SSPAI Review | Best New Apps to Try This Week

Snapseed 4.0: Simultaneous Cross-Platform Update Adds New Lighting Effects Tools

Platforms: iOS / Android
Keywords: Mobile Photography, Photo Editing

@Snow: Ever since Snapseed entered the 3.0 era, it has completely abandoned its old “lying flat” attitude and started updating with the intensity of that one ultra-competitive overachiever at your school or workplace. Previously, though, it was only really “grinding” on iOS. This time, it finally remembered it belongs to Google’s family too, bringing the previously updated UI redesign, smart masking, vintage filters, film grain, dehaze, beauty retouching, and many other features to Android alongside the new 4.0 release. If you’d like to learn more about the new features introduced throughout the 3.x cycle, you can check out previous App Picks entries through the related tags.

Version 4.0 also introduces another round of UI adjustments. It adds some playful eye and finger elements to the startup animation, gives the overall button design a cleaner, more outlined look, and introduces a light background theme that can automatically switch based on system settings. Personally, I find this slightly at odds with iOS’s occasional Liquid Glass aesthetic, and I actually think the 3.x versions felt more visually cohesive. But perhaps this redesign was made for better consistency with the Android version.

The new version moves the export button from the upper-right corner into the bottom toolbar. Tools and Favorites have now been merged together, and the previous limit of only four favorite tools has been removed. The editing interface also feels more centralized during image adjustments, which definitely deserves praise.

Version 4.0 also introduces two new style tools: Bloom and Halation. If those names sound familiar, that’s because they’re the same effects introduced in Darkroom 7.0 late last year — now with Google-approved “official” Chinese translations. Bloom softly spreads light throughout an image, creating a dreamy and hazy atmosphere. Halation, meanwhile, simulates the reddish glow old film stocks produced under strong lighting conditions, adding a warm nostalgic feeling to photos.

Compared with Darkroom, Snapseed’s default effects at the same intensity feel noticeably more aggressive. The Bloom effect spreads farther and appears brighter, while the red glow from Halation is also much more pronounced. Fortunately, Snapseed offers a far richer set of adjustment controls. In addition to intensity, Bloom allows you to tweak size, source range, and softness. Halation is even more professional, offering eight adjustment parameters including intensity, size, hardness, source range, target range, global offset, hue, and grain. This allows for far more diverse halation effects than what Darkroom currently offers.

Snapseed 4.0 still retains what may be its greatest advantage: it remains completely free and ad-free. You can download it for free from the App Store or Google Play.

Bevel: Expands AI Features With Support for Personal Health Records

Platforms: iOS / watchOS
Keywords: Health Data, Health Assistant

@ElijahLee: The all-in-one health app Bevel has released its 3.0 update, with this version heavily focused on strengthening the new AI health assistant Bevel Intelligence, adding support for importing health records, and introducing practical features such as biological age metrics and personalized recommendations.

First up is the AI health assistant Bevel Intelligence, a conversational AI agent designed for AI-assisted health analysis. In the upgraded V2 version, users can now choose Bevel Intelligence’s communication and coaching style from four personalities: Data Nerd, Guardian, Friend, and Commander. Each personality specializes in different functions. For example, Data Nerd is more analysis- and detail-oriented, focusing on trends, patterns, and the reasoning behind the data. Friend, meanwhile, takes a warmer and more encouraging approach, placing greater emphasis on companionship and sustained motivation. These personalities extend across AI conversations, notification messages, health recommendations, and more. Of course, as an intelligent agent, it can also adapt to other preferred tones and styles upon request.

Beyond question-and-answer interactions, Bevel Intelligence now supports morning briefings, reminders, and progress tracking. Users can ask the AI to push scheduled updates on sleep and recovery every day, set reminders for logging food and nutrition information, or generate weekly and monthly summaries and analyses. All of these tasks can now be assisted by Bevel Intelligence.

Bevel has also introduced a brand-new Biological Age feature, which comprehensively analyzes body, physiological, and blood biomarker data integrated into the app to estimate the body’s current age-related condition. Specifically, the system evaluates five categories of data: sleep, activity, fitness training, lifestyle, and blood biomarkers. The more data you track, the more accurate the results become. Every Monday, users receive an updated biological age report, and can further explore weekly changes and understand which indicators contributed to fluctuations in their age profile.

Within Bevel Intelligence, the new Files feature replaces the previous Memory function, turning it into a dynamic and persistent information hub used to store workout data, nutrition logs, AI-generated historical content, records, and various other types of information. In essence, it becomes a personal AI-powered data archive that continuously updates over time. The more you use Bevel Intelligence, the more comprehensive and accurate its analysis becomes.

