Welcome to this week’s edition of SSPAI Review. You can use the article directory to quickly jump to the content you’re interested in. If you discover other apps or topics worth discussing, feel free to share them with us in the comments.

New Apps Worth Noticing

Although SSPAI has always been committed to discovering and introducing quality apps across platforms, there are still many well-designed, highly functional, thoughtfully crafted apps that haven’t yet been spotlighted. They may be older apps or newly released ones — and we’ll feature them here.

The Outsiders: Workout Analysis and Training Load Management Tool

• Platform: iOS, watchOS
• Keywords: Workout analysis, training load

@ElijahLee: The Outsiders is a workout-analysis app designed for athletes and fitness enthusiasts. Developed by the team behind Gentler Streak, The Outsiders focuses more on performance, training load, and functional recovery management.

The app’s Home / Today page shows your daily status. At the top is Training Readiness, calculated through multiple data sources such as sleep, heart rate variability, and recent workout performance. This score helps you determine whether you’re prepared for high-intensity training on that day.

Next is the Training Load section, which compares your short-term and long-term training volume to calculate your training load ratio. Based on the interval your ratio falls into, the app helps you identify whether you need a recovery period to avoid overtraining and reduce injury risks. A ratio between 0.8–1.3 is optimal; higher values enter high-intensity or even danger zones, while lower values indicate detraining.

Wellbeing displays key bodily indicators pulled from the Health app, including heart rate, HRV, wrist temperature, blood oxygen levels, and more. Finally, the Sleep section offers a simple breakdown of total sleep duration, restorative sleep time, and other essential charts.

The Progress page visualizes your past four weeks of training trends and load changes with a unique circular dot chart — giving you an intuitive overview at a glance. You can also filter for more metrics such as training load, duration, distance, and more. Intensity Distribution then focuses on aerobic intensity and heart rate zones, using clear bar charts to show the distribution of high, moderate, and low aerobic workouts. Whether you’re training for fat loss or muscle gain, these distributions help you plan future exercise intensity.

The Workouts page provides both an overall summary and detailed analysis of your training sessions, integrating heart rate, pace/power, load, and recovery to help optimize training plans. Overview charts display weekly/monthly/yearly trends for workout count, total duration, distance, and energy expenditure. A filter button allows you to view specific sports independently. The workout history section provides detailed analysis for each session, including aerobic distribution, heart rate, segmentation, pace, and other sport-specific metrics.

If you run, cycle, or train regularly — and have clear goals around results, recovery, or long-term improvement — The Outsiders is absolutely worth trying. It provides more professional trend analysis and actionable advice than typical fitness apps. Though built by the same team, Gentler Streak focuses on lifestyle-friendly health habits suitable for everyday users, while The Outsiders is a training-oriented tool designed for serious athletes.

You can download The Outsiders for free from the App Store. Most core features are available at no cost; subscription unlocks wellbeing metrics, long-term training load charts, sleep analytics for any day, extended workout history, and more. Pricing: ¥28/month, ¥198/year, or ¥538 lifetime.

Radiance+: Make Your Photos Look More Realistic and Bright

• Platform: iOS
• Keywords: Photography, HDR

@化学心情下2: When we use an iPhone to take photos or record videos, HDR mode is often enabled automatically. By presenting a high dynamic range, HDR makes images look brighter and clearer. The principle behind HDR photography is not complicated: the camera captures multiple exposures and stacks them into a single image in which both shadows and highlights retain detail. Even when the real shooting environment isn’t ideal, HDR can still produce an image filled with information and depth.

As display technology continues to advance, people’s expectations for image quality have also moved beyond traditional HDR. Thanks to displays with higher peak brightness and more precise local dimming, Apple introduced EDR (Extended Dynamic Range), a display capability that offers even greater visual enhancement for images and videos on compatible devices.

Unlike HDR, EDR is not a shooting or content-encoding standard — it’s a display-level capability. Instead of relying on multiple exposures, it uses system-level adjustments to brightness mapping, allowing existing SDR or HDR content to present higher localized brightness and more lifelike lighting effects on devices equipped with XDR displays. As a result, even existing HDR images can appear closer to real-world lighting when viewed in an EDR environment.

Radiance+ is a tool designed to rebuild traditional iPhone photos into EDR images using image-processing and machine-learning techniques. It’s extremely easy to use: when you open the app, it first checks whether your device supports XDR displays. If the light ring on the right appears brighter, your device can display EDR images — and you can move on to selecting photos.

