New Insights Tab

A brand-new Insights tab has been added to the front of the Stats section. It’s organized into three levels of scope: Weekly, Monthly, and Yearly Insights.

At a high level, the Insights tab is designed to give you a clear, digestible overview of your life without needing to jump between multiple charts and screens.

At the top, you’ll find key summary metrics for the selected time period:

• Average rating

• Number of entries

• Dailies success rate

• Number of locations visited

Just below that is a line graph showing how your mood changed over time. For easier comparison, the previous period is also shown, and the yearly view includes a scaling option to better highlight long-term trends.

You’ll also see a Tags Overview, which highlights your most-used tags along with usage deltas compared to the previous period. In addition, each tag includes its associated average mood rating, making it easier to spot patterns between specific activities or contexts and how they affect your day.

Finally, there’s the Dailies Overview, which focuses on consistency. This section shows both your overall daily completion rate and detailed performance for individual dailies. In the example shown above, you can see my own December stats (Really was lazy on Saturdays…). You can also switch between total performance and specific dailies (like “Workout”) to see how habits evolve over time.

Improved Tag Stats (Monthly & Yearly)

Tag statistics have remained mostly unchanged since launch, and parts of this section were starting to feel outdated. In this update, several improvements were made to make tag data clearer and more useful.

Most notably, the Monthly “Occurrences by Day of Month” view was completely redesigned. The old bar chart has been replaced with a calendar-style layout, making it much easier to see when tags actually occurred during the month.

In addition, the stats summary has been moved to the top of the tag view for clearer context. A delta is now shown next to the mean rating, comparing the tag’s average rating against your overall average. This helps highlight whether a tag tends to be associated with better or worse days.

Finally, a new Average Interval metric was also added. This works especially well for sparsely used tags—such as haircuts, doctor visits, or getting gas—where frequency matters more than raw counts.

Bug Fixes & Polish

This release also includes many fixes focused on correctness, layout stability, and cross-platform consistency:

• Fixed Google sign-in not working on Android

• Fixed duplicate usernames appearing in the Account tab

• Resolved missing translations in Event Stats

• Fixed Android header height issues

• Fixed Dailies list overflowing on larger text scales

• Fixed rating text wrapping in the Day Entry modal causing layout clipping

• Fixed Monthly/Yearly Tag modals opening entries using local time instead of the correct date

• Fixed the Stats refresh prompt appearing on app startup

This update addresses many of the rough edges—especially on Android, which admittedly hadn’t received as much attention as iOS until now.

Closing

It has been a while since the last major update, so thank you once again for stopping by! As always, thank you for supporting Yian, and as we head toward 2026, expect more updates and new features ahead.

A New Look for the Calendar Tab

In an effort to make the app more welcoming, I updated the Calendar Tab Header to better represent Yian — replacing the plain “Calendar” label with “Year in a Nutshell.” Many users didn’t realize that Yian is short for “Year in a Nutshell,” so this change should help make that connection clearer.

I also replaced the old header text (“Your 2025 in a Nutshell”) with a new personalized greeting that finally makes use of signed-in users (until now sign-in existed but did not really do anything). This greeting changes based on the time of day as well. Hopefully it gives a more welcoming feeling to users whenever they open the app!

Search Through Your Tags

The first QoL update is the addition of a search bar in the Tag stats section. While using the app myself, I realized how quickly tag lists can grow, resulting in a hard time while trying to search for a specific one. Although this does not completely solve the issue, I believe it is a welcome addition that should’ve been part of the app from the start.

Collapsible Stats Sections

Another QoL improvement is that Stats sections now remember their collapsed or expanded state.
Previously, the app would forget your layout preferences every time you reopened the Stats tab.
Now, Yian remembers exactly how you left it, keeping your stats layout consistent between sessions.

The Brand New Notes Stats

I’ve long debated adding a Notes Stats section because I wasn’t sure what would be most useful there. However, I finally found a useful way to incorporate something into the Stats Tab. You can now search your notes by keyword to quickly find entries that mention specific ideas, feelings, or phrases.

In the future I want to expand the Notes Stats to also include some type of graph that shows most common words or something that shows interesting patterns or trends but this is all that is included in the Notes Section as of now.