The arrival of the Files feature also lays the foundation for comprehensive health record management. Inside Bevel, users can upload hospital examination reports, medical checkup records, clinical documents, prescription information, and other healthcare materials, bringing together fragmented health data scattered across different places. Combined with daily physiological data such as sleep, exercise, and nutrition, Bevel Intelligence can then organize and analyze everything together. As a result, Bevel is evolving beyond being just an Apple Watch data collection tool and moving closer toward becoming a one-stop personal health record management system.

Bevel can be downloaded and used for free from the App Store. AI features require a subscription to unlock advanced functions including check-ins, trend analysis, workout template creation, food logging, and personalized training plans. Subscription pricing is RMB 98 per month or RMB 698 per year, with a three-day free trial available.

Minis: An AI Agents Platform for Mobile Devices

Platforms: iOS / iPadOS / Android
Keywords: AI, Local Assistant

@Vanilla: There’s no need to explain how hot AI Agents are right now, but most of them still primarily run in desktop environments. Xiaomi has already introduced MiClaw on its smartphones, and before that there was the Doubao phone, but truly general-purpose AI Agents like Openclaw, Hermes Agent, Claude Code, or Codex remain relatively rare on mobile devices. Minis, as an independently developed project, has launched dedicated mobile clients for both iOS and Android, while also supporting integration with various LLM services, seemingly aiming to create a mobile AI Agents platform. But is it really? Let’s take a closer look.

The first time you open Minis, the app prompts you to add an AI provider. Here, I’ll use Gemini as an example. Enter your API Key, leave the custom API address blank unless you’re using a third-party relay service, then tap “Add AI Provider.” Next, choose a model — in my case, I selected Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview — and after that, you’ll enter the chat interface.

Like other AI Agents, you simply enter instructions into the chat box and let Minis complete tasks for you. But on a closed system like iOS, how does Minis actually make AI Agents work? The answer is that Minis includes a built-in Linux Shell environment. All natural language input from the chat interface is converted by the AI Agent into terminal commands and executed inside the Shell environment. Of course, you can also skip the AI Agent entirely and directly operate through command-line input inside the Shell window yourself.

Naturally, iOS system restrictions also define Minis’ current ceiling. Even through Shell commands, it can only interact with Apple-approved interfaces such as HealthKit, Calendar, Reminders, HomeKit, Contacts, Bluetooth, Location, Photos, and Speech APIs. In essence, this is not fundamentally different from what Apple Shortcuts can already do. At the same time, Minis also supports creating and invoking Skills, allowing the AI Agent to handle different stages of a workflow for you automatically.

At this point, I have to say that I don’t think third-party AI Agent tools really have a future on iOS. This is something only Apple itself can properly build. Different AI services can certainly be integrated, but the entry point will almost certainly remain Siri — Apple is unlikely to open that level of system access to third-party apps. Android, meanwhile, may have a slightly brighter future here since its permission controls are far less restrictive than iOS. Whether through third-party apps or customized Android systems, it’s much easier to build something genuinely capable. So if you want to try Minis, I’d actually recommend downloading the Android version instead.

Minis can be downloaded for free from the App Store or the official website.

Klack 2.0: Mechanical Keyboard Sound Effects Tailored for Mac

Platform: macOS
Keywords: Keyboard Sound Effects

@化学心情下2: We’ve covered quite a few mechanical keyboard simulation apps for macOS in previous editions of App Picks. While the built-in keyboard on a MacBook can’t really reproduce the tactile feel of a mechanical keyboard, hearing satisfying switch sounds while typing still provides a certain kind of joy. But after trying many of these apps, I noticed they all tend to share the same pain point: a lack of contextual controls. For example, adding simulated keyboard sounds on top of an actual external mechanical keyboard feels redundant, and during online meetings, you definitely don’t want everyone else hearing loud typing noises through your microphone. After trying a whole range of options, I ultimately settled on Klack, because the new sleep settings introduced in version 2.0 solve exactly these problems.

On the sound side, Klack offers a variety of switch types including Black, Brown, Cream, and Purple switches, while version 2.0 also adds the classic Red switch, meaning most mainstream switch sounds are now covered. After clicking the menu bar icon, simply hovering over any option lets you preview the corresponding typing sound in real time. Unlike many similar apps, Klack 2.0 also introduces support for spatial audio. When paired with AirPods, the typing sounds gain a much stronger sense of depth, creating a surprisingly convincing illusion of using a real mechanical keyboard.

