slotho 26.3 — the notes read themselves
slotho 26.3 went out on 30 August. This one is mostly about the moments when you cannot look at a screen: mid-set with a barbell in your hands, or at the end of an evening when the useful question is what is still ahead rather than what you already did.
It is also the release where Settings stopped being a pile.
The watch reads your notes to you
If you write a form cue on an exercise — elbows tucked, pause at the bottom — the worst possible moment to have to read it is the moment it matters. 26.3 reads it out instead. Turn on Read Notes Aloud on the watch (it is off by default, and it is free), and the set’s note is spoken when the set changes.
Two decisions inside that are worth stating, because both could reasonably have gone the other way.
It speaks the note in the note’s own language, not the phone’s. watchOS ships 180 voices across 49 languages with nothing to download, so a Portuguese cue written by a Brazilian coach is read by a Portuguese voice even on an English watch. The language is detected from the note itself.
It ducks your music rather than stopping it. A playback session that pauses what you are listening to in order to say four words is a worse trade than the words are worth.
The shape was measured on a physical watch before a line of it was built, which is how we know a session of thirty cues over ten minutes with the display dark does not stall.
Breathe, and meditate
Two guided sessions joined the Log tab: Breathe, a paced breathing exercise from one to five minutes, and Meditate, a timer from one to thirty. Both write a mindful session to Apple Health, and both run on the watch as well as the phone.
slotho ships no audio and starts none. iOS Background Sounds — rain, ocean, fire, the noise colours — are an Accessibility feature with no public API for an app to start them, so rather than pretend otherwise, the setup screen tells you where the switch is and the session then coexists with whatever you have running. The bells are played through System Sound Services precisely so a Background Sound already playing is never interrupted.
Pink and brown noise were looked at and left out. The evidence supports them for falling asleep far more than for anxiety, and one randomised trial uses pink noise as the control against music. That is not a strong enough basis to ship a feature.
An evening that says what is still ahead
The new Evening card on Today reads forward rather than back: the last sensible coffee, the last meal before bed, and when to start winding down — each as a countdown while there is still time, and afterwards as kept or, if you logged something past it, as the time you did.
The cut-offs come from the literature and are measured against your typical bedtime rather than the clock, so a shift worker’s ordinary evening is not filed as a late one. The meal cue also defers to your own eating window, so the card and the fasting page can never tell you two different times for the same meal.
There is a deliberate wrinkle here we would rather explain than hide. The cue uses the full evidence-based margin — 8.8 hours for caffeine, 3 hours for a meal — while the retrospective finding in Insights uses a tighter one. They differ because they answer different questions: a prospective nudge can afford the generous margin, while a verdict that fires on half the population’s ordinary evenings is noise. The card says as much behind its ⓘ button.
One home per setting
Settings had grown by accretion to fourteen root sections, three sub-pages, and controls scattered across other screens — workout settings in three places, hydration reminders editable from two screens under different labels. 26.3 rebuilt it as a short list of feature hubs: General, Notifications, Food & Drink, Workouts, Fasting, Intelligence, Health & Privacy, About.
No stored setting was renamed, so nothing you had already chosen was reset. Goals stayed in Me → Profile, because those are facts about you rather than app preferences.
Also in 26.3
- Satiety. Between half an hour and three hours after a meal, slotho may ask how full it left you. There is no Apple Health type for fullness, so the ratings live in slotho and sync through iCloud the way your favourites do. They then pair with protein, fibre and meal size.
- Your fast starts when you finished eating. A dinner logged 22:00–22:45 used to start its fast at 22:00. It now starts at 22:45, on every surface — Today, the widget, the stage notifications and the fasting page.
- A skipped eating window is a fast only once you say so. If nothing was logged since yesterday, slotho asks whether that was an extended fast or a day you forgot to log, rather than quietly claiming either.
- The food logger became one list. Typed, searched, scanned and photographed items are all rows of the same list now, and logging no longer goes through a sheet.
- A meal can be photographed as an input rather than a separate screen, and photos accumulate — a second plate adds its rows without replacing the first one’s.
- Workout history cards lead with one figure and colour only what carries a signal: the heart-rate chip takes the zone its average sat in, the effort chip takes the effort band, and a missing input degrades to neutral rather than to a wrong colour.
- Sloth Pacing ends a rest when your heart rate has come back rather than when a timer says so — measured against the reading taken at the start of your previous work set.
What we are not claiming
The stage names on a fast — ketosis, autophagy — are the hours usually cited, not a measurement. slotho is not measuring your ketones, and no app working from a phone and a watch can.
The spoken-cue voice is better than it was; it is not expressive. AVSpeechSynthesis gives an app pitch and rate, not performance, and pushing those numbers to chase a coach’s delivery produces a chipmunk. The bar we set was clearly better than flat.
slotho supports general wellness. It is not a medical device and gives no medical advice.