Tap “Choose Photo” or “Choose Sample Photo,” then select the image you want to process. The app automatically enters the editing page. By default, it immediately applies processing with its preset configuration. You can hold the “Compare” button in the lower-left corner to see a before/after comparison. If you tap “Adjust” in the lower-right corner, you can fine-tune processing — adjusting areas, strength, and more.

Once adjustments are complete, you can export the image in different formats. Radiance+ supports exporting as HEIC, JPG, and a file type optimized specifically for Xiaohongshu; it can also embed EDR information into the original photo. The default compression quality is 70%, which you can modify in export settings. Photos exported without a Pro subscription will include a watermark.

Radiance+ also supports batch processing. The app automatically adds its processing actions to the system Shortcuts app, allowing you to combine them with other built-in actions to create more complex automated photo workflows.

You can download Radiance+ on the App Store. The monthly subscription costs ¥20, making it convenient to subscribe only when needed.

Whistle: Fully Offline Speech Transcription and English Translation

• Platform: Android
• Keywords: Translation, Speech Transcription

@大大大K: The biggest obstacle when traveling abroad is often the language barrier. Even if we prepare our network setup in advance to ensure translation tools work properly, we can never be fully certain about the network conditions at our destination. Once the connection becomes unreliable, translation tools become useless — especially in non-English-speaking countries, where unfamiliar pronunciations can make even asking for directions difficult.

Whistle is a fully offline speech-transcription tool that supports real-time transcription of multiple languages. It can even serve as a communication aid for people with hearing impairments. For most of us, though, I recommend keeping this app as a backup option when traveling abroad. Not only can it recognize English, but it also supports many smaller languages such as Japanese, Korean, Thai, and more, converting them directly into English for easy reading. This means that even if the network fails during a trip in a non-English region, you can still understand the general meaning of what people are saying.

Whistle comes with three speech-transcription models of different sizes. The Quicker model transcribes the fastest but with lower accuracy, making it suitable for simple and rapid conversations. The Average model is more balanced in speed and accuracy, ideal for everyday use. The Slower model is unique — it is the slowest but also the most accurate. Because of its large size, it is not bundled with the app and must be downloaded separately from Google Play before use.

If you need translation, you must enable it in the settings by toggling the “Translate to English automatically” option. In this mode, the app uses the Quicker model to display real-time previews — which may be inaccurate for non-English languages — but once the recording ends, the app will reprocess the audio using the model you selected. You can then view a more accurate translation in the transcription history.

Whistle also supports importing audio files from local storage for transcription, although processing long audio files may take more time due to the limitations of offline models.

You can download Whistle for free on Google Play.

Pixel Play: Let Your Music Playback Become More Vibrant

• Platform: Android
• Keywords: Music Player, Audio

@Peggy_: When I first started using smartphones, I loved hunting down music from my favorite artists, neatly organizing everything into folders, setting cover art and track info one by one, and then listening for hours on the bus between home and school using a local music player. With the rise of the streaming era, I cycled through Apple Music and Spotify before finally settling on Spotify — and ever since, I’ve lived within its colorful, jet-black interface.

But while the market for local music players has been shrinking, and many once-familiar apps have faded away, there are still developers brave enough to dive into this thankless niche. Pixel Play is one such emerging local music player still in development. As the name suggests, it embraces platform-native aesthetics and incorporates the latest Android design language, M3E.

What sets Pixel Play apart from other local players is its vibrant design. On launch, the home page greets you with album covers displayed in various shapes that immediately draw the eye. These covers correspond to a randomly generated daily playlist — tap “shuffle play” and your music journey begins. Each shaped album tile can also be tapped to jump directly into that album’s tracklist.

Also featured prominently on the home page is the listening statistics section. As you continue using the app, Pixel Play compiles your listening habits and generates daily, weekly, monthly, and even yearly reports. The depth of these statistics can rival those offered by some major streaming services.

In the playback interface, Pixel Play dynamically extracts colors from the currently playing album cover to theme the UI. You can adjust the queue or tap the heart icon to favorite the current track. Very considerately, the developer even built a lyrics feature: you can search for matching lyrics online or upload your own local lyric file. When matched correctly, Pixel Play syncs the lyrics with playback, and tapping a line of lyrics will jump to the corresponding part of the song.

Even though Pixel Play is still in testing, its level of polish is already impressive. Seeing my favorite artists’ albums spread across the home page brought me right back to those bumpy bus rides — reminded of the pure, unfiltered joy that music brought me before algorithms took over.

If you want to rediscover the local music you once collected, you can try Pixel Play by downloading it from its project page.

App Updates You Shouldn’t Miss

Beyond brand-new apps, many familiar names in the App Store continue to iterate and evolve, adding new, interesting, and useful features. At SSPAI, we want to help you filter out the App Store updates most worth your attention, allowing you to quickly understand what developers are working on and what’s new in your favorite apps.

