I have a neat idea for a smartphone app, but I would like to know if something similar exists before trying to create it.
It would be used to measure various things in one’s life without having to fiddle with spreadsheets. You could create documents of different types, each type measuring something different. Data would be added via simple interfaces that fill in most of the necessary information. Reminders based on time, location and other factors could be set up to prompt for data entry. The gathered data would then be displayed using various graphs and could be exported.
The cool thing is that it would be super simple to reliably measure most things on a phone in a way that’s much simpler than keeping a spreadsheet. For example: you want to measure how often you see a seagull. You’d create a frequency-measuring document, entitle it “Seagull sightings”, and each time you open it, there’d be a big button for you to press indicating that you just saw a seagull. Pressing the button would automatically record the time and date, perhaps the location, when this happened. Additional fields could be added, like the size of the seagull, which would be prompted and logged with each press. With a spreadsheet, you’d have to enter the date yourself, and the interface isn’t nearly as convenient.
Another example: you’re curious as to how long you sleep and how you feel in the morning. You’d set up an interval-measuring document with a 1-10 integer field for sleep quality and reminders tied into your alarm app or the time you usually wake up. Each morning you’d enter hours slept and rate how good you feel. After a while you could look at pretty graphs and mine for correlations.
A third example: you can emulate the experience sampling method for yourself. You would have your phone remind you to take the survey at specific times in the day, whereupon you’d be presented with sliders, checkboxes, text fields and other fields of your choosing.
This could be taken further in a useful way by adding a crowd sourcing aspect. Document-templates could be shared in a sort of template marketplace. The data of everyone using a certain template would accumulate in one place, making for a much larger sample size.
I used to be very active in the Quantified Self community in the past but currently I still follow the Facebook group. As far as I know there’s no app that does a good job at this task.
So it’s 1 click to begin, 1 click for each choice, 1 click to save.
That’s three clicks.
If you have a Google form with a checklist of 10 items and you answer half of them with “yes” (tick them) you have 7 (if we count opening the form and sending the form) clicks instead of 30 (or maybe 25 if if you play with predefined values).
If you know an app that does this better, I am looking.
The main argument I’m making here is that there’s no app out there that really solves this problem well and there’s room for Sandi to create something better than the present options.
I recommend the app warmly, but at the same time I’d be happy to switch if something with better design or features came up. I haven’t found anything as good yet.
Thanks! I didn’t know this was such a developed concept already and that there are so many people trying to measure stuff about themselves. Pretty cool. I’ll check out Quantified Self and what’s linked.
Gleeo Time Tracker lets you define categories, and then use one click to start or stop tracking the category. You can edit the records and include more specific descriptions in them. You can export all data to spreadsheet. I use it to track my daily time, on very general level—how much I sleep, meditate, etc.
(Note: When you start integrating with other apps, there are almost unlimited options. You may want to make some kind of plugin system, write a few plugins yourself, and let other users write their own. Otherwise people will bother you endlessly to integrate with their favorite app.)
The point is, this kind of problems is the wheel that every starting coder feels the need to reinvent. How much innovation there is in linking an on-screen UI element like a button with a predefined SQL query? (eh, don’t answer that, I’m sure there is a patent for it :-/)
Sure, you may want a personalized app that is set up just right for you, but in that case just pick the right framework and assemble your app out of Lego blocks. You don’t need to build your own plastic injection moulding machinery.
If you want to use spreadsheet software to do your data management you usually just use Excel instead of writing your own code for your own spreadsheet needs.
There’s no comparable well-developed app that does data entry on smart phones very well.
Data entry is a different problem than just having a database.
I installed Memento and let my start by listing how it screws up: ① The multiple choice field starts by showing me an empty drop down menu. I have to click on it for making it expand. After selecting my choices I have to click on “Ok” to get back to my form. That’s clearly two clicks to many. ② Automatic time tracking is even worse than Google Forms. The field that tracks the time get’s shown to the user with “current time” with the term current time meaning. There’s no reason why it can’t do the time tracking in the background. And if I fill out 5 entries there’s no reason why it can’t give me 5 time stamps. I would also want 5 time stamps with milliseconds and Memento apparantly thinks that nobody needs milliseconds. ③ It doesn’t do notifications. For a use case like morning tracking it’s good to have a notifaction. That means that I can press “on”, “click on the notifaction” and I’m right at my form. There’s no need to unlock the phone to enter data. ④ Many of the buttons are just to small. Yes, I can click on small buttons but it’s not as fast and if I want to build the habit to track something for QS purposes convenience matters a great deal.
I don’t think “data entry” is the problem that Memento is designed to solve well. From a QS standpoint a feature like notification seems key but from a “build a database”-standpoint it isn’t.
Thinking in terms of QS leads to getting as much timestamps as possible but if you design a database than you don’t add columns that the user doesn’t explicitly suggest he wants to have.
TapLog is very nifty, it’s simply that it would be even better with a somewhat extended feature set.
Here’s one use case: I want to log my skin picking and skin care routine (morning/evening).
The first is easy. I just add a button to my home screen that increments by one every time I click it (which is every time I touch my face with my fingers). After a while I can plot number of picks each day, or month, or cumulative, etc. It’s very nice.
