Apps

How to get a good night’s sleep

Five tips that don’t involve melatonin

Published

April 1, 2021

Chay Lazaro

Getting a good night’s sleep is essential to staying healthy. Not only does it allow your body to rest, it’s also the time for your body to perform some essential maintenance on your memory, hormones, immune system, and other critical functions. Sleep also helps the brain’s ability to learn, help the body fight infection, and even lower blood pressure.

If you are looking to improve your sleep habits, it might be counterintuitive to look to your smartphone for help. Keeping electronics away before bed is always a good place to start, but there are a lot of tools and features on the iPhone that can get you to sleep better.

Track your sleep

Built into the Apple Watch and the Health app on the iPhone, using the Sleep app is a good way to start tracking your sleep. Sleep tracking will make sleep a priority alongside exercise and eating healthier.

Tracking your sleep can give you an overview of your sleeping patterns so you can make adjustments where necessary. Going to sleep one hour earlier or later can sometimes make you feel more well-rested.

The Apple Watch uses signals from the accelerometer to determine when you’re awake and when you’re asleep, so you can track how long you’re asleep each night and view your sleep trends over time.

Other sleep tracking apps you can try are Sleep Cycle – Sleep Tracker, Autosleep, Sleeptown, Snorelab.

Create a bedtime routine

Using the Wind Down feature on the Sleep app, you can create a customized bedtime routine. You can create a shortcut that includes etting up a specific scene in the Home app, listening to a soothing soundscape on Apple Music, or using a favorite meditation app before you fall asleep.

You can also set a schedule for time away from your iPhone screen using Downtime. This can help put a stop to doom scrolling your social media feeds past your bed time.

Other apps like Fabulous – Daily Self Care, and Mindvalley: Learn and Evolve can help you build habits, create routines for self care that result in better sleep.

Winding down can also be done by anchoring offline activities to bedtime. Changing into comfy pyjamas, doing your nighttime skincare routine, dimming the lights, diffusing lavender oil, journaling, or reading a few pages of a book can help your body know it’s time for sleep.

READ: How you can use your smartwatch to be healthier

Listen to ambient sounds

It’s not just your body that needs to relax before bed; the mind needs to calm down, too.

Meditation and breathing mindfully can help prepare the mind for sleep. Apps like Headspace, Calm, Relax Melodies: Sleep Sounds, and Breethe: Meditation & Sleep have guided exercises to help you drift off at night.

Sleep-associated content consumption on Apple Music has been up since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Apple Music has a dedicated space entirely devoted to helping people unwind, relax and fall asleep. On the app you can find curated mood and activity playlists, nature sounds and white noise, radio stations and more.

The top playlists on Apple Music for relaxation and sleep include: Sleep Sounds, Piano Chill, Bedtime Beats, In My Room, Today’s Easy Hits, Acoustic Hits, Today’s Chill, Pure Focus, Piano Chill.

READ: 8 mindfulness apps to help you cope in this time of uncertainty

Try LumiHealth

In Singapore, the LumiHealth app is also helping to look after your sleep. Users can earn rewards of up to SG$380 with challenges that remind users to stick to a sleep routine, wind down before bedtime, or meditate for a good night’s sleep.

Apps

Apple Creator Studio: Creative apps bundled into single subscription

All the tools you need, one payment

Published

January 14, 2026

GadgetMatch

Apple has officially streamlined its popular creative apps into one single subscription suite with the introduction of Apple Creator Studio.

The collection includes some of the most useful apps for today’s creators: Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage.

New AI features and premium content in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers also make the Apple Creator Studio an exciting subscription suite. Freeform will eventually be added to the lineup.

The groundbreaking collection is designed to put studio-grade power into the hands of everyone. It builds on the essential role Apple devices play in the lives of millions of creators worldwide.

The apps included cover video editing, music making, creative imaging, and visual productivity to give modern creators the features and capabilities they need.

Final Cut Pro introduces exceptional new video editing tools and intelligent features for Mac and iPad.

For the first time, Pixelmator Pro is also coming to iPad with a uniquely crafted experience optimized for touch and Apple Pencil.

Logic Pro, meanwhile, for Mac and iPad introduces more intelligent features like Synth Player and Chord ID.

Apple Creator Studio will be available on the App Store beginning January 29. In the Philippines, the rates are PhP 399 a month or PhP 3,990 annually.

There is also a free one-month trial which includes access to:

Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, and Pixelmator Pro on Mac and iPad
Motion, Compressor, and MainStage on Mac
Intelligent features and premium content for Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and later Freeform for iPhone, iPad, and Mac

College students and educators can subscribe for a discounted price of PhP 149 per month or PhP 1,490 per year.

Apps

Apple gives up on making AI, inks a deal with Gemini to power Siri

Gemini gets another feather in its cap.

Published

January 14, 2026

Luigi Leonardo

In the not-too-long-ago past, the biggest names of the tech industry competed to build their own AI software. Now, though some brands are still on the hunt, it’s easier to name certain software that have more successfully drowned users in a flood of AI-powered features. Today, Google gets another win by adding Apple’s Siri to its Gemini cap.

In the past, Apple peddled Apple Intelligence, an upcoming AI-powered system to compete against the giants of the industry. However, much like other features from other brands, Apple Intelligence came out half baked with features still lacking months after the initial launch.

Now, Apple has signed a deal with Google to use Gemini for a revamped Siri. The former plans to launch a new version of Siri later this year. Because of the deal, the voice assistant will start using Gemini as a foundation for its own services. Currently, Samsung’s Galaxy AI already uses Gemini.

Formerly a battleground between so many competing brands, it’s now looking like a battle between two major companies: Google and OpenAI. Google now has a huge grip, though. Both Samsung and Apple are no slouches when it comes to owning market share in the world’s smartphones.

Now, as consumers, Apple’s deal probably doesn’t mean much besides the continued influx of features that add little to no value to a smartphone.

Apps

Microsoft continues to shove Copilot where it’s not wanted

This time, it’s reportedly coming to File Explorer.

Published

January 14, 2026

Luigi Leonardo

If you look at a modern keyboard, you’ll find that the Copilot button is the cleanest one on the entire panel because no one ever willingly presses it. And yet, Microsoft still believes in the feature’s value. To show their odd commitment, the company is reportedly adding Copilot to File Explorer.

According to @phantomofearth from X (via Windows Central), a new Windows 11 preview build will add a button beside File Explorer’s navigation menu. Currently, the button is invisible and doesn’t do anything. However, the report says that the feature is tied to something called “Chat with Copilot.” It’s becoming clear that the system aims to add the AI software right inside the file organization app.

Besides revealing the potential addition of the egregious feature inside File Explorer, @phantomofearth also added mock-ups of a desktop with Copilot right on the taskbar, hinting at a potential nightmare of the feature lording itself over where it’s not wanted.

Thankfully, the preview build doesn’t always represent a final version of the system. There’s still a chance that Microsoft will not add the AI to the File Explorer.

As of late, Microsoft has received a lot of flak for persistently pushing Copilot onto users, regardless of how they feel about the feature. The company is also facing criticisms in the background for being a major proponent of AI data centers in the United States, which, in turn, have caused the prices of tech to skyrocket this year.