Article
Spectra is a new personal reflection app built around a simple idea: our views, values and inner states are rarely fixed. They move, soften, sharpen, drift and settle over time.
Instead of asking you to reduce that movement to a single label, Spectra lets you track where you sit between two poles. You might track where you sit between grounded and restless, cautious and bold, structured and flexible, or security and freedom. Over repeated check-ins, those small placements become a record of how you are changing.
Spectra comes with 20 built-in spectra across categories including World Views, Personal Tendencies, Work & Lifestyle, Social, Values and Thinking Styles. You can use them all, or keep things focused by choosing only the ones that matter to you.
Why Spectra exists
- To help you notice how your views and values shift over time
- To track moods, tendencies, working styles and personal tradeoffs without forcing them into fixed labels
- To give everyday reflection a little more structure than a blank journal page
- To make patterns visible across small, repeated check-ins
What Spectra does
- Start with 20 built-in spectra across World Views, Personal Tendencies, Work & Lifestyle, Social, Values and Thinking Styles
- Choose whether to use all of the built-in spectra or only a focused selection
- Check in over time and record where you sit between those poles
- Add notes for context when a position needs more explanation
- Review current position, history, trends, averages and previous entries
- Use insights to spot movement, lean, range, swings and settled areas
- Optionally enable Apple Intelligence to generate analysis and reflection prompts from your values and their movement
- Export AI prompt text if you would rather use another AI tool for similar reflection
- Export CSV data when you want to analyse or back up your reflection history elsewhere
Go further with custom spectra
For a small in-app purchase, Spectra also lets you add unlimited custom spectra. That means you can define your own pole values, create your own categories, and shape the app around the exact tensions, values or tendencies you want to track.
A more nuanced kind of self-tracking
Spectra is especially useful when a yes/no answer or one-word mood label feels too flat. Some questions are more interesting when they are treated as tensions: focused to distracted, open to guarded, ambitious to content, independent to connected.
By checking in against those tensions over time, you can start to see what changes with context. Maybe a value becomes stronger during a transition. Maybe a working style shifts under pressure. Maybe a feeling you thought was constant turns out to move in a pattern.
Spectra is designed for that kind of noticing.
Optional AI-assisted reflection
If you choose to enable Apple Intelligence, Spectra can provide analysis of your recorded values and how they have moved over time. It can also suggest reflection prompts based on those patterns, giving you a useful starting point for journaling, coaching conversations or deeper self-review.
If you prefer to use a different AI tool, Spectra can export AI prompt text instead. That gives you the same raw reflective context in a portable form, so you can decide where and how to explore it further.
Spectra
Start tracking how your views, values and inner states change over time.