Reader Public Beta #13 Update: Improved iPad Support and More AI Features

• Platform: iOS / iPadOS / macOS / Windows / Web
• Keywords: Read-it-later

@Vanilla: Reader is a reading app developed by Readwise and has been featured many times on SSPAI. As one of the earliest reading tools to fully embrace AI, Reader has deeply integrated large language models such as ChatGPT into its architecture and feature designs. The newly released Public Beta #13 brings major updates, including improvements to the iPad reading experience and several new AI-powered utilities.

First, let’s look at the updates for Reader on iPad. As one of the best devices for reading long-form content, the iPad has received a number of meaningful improvements. In landscape mode, a dual-column layout is — in my opinion — the most efficient viewing option, making full use of the iPad’s width. Reader finally supports this in the latest update. Although still in beta, it already works quite well. Whether viewing clipped web articles or EPUB ebooks, you can enable “Horizontal pagination (Beta)” in the appearance settings.

The redesigned sidebar is also much more useful. In landscape mode, you can keep the sidebar open at all times, allowing you to jump between sections instantly — a huge efficiency boost for readers who frequently reference different parts of a document. Additionally, Reader now includes native Apple Pencil support, enabling you to highlight text and swipe pages directly on the iPad client.

Next, let’s look at Reader’s AI enhancements. The web version now supports the full GhostReader experience, allowing you to chat with a large language model inside any document and quickly obtain answers. Notably, GhostReader v3 on the web also supports rapid prompt access, custom prompts, and clickable citations in AI responses that take you back to the referenced section of the original text.

While Reader has long supported importing podcast episodes, the new version adds a transcript-conversion feature. You can import a podcast via the share sheet or by copying the link, and Reader will attempt to convert the episode into text for easier reference. However, in my testing, the transcription accuracy was not particularly high, and punctuation was completely missing, which made readability quite poor. This beta feature clearly needs more work.

My favorite new feature in this update is the custom theme summarization tool. You can create themes in the settings, configure highlight counts, frequency, timing, and more, and Reader will then push curated highlight bundles that match your chosen theme — a perfect “review and recall” workflow.

Reader also now supports two new third-party integrations. One is Zapier, which allows automations based on predefined triggers. The other is a ChatGPT browser plugin that lets you save text from ChatGPT conversations into Reader with one click.

Additionally, Reader has rewritten its offline functionality. Improvements include faster document downloads, a new “Offline Documents” management panel, and modified default download settings. Most documents will retain text only when offline, while EPUB files preserve both text and images.

You can download Reader for free from the official website or the App Store, but a subscription is required for full functionality. Pricing is USD 12.99 per month or USD 119.88 per year, covering all features of both Readwise and Reader.

ColorfulClouds Weather Update: Warning Map Added, AQI Reporting More Detailed

• Platform: iOS / Android / iPadOS / watchOS
• Keywords: Weather

@Snow: While many weather apps compete fiercely on design and interaction polish, ColorfulClouds Weather maintains its own steady update rhythm — leaving “liquid glass” aesthetics and other trendy features aside, focusing instead on making weather forecasting stronger and more accurate.

Last week’s 7.48.0 update introduced a new warning map feature. From the “More” button on the map page, you can open the warning map to view weather alerts for any chosen location and its surroundings. This significantly expands the coverage compared to the old “nearby warnings.” If you’re planning a trip, you can use the warning map to quickly check for potential weather risks along your route and adjust your plans accordingly.

In addition to the warning map, ColorfulClouds also added an AQI station map. Turn on the toggle in the air quality map page, and you’ll see real-time air-quality data from monitoring stations nearby, along with historical data and future forecasts. Compared to regional averages, real-time readings from local monitoring stations are clearly more meaningful. If unexpected pollution occurs in a specific area, the AQI map can alert you much more quickly.

Several weeks ago, ColorfulClouds also extended AQI forecasting to 15 days and exposed concentration data for six major pollutants: PM2.5, PM10, O₃, NO₂, SO₂, and CO. If you’re sensitive to any particular pollutant, these readings can help you plan protective measures accordingly.

Version 7.44.0 also introduced improvements to operational efficiency. The app now supports jumping directly to specific data views via Spotlight search or Shortcuts. ColorfulClouds currently allows quick navigation to the home page, air-quality layer, typhoon details, hourly forecast, 40-day extended forecast, and 3-hour precipitation layer. You can use this to build more efficient lookup routines or automation workflows.

You can download ColorfulClouds Weather from the App Store or Google Play.