Some 50 years ago, Beck (1976) and Beck, Rush, Shaw, and Emery (1979) introduced the thought records method for cognitive behavior therapy, a method in which clients reflect on maladaptive feelings, behaviors and thoughts in challenging situations. Since then, its effectiveness has been well established (e.g. McManus, Van Doorn & Yiend, 2012), so nowadays clients are often encouraged to process challenging situations by following the thought record model between therapy sessions. Traditionally, this is done by pen and paper. Years ago we thought we could make this a little easier for clients, and bring the method to a tool that's with you wherever you go: your phone. Our Thought Records (née Rethinker) app actually precedes our official registration as a company in 2021, and is therefore certainly a little more experimental than the apps we've since been working on. As such, we've left it alone for a couple of years. Then, last month, we decided to take a short break from our established (and future) apps, and revise the Thought Records app.

Why revise the Thought Records app?

From the start, the Thought Records app was designed and coded to be fully powered by Apple's own SwiftUI framework. SwiftUI is essentially a package of components and modifiers used by app developers to build apps - it contains components, like buttons and text fields, and modifiers, which determine e.g. shapes and colors. The first version of SwiftUI released in 2020 and was only supported by iOS 14; since then every year an update to iOS extended the range of available SwiftUI components and modifiers. Of course, the first version of SwiftUI was relatively lacking in components and modifiers, and so was the second version (supported by iOS 15). The Thought Records app, however, was built on that second version. Therefore, it was constrained in some awkward spots, such as text fields. In an app that's all about text input in various text fields, the user experience of text fields is has a crucial impact. At the time, SwiftUI was limited in that regular text fields could not grow vertically as text fields received more text. Thus, as the user was typing in a longer sentence, the earlier words of the sentence would gradually move out of the textbox while new words were added. We didn't think this issue was serious enough to warrant going the non-SwiftUI route (in part because we encourage users to keep text input short), but it left us feeling a little unhappy about the resulting user experience. Then a couple weeks ago, as we needed a break from working on an unannounced future project, we decided to fix these issues with the tools available in newer versions of SwiftUI.

So what's new?

Name
First of all, we've updated the name of our app from Rethinker to Thought Records. We're big fans of the simplicity present in names that directly refer to their function, and since this app is all about thought records, we're now calling it Thought Records (readers might notice a similar strategy with our EMDR app).

Apple Vision Support
Secondly, we took the opportunity to present early adopters of Apple Vision Pro a fully native Apple Vision app. We're big believers in native user interfaces (see the 6 native versions of our EMDR app), and only a native Apple Vision version of our app could provide that. Also, it only took us two days to optimise the SwiftUI code for Apple Vision. Here's what the opening screen looks like in the Apple Vision version: