At some point in our lives, we’ve no doubt all kept a personal diary or journal of some kind. A place where we keep track of each and evey day that we’ve lived. Be it the events that occurred, the thoughts that we had or the feelings that we experienced. It’s serves as a sort of literary time capsule that’s strictly for our eyes only.
Pixels is an app for your phone that takes the basic premise of an old fashioned diary and reimagines it for the modern age. In it’s most simple form it’s a daily mood tracker. But take a little time to delve deeper into what the app has to offer and you’ll find a fully fledged peronal diary application with detailed mood and feelings analysis at it’s core.
Each day of the year is represented by a square – or a ‘pixel’ – and each of those squares will be a different colour corresponding to how you were feeling on that particular day. So in my case, the green pixels are good days and the purple pixels are bad days, with the blue pixels representing those days that sit somewhere inbetween.
When you fill out your daily Pixels journal – which, by the way, you can handily set up to remind you to do at the same time each day – it will ask you to rate your day from good to bad. It will also then ask you how you felt during the day from a preset list of different emotions such as ‘happiness’, ‘stress’ and ‘fear.’ I believe you have the option to customise this list too if you so desire. Additonally, the app will offer you the chance to write something about your day in a similar fashion to how you would in a traditional diary, which I think is a nice touch.
It doesn’t end there though. The Pixels app goes one step further and allows you to analyse the various trends within your moods and emotions through a series of charts and graphs, which it can generate on the fly using the historical data that you have previously entered. The more often you use the app, the more acuarate the analytics, and it’s certainly interesting to see how the patterns within your mood fluctuate over different time periods.
Pixels has become an essential app on my phone over the past few months. Offering a simple yet detailed environement to record my thoughts and track my emotions. It’s also completely free as well, which is an added bonus. Although you do have the option to buy additional colour sets for your pixels and the ability to support the apps creator by watching a brief video ad every so often, which I 100% reccommend you do.
Pixels is available to download from Google Play.
Chris Hack 