Today I discovered a new-to-me word: Yonks. There are two main things to know about it:

1. It’s a British slang that basically means “a long time” — as in, “I haven’t seen that guy for yonks.” I don’t know why that means what it does, but it seems to go back to at least the 1960s. (Hail Britannia? 🇬🇧)
2. It’s also the name of a new-ish app created by German developer Stefan Grund, which I heard about after being featured in today’s episode of the AppStories podcast). In Grund’s own words, Yonks is “a day counter app for past and future events, you would like to remember.”

There are endless things you can track with Yonks:

• How many days old you are
• How long ago your wedding was, to the day (works with any other milestone you can think of)
• The number of days since you started a diet or other big lifestyle change
• Weeks left until your vacation, or the completion of a big project
• The hours left until your most anticipated movie, video game, TV show season, or even product releases
• Days since the last Space Shuttle launch
• …the list goes on and on.

Every counter you set up is totally customizable, not only in terms of units of time (minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years) but in how they’re presented in the app. Each one can be assigned an appropriate emoji and individual color, and you can add custom text notes to any counter you like, accessible by tapping that counter on the list. The list itself can be reordered manually or via filters like A-Z, date, or color. The date/time/number format can also be tailored to your local or personal preferenes.

Yonks even offers suggestions for events and milestones to add, from categories like holidays, history, sports, tech, movies and music. You can add notable milestones to your calendar too, if you wish (e.g. your 1000-day anniversary).

This is a really neat idea for an app and I like that the guy is actually charging a little money for it up front. It’s just $2 on the iOS App Store. Same goes for the Android side.