Subtle But Noticeable Touches

A subtle touch added in this update is a light background color to every rating box (which they appear in lots of places!). Here’s one of the clearer examples:

Another updated that most people probably won’t realize is the addition of App notification badges in the iOS version of the app.

Do you see the little badge next to the icon of Yian? Apparently notifications and the badges on iOS are not linked, so I had to manually connect them together. That means until now even though the app sent out notifications, the little badge icon never popped up until now! Isn’t that interesting?

Closing

That is all for update v.1.1.0! I hope this update fleshes out the app a bit more and gives a more welcoming, personal feel to it. See you in the next update! Thank you for supporting Yian.

Have you ever heard of the “Year in Pixels” calendar? It’s almost a tradition now to see these colorful grids popping up at the start of every new year on social media sites like Reddit. The first time I saw one of these calendars was on this post, in January 2022:

Posts from the mildlyinteresting
community on Reddit

Since it was the start of the new year, I figured it was the perfect time to try it myself — except I started mine on a Google Sheets instead of pencil/paper. By the end, it looked something like this:

While not as pretty or polished as the original Reddit post, I was still proud of it. And as a person who loves data, charts, and visual storytelling, I realized it was the perfect chance to collect and analyze data about my own life. Sure, rating how you feel each day is subjective — but even subjective data can reveal surprising patterns.

Here are some of the graphs I created from my first Year in Pixels experiment:

After a year of relentlessly filling in those Google Sheet cells, I finally had a full dataset — a snapshot of how my entire 2022 went. While it may not really mean too much to an outside observer, to me it was fascinating. I could actually see patterns — how my mood changed depending on the day of the week, the month, or even where I was.

For a bit of context behind the final graph, in December 2022 I visited family in Korea — the first time in over 6 years. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that December ended up being the best month of my entire year.

As much as I loved looking at all these graphs, there was one caveat. Aggregating all this data into graphs by hand was extremely time-consuming. I want to especially highlight the Days of the Week graph which I had to count by hand (and double-check I didn’t make a mistake):

Fast-forward to the end of 2023 — another year, another completed “Year in Pixels” calendar. I was a little faster this time, but the process was still just as tedious as before.

Around then, a thought hit me: why not automate all of this?

As a Computer Engineering student, throughout the entire curriculum I had been learning how to code programs, with an emphasis on automating tasks that are boring, tedious, but most importantly, predictable. So I figured… why not use what I know to make my own life easier? That’s when the idea for an app started forming: something that could take the whole process — rating each day, storing the data, and generating the stats automatically — and turn it into something simple, quick, and actually enjoyable.

The Origin of the Name: “Yian”

One of the first things I thought of was what to call the app. While “Yian” might sound like a Chinese word at first, it is actually the abbreviation for “Year in a Nutshell.” I specifically chose “Nutshell” as a direct callback to the first Year in Pixel Calendar I filled out, which was called “2022 in a nut.” (nut being the shortened version of nutshell, because “nut” sounded funnier at the time..)

In case you don’t know, “in a nutshell” is a common phrase that means “in the fewest possible words”, a great representation of what a “Year in Pixels” calendar really is — a summary of an entire year in a brief/concise calendar.

However, I wanted the app to not just be a glorified “Year in Pixels” calendar app, but truly encapsulate the idea of summarizing and representing a whole year of someone’s life.

As a bonus, the concept made designing the logo easy (It is based on a walnut!). Here is an early rendition of the logo:

🔗 Learn more or download the app at yian.app

From Spreadsheet to App

With the name and logo locked-in, I moved on to the long process of building the app. Like I said previously, my goal was to not just be another “Year in Pixels” calendar app, plenty of which already exist on App Store and Google Play

I wanted to lean into the philosophy behind the name, “Year in a Nutshell” and provide in-depth data and insight about a person’s life.

From the start, I knew Yian would revolve around two main pillars: the Calendar section and the Stats section. The design of the app would then be centered around these two (with an additional 3 more sections) to create the core layout of the app.

Choosing the Tech

When it came time to pick the tech stack, I went with React Native and Expo. At the time, I barely knew either, but here were the two big reasons that pushed me over the edge:

• One codebase for both iOS and Android. Normally you would have to write two separate apps — Swift for iOS and Kotlin/Java for Android. React Native lets you write everything in JavaScript and share it across both.

• Hot-reloading and real-time testing. Using Expo Go, you can instantly see any changes made on your actual phone — no complicated builds, no waiting. It made development way faster.

