Serenity App Hopes To Soothe Away The Worries Of The Day [Review]

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New from Tap Tap Tap is Serenity, a relaxation app for iPhone or iPad.

Relaxation app? What’s one of those? It’s an app for relaxing by; in this case, a digital jukebox of all things peaceful, calm, tranquil, and imperturbable. It plays sounds and moving images to lull you to sleep, or at least to a less troubled state. It’s an anti-alarm clock. Without the clock.

You’re presented with five pages of calm settings to flip through, and a shuffle button for those times when you’re too damned stressed to decide which peaceful scenario you want JUST INJECT THE CALM RIGHT HERE BUDDY.

Ahem. As I was saying, there are five screens, each one with a theme and six peaceful serene moods for you to choose from. There are beaches at sunset, babbling streams at dusk, roaring waterfalls, birdsong-rich woodlands, and floaty-spacey places playing something that sounds like Brian Eno.

There really isn’t that much to it. The only other control is a sleep timer, so you can leave this thing babbling, roaring, birdsinging or Eno-ing in the background until you drift off.

It’s beautifully made, as you’d expect from Tap Tap Tap. Not all the different moods (places? settings? concepts?) work, at least not for me. I found the ones with natural soundscapes far more interesting than the ones playing soft piano.

It’s only a dollar and purely in terms of the work that’s gone into it, that’s a bargain. The question you need to ask yourself is: do I want to relax in front of another screen? For me, the answer is no, I’d rather do my relaxing away from screens and gadgets.

But it’s not always about going to sleep. You might like Serenity playing in the background while you work, or playing while you meditate or do some yoga. It’s only a dollar, and you certainly get a helluva bucket of calm for your money.

[xrr rating=80%]

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