HourLife 1.4: more of your days in iCloud, your health kept off it

HourLife 1.4 is available for iPhone. HourLife for Mac, which pairs with it, is on its way to the Mac App Store.

What changed

• Mood, meditation, energy, workouts, intake and experiments now sync through iCloud, so they follow you to your iPad, and to HourLife for Mac when it arrives.
• Health records stay off iCloud. Once HourLife for Mac is out, pair it with your iPhone to bring symptoms, medications, sobriety and your Apple Health habit values across over your own Wi-Fi.
• Quick Timer: tap the alarm on Today, turn the dial or type “feed the dog 10”, and it rings when time’s up, with Snooze and Done.
• Sobriety now lives inside Health.
• Quick timers can ring as an alarm — switch it on in the timer sheet or in Settings › Notifications.
• A 1 hr preset, and a running timer can be renamed in place.
• Deleted Vault notes now go to Recently Deleted.
• Improvements to Markdown editing.

More of your days, on every device

Until now the logs you keep through the day — how you felt, how long you sat, what you ate, the workout, the experiment you are running on yourself — stayed on the phone you logged them on. In 1.4 they sync through your private iCloud with the rest of HourLife, so your iPad reads the same days your iPhone does, and HourLife for Mac will too.

Your health, kept off iCloud

Health is different. Symptoms, medications, sobriety and the values your habits read from Apple Health don’t go through iCloud at all. When HourLife for Mac arrives, pair the two once instead: open Settings › Sync with Mac on the iPhone and Settings › iPhone on the Mac, and enter the 6-digit code. They talk directly over your local network, encrypted, with no server in between.

One change follows from that. HourLife 1.3 kept the Apple Health values behind your habits in iCloud, alongside the habits themselves. The first time 1.4 opens, it moves those values into storage on your iPhone and deletes the iCloud copies, including the copies kept in goal logs. There is nothing for you to do; your habits read the same numbers as before.

Sobriety moves too, into Health, next to the other records it belongs with.

A timer for the small things

A focus session is for work you want to count. Most timers aren’t that: the pasta, the parking meter, the dog’s dinner. Quick Timer is for those.

Tap the alarm on Today and turn the dial, or type the name and the minutes in one go — “feed the dog 10” — and it starts. When time’s up it rings, with Snooze and Done. Switch on Ring as alarm and it rings as an alarm rather than a notification. There is a 1 hr preset now, and a timer can be renamed while it runs.

Quick timers sync across your devices, so once HourLife for Mac is out, one you start on the phone can ring on the desk.

The smaller things

A Vault note you delete now goes to Recently Deleted, so a slip of the thumb can be undone.

Keep the days everywhere. Keep your health at home.