Honestly, without Expo, I don’t think Yian would’ve made it off the ground as fast as it did. If anyone’s thinking about building their first app, I can’t recommend React Native + Expo enough!

A Calendar App

While the “Year in Pixels” calendar was the inspiration for my app, I expanded the idea to include monthly and weekly calendars too. The Yearly view (the classic “Year in Pixels” layout) is great for seeing your whole year at a glance — but it’s also a little too zoomed out. You can spot big patterns, but not the small stories in-between. That’s why I added the other two views, each giving a different level of detail:

Weekly → Monthly → Yearly.

Partway through designing the calendar, I also added an Event Calendar, which is a staple in most calendar apps. I’d figured that having stats centered around specific dates (think anniversaries, appointments, trips, etc.) would be a valuable addition. For example, think to yourself:

• How did I feel overall throughout my trip to Europe?

• Out of the countries I visited, which had the highest average rating?

• Did birthdays or anniversaries tend to be happier days than normal ones?

• What about that stressful job interview — how did I rate that day afterward?

These are some example questions that highlight the value of adding events to my calendar portion of Yian. It takes what’s a common feature in many calendar apps and turns it into a way to connect your schedule with your state of mind.

Over time, this shifted the focus of Yian’s calendar toward something more productivity-oriented (Still a work in progress!). Most productivity apps help you track what you need to do; I aim to make Yian an app that also helps you see how those things made you feel.

A Stats App

This brings us to Yian’s other core feature — the Stats tab.

Functionally, Yian acts like a diary. You rate your day from 0-10 (with 0 being the worst day of your life, to 10 being the very best). Then you go through your daily checklist (or dailies, as I call them — more on them later!), add a few tags, jot down some notes, and even record your location.

What makes Yian different from a typical diary app is what happens after you save your entry. Yian automatically gathers all that data and turns it into meaningful insights — visualizing your life through charts, graphs, and trends. In fact, many of the graphs take direct inspiration from the ones I did in my “Year in Pixels” Calendar:

One of my favorite examples is the Location graph. It shows all the places you’ve been throughout the year, along with how your mood tends to change by location. Here’s an example from a friend of mine — he traveled a lot more than I did this year!

I also want to briefly go over the Dailies and the Tags (I plan on making dedicated articles in the future so I will keep it short here- also this article is getting really long!)

Dailies — short for daily tasks — are habits or routines you want to track. You create them yourself, and each night you check off which ones you completed. Yian keeps track of your success rate over time and shows you how consistent you’ve been.

Tags, on the other hand, are totally freeform. They can be anything you want to keep an eye on. It is up to the user’s choice (and creativity!) to put whatever they feel like tracking over the course of the year. Some basic examples may include:

• How many times did I eat McDonald’s this year?

• How many times did I feel sick this year?

• How often do I go to get a haircut?

Whatever you may want to keep track of, just tag those days, and Yian will show you how frequently they happen, broken down by day of the week or month. Also it is possible to have more than 1 instance of a tag in a day (say for example you eat McDonald’s 3 times in one day). Over time, these little details start forming patterns about your life that you’d never notice otherwise.

I plan to add more stuff to Yian in the future, but for now these are the core features that are centered around the Stats portion of my app. Suggestions are always welcome!

Closing Notes

I started working on Yian from January of this year, and it took until early September to officially get it published to the App Store. The Google Play version followed suit and was published late into September as well. Although it seems like it took a long time to get here (basically 9 months, so its like my child..?), the app is still very new and has a lot of room for growth/improvement. Even then, I still believe I have a strong foundation for an app. Yian sits at the intersection of a diary, a calendar, and a stats app — combining the personal reflection of journaling with the structure of productivity tools and the insights of data visualization.

What started as a simple “Year in Pixels” spreadsheet has turned into a tool that helps people see their lives in a new way. If you love data, graphs, or just the idea of turning everyday life into something visual, I encourage you to give Yian a try. You might be surprised at what you learn about yourself — not from what you remember, but from what you record.

My goal is to keep improving Yian and eventually make it the go-to space for anyone who wants to understand themselves better through data. If you have any suggestions or ideas, do not hesitate to reach out!

Thank you sincerely for reading until the end :)

- Jungwoo Kwak

🔗 Learn more or download the app at yian.app