Version 2.0 also introduces a new feature called Tone Pad, located within the sound settings. By dragging the central control point, you can adjust the perceived position and distance of the sound source, making the simulated typing audio feel closer to a realistic environment.

The Sleep Triggers feature is what I care about most in this update. Under “Settings” > “Sleep Options,” the Sleep Triggers section lists multiple conditions, including connecting an external keyboard, playing music, microphone usage, wearing headphones, being in a meeting, and more. Once any selected condition is met, the app automatically mutes itself. For example, after enabling the external keyboard trigger, Klack automatically stops playing simulated sounds whenever my Mac is connected to an external mechanical keyboard. If you don’t want complete silence and simply prefer quieter sounds, you can enable “Lower volume instead of muting” and separately configure the reduced volume level during sleep mode.

Overall, Klack 2.0 not only satisfies the desire to hear mechanical keyboard sounds on a Mac, but also eliminates the hassle of manually switching settings thanks to its Sleep Triggers system, making the experience feel much more seamless and unobtrusive. Klack is available on the Mac App Store for RMB 38 as a one-time purchase with no in-app purchases, and it’s definitely worth trying if you’re interested.

Momentum: Turn Daily Photos Into a “Video Diary”

Platform: Android
Keywords: Journaling

@大大大K: Before high school, I used to keep a diary consistently. But as life became busier with age, I gradually stopped sitting down to record my life through writing. That doesn’t mean we’ve lost the ability to document our lives — it’s just that photography has become a faster and more convenient alternative. Posting on social media or shooting short videos has, in many ways, become another form of “diary.”

If you want something with a bit more ritual and intention behind it, you might want to try an app called Momentum. It can automatically turn the photos you take every day into a short “montage” video complete with dates. Today, “montage” generally refers to a film editing technique where multiple short shots are rapidly stitched together to tell a story or move a narrative forward.

Momentum adopts a standard Material 3 design language, with a clean interface, elegant animations, and a UI logic that feels highly intuitive. It’s visually pleasing to use while also being completely approachable. To get started, you simply create a “Project” (such as “Daily Meals” or “Baby”), after which you’ll see a calendar view. All you need to do is remember to casually snap a photo worth preserving and import it into the corresponding date. If you’re worried about forgetting, you can also enable daily reminders within a project.

But honestly, I don’t think this feature is necessary. When you encounter moments truly worth remembering, you’ll naturally take a photo anyway. Daily reminders end up feeling more like a burden than encouragement.

Once you’ve imported photos for at least five days, the app automatically starts stitching them together into a video. But if you simply import photos without anything else, the final result may end up looking more like a slideshow presentation. Don’t forget that this is still a “diary” app — it needs a sense of narrative. While importing photos, you can also add short notes or captions, whether it’s a title for the image or simply how you felt at the moment you took it. These fragments of text eventually appear like subtitles in the final video, transforming what would otherwise feel like a passing stream of images into something much closer to your own personal story.

In addition, when you have particularly vivid memories tied to a specific day or story, you can favorite that day’s photo with a heart. Those photos are then displayed separately within the project.

Momentum also includes several genuinely interesting features. For example, when documenting your own growth or that of a child, every photo is naturally taken from slightly different distances and angles. To solve this, Momentum integrates Google’s MediaPipe framework, an on-device machine learning component that enables facial scanning and tracking.

When exporting the final video, you can simply enable the “Stabilize Faces” option in the short film settings, and the app will automatically align every face to the same position within the frame. Once enough photos accumulate, the resulting video becomes surprisingly powerful — every version of “you” remains centered in the frame, while the backgrounds and stories constantly change around you, as if the world itself is rapidly flowing past behind your back. The strong visual contrast creates an almost tangible sense of “participating in the world.”

When exporting videos from Momentum, you can also customize the number of frames each photo stays on screen, playback frame rate, date format, background color, and even the font. The app requires no account registration, runs entirely offline, and keeps your data private. If you also find it difficult these days to sit quietly and write long diary entries, perhaps this lighter and more effortless way of recording life’s fragments might suit you better. Momentum is currently available as a free download on Google Play and GitHub. The Google Play version requires in-app purchases to unlock additional features, while the GitHub version is fully free — though you can always “buy the developer a coffee” to show support instead.

App Updates

The Fitbit app will be upgraded to Google Health starting May 19, integrating Fitbit / Pixel Watch, Health Connect, Apple Health, Google Fit migration, and medical records.

The email app Spark now supports CLI and has introduced related Skills, allowing users to perform various email operations through local AI agents.

This year’s Swift Student Challenge has concluded, with multiple student developers from China receiving final awards.

SP-Life