four buttons in addition to the address bar, and the second row up to seven buttons. If you still have more frequently used functions, you can place them in the “More” menu.

Through this kind of “limited freedom,” Quiche Browser manages to meet users’ personalization needs while still maintaining a clean and aesthetically pleasing design.

Quiche Browser also allows fine-grained customization of how the address bar is displayed. For example, you can choose to show only the domain, the full URL, the page title, and/or the site icon, adjust the text to be left-aligned or centered, and display estimated reading time. In terms of interaction, you can assign different actions to short-press and long-press gestures on the address bar, further improving efficiency.

Beyond page interaction, Quiche Browser adds several functional features to compensate for its lack of third-party extension support. The app enables ad blocking by default and includes three built-in rule sets that you can toggle as needed, although adding custom rules is not currently supported.

It also supports forcing dark mode on all webpages. If you subscribe to the Quiche Plus service, you can additionally choose custom theme colors. The app further allows you to adjust many other options such as the default search engine, private browsing mode, background refresh behavior, and user agent (UA). For a more detailed introduction, you can click here to learn more.

The app includes a subscription-based in-app purchase, priced at 22 RMB per month or 198 RMB per year. After subscribing, you can unlock multi-theme dark mode, one-handed mode, more button styles, and additional app icons. Since these features do not significantly affect the core browsing experience, it’s recommended to use the app for a while before deciding whether to pay.

You can download Quiche Browser for free from the App Store.

Activas: A Local AI Health Analysis Assistant

• Platform: iOS / iPadOS
• Keywords: health tracking, data analysis

Some time ago, OpenAI introduced the ChatGPT Health feature, which on iOS can even directly import data from the Health app for analysis and suggestions. One can’t help but wonder whether this made Apple feel a bit uneasy, considering that its own promised “enhanced health assistant” has yet to materialize.

If you can’t wait for that day to come, and you’d rather not share your data with OpenAI, you might want to try Activas. This app uses Apple’s on-device ML APIs to analyze data and provide corresponding suggestions based on your health information.

After opening Activas, the app will request permission to access Apple Health data. Once you complete some basic setup, you’ll enter the Dashboard. Here, you can see an overall score summarizing your physical condition. Tapping into the details page shows the specific factors behind changes in the score.

In the Insights module, the AI generates a summary based on your current health data. Scrolling down, you’ll find data across different categories such as Activity, Nutrition, Sleep, Vitals, and Body Measurements. Tapping any of these modules takes you to the Activas AI tab, where the AI provides analysis and recommendations tailored to that category.

However, this health chatbot can only respond to preset questions and doesn’t allow you to freely type in your own queries, which feels somewhat limiting.

Overall, the app’s functionality is quite simple and serves more as a technical showcase of Apple’s on-device AI capabilities. Activas can be downloaded for free from the App Store (in regions outside mainland China) and has no in-app purchases. The Insights and chat features require Apple Intelligence to be enabled, while basic functions such as data display and trend charts are available without restrictions.

“What Time Is It”: A Fun Time App Combining Calendar, Perpetual Calendar, and the Chinese Almanac

• Platform: iOS / iPadOS / macOS / watchOS
• Keywords: calendar, perpetual calendar

@化学心情下2: As a fairly traditional Chinese person, I see a calendar as more than just a way to know what day of the week it is, the date, or what appointments I have. It’s also for checking solar terms and flipping through the old Chinese almanac—functions that may look a bit “superstitious,” but are in fact part of traditional Chinese folk culture. In practice, I’ve seen many standalone almanac or perpetual calendar apps, but far fewer that combine a modern calendar, a perpetual calendar, and the traditional almanac into one. “What Time Is It” is a beautifully designed and playful time-related app I discovered recently that does exactly that.

From the app’s name alone, it’s easy to tell that it emphasizes traditional Chinese timekeeping. When you open the home screen, you’ll see a clock along with the corresponding traditional two-hour time period (shichen), as well as the lunar month and date. The app also annotates each shichen with its pinyin pronunciation—for example, if the current time is “Wei hour (未时),” it will display the pinyin “Wei” next to the character.

Taking the macOS version as an example, you can switch between different calendar views via the tabs at the top. In the perpetual calendar section, you can not only view dates by month, but also see the corresponding lunar calendar information, today’s “auspicious and inauspicious” activities from the almanac, and upcoming 24 solar terms and holidays. Switching to the calendar events view allows the app to read system calendar events from macOS or iOS.

Switching to the traditional almanac view shows information such as today’s recommended and avoided activities, the auspicious and inauspicious hours of the day, today’s “fetal god” position, favorable deities to approach, and unfavorable deities to avoid. For users who are not familiar with these concepts, you can tap the help button in the top-right corner to see explanations.

“What Time Is It” also offers two small features that I find particularly practical. The first is festival notification reminders: in addition to receiving alerts for festivals on the day itself, you can choose to enable specific categories of holidays. Currently supported categories include statutory public holidays, traditional festivals, solar terms, domestic holidays, international holidays, Taoist festivals, Buddhist festivals, the 72 pentads, the Sanfu days, and the “Shujiu” cold-day periods.

The second is its widget support. macOS now allows widgets to be added directly to the desktop, and “What Time Is It” happens to provide a wide variety of them. Personally, I really like the widget that combines a clock with the current shichen, so I can tell the time at a glance on my desktop—it’s even more convenient than looking up to the top-right corner of the screen.

Overall, both in terms of functionality and design, “What Time Is It” cleverly integrates multiple calendar formats into a single app, allowing you to check the modern calendar, the perpetual calendar, and the traditional almanac all in one place. If you’re looking for an elegant and full-featured traditional time app, it’s well worth a try. You can download it from the App Store, and it is priced at 8 RMB.

App Express

• Apple announced that it will launch the Apple Creator Studio subscription service on January 29. The service will include Apple’s professional creative apps on Mac and iPad, and Pixelmator Pro will also release an iPad-compatible version. In addition, Apple will introduce premium templates and subscription content for the iWork productivity suite and the Freeform app (at a later date). The subscription is priced at 38 RMB per month or 380 RMB per year.
• Apple and Google also announced that Gemini will provide AI technology support for the new version of Siri.