Logging my skin care routine is more difficult, since TapLog does not support lists. (Only quantity, and/or text-input [with an optional prompt], and/or gps position, for a single entry)
What I would like is for TapLog to let me predefine a list of items (shave, cleanse, moisturizer) then give me a push notification in the morning and/or evening requesting me to check off each item.
(If you use something like Wunderlist with a daily repeat of the list, it is very fragile. If you miss a couple of days you have to reset the date for the reminder, because there’s no way for unfinished lists to simply disappear unless you actually check them off. And in Wunderlist there’s no way to analyze your list data to see how well you did last month, etc.)
TapLog is designed for entering one piece of data at a time.
If you have a checklist with 10 items and on average 5 are “yes” you have to do 10 clicks. Basically “click 1 yes” “back” “click 2 yes” “back” “click 3 yes” “back” “click 1 yes” “back” “click 1 yes” “back” and “click 5 yes” “back”.
If you have a Google form it only takes half as much clicks.
Besides pure click counting it’s also nice to see the checklist of 10 items together before clicking send to make sure that everything is right.
Google Forms is very nice but it’s not optimized for the smart-phone form factor.
It’s not even optimized for gathering as much data as possible. It doesn’t give me a time stamp for every single data entry but only one timestamp when the form in finished. It also needs internet. There was a while when I purposefully deactivated my router in the first hours of the day to reduce distractions and that prevented me from doing my morning tracking with Google Forms.
I didn’t want to criticize that you mentioned it, I just wanted to provide the general reasons of why the solution has problems (which is important for someone wanting to build something better).
You not need to see a seagull, it is better to hear a seagull. Especially for the reason your vision angle is not all around and behind the tree.
Your hearing is.
And when you hear a seagull, your phone hears it too, and there is no need for “a popup insert record into the database Android/Apple gesture widget” shit. It can be done automatically every time!
I think this is the wrong way to look at this problem. You can easily build an app for detecting seagull by their sound but that app isn’t easily customizable and you can’t throw it easily against different problems.
There’s a reason why most of us still use paper from time to time. Multiple local rationalists I know use paper notebooks. That’s because paper is very flexible. For all it’s problem it still outperforms digital tool in many circumstances because it’s so adaptable.
I’m not exactly sure how to respond, but maybe “don’t feed the trolls” is the way to go? I don’t see anything that Sandi did that motivated trolling her.
The answer is actually:
There isn’t a good app for this purpose.
Writing complex AI isn’t the only unsolved problem. Writing a simple and functional general purpose data entry app for smartphones also happens to be a problem without a good solution.
This one wouldn’t be very good, either. To automatize the data input, that’s the way to go, if you ask me. He did ask, and I gave him an answer. Whether you folks like it or not.
The question he asked was “I would like to know if something similar exists before trying to create it”. Maybe, understanding the problem domain isn’t the only problem but also reading comprehension?
“If you say X asked and I answered” that commonly means that you claim that your answer has something to do with the question. If you understand that your answer has nothing to do with the question there’s no need to point out that the person asked.
Just record everything (camera, microphone, GPS, your activity such as which web page you are reading), upload it to the cloud, and you can analyze it later.
I have a neat idea for a smartphone app, but I would like to know if something similar exists before trying to create it.
It would be used to measure various things in one’s life without having to fiddle with spreadsheets. You could create documents of different types, each type measuring something different. Data would be added via simple interfaces that fill in most of the necessary information. Reminders based on time, location and other factors could be set up to prompt for data entry. The gathered data would then be displayed using various graphs and could be exported.
The cool thing is that it would be super simple to reliably measure most things on a phone in a way that’s much simpler than keeping a spreadsheet. For example: you want to measure how often you see a seagull. You’d create a frequency-measuring document, entitle it “Seagull sightings”, and each time you open it, there’d be a big button for you to press indicating that you just saw a seagull. Pressing the button would automatically record the time and date, perhaps the location, when this happened. Additional fields could be added, like the size of the seagull, which would be prompted and logged with each press. With a spreadsheet, you’d have to enter the date yourself, and the interface isn’t nearly as convenient.
Another example: you’re curious as to how long you sleep and how you feel in the morning. You’d set up an interval-measuring document with a 1-10 integer field for sleep quality and reminders tied into your alarm app or the time you usually wake up. Each morning you’d enter hours slept and rate how good you feel. After a while you could look at pretty graphs and mine for correlations.
A third example: you can emulate the experience sampling method for yourself. You would have your phone remind you to take the survey at specific times in the day, whereupon you’d be presented with sliders, checkboxes, text fields and other fields of your choosing.
This could be taken further in a useful way by adding a crowd sourcing aspect. Document-templates could be shared in a sort of template marketplace. The data of everyone using a certain template would accumulate in one place, making for a much larger sample size.
I used to be very active in the Quantified Self community in the past but currently I still follow the Facebook group. As far as I know there’s no app that does a good job at this task.
For background research you might check out: https://gyrosco.pe/ http://www.inputbox.co/#/start http://www.reporter-app.com/ http://brainaid.com/
Here’s another app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zagalaga.keeptrack
I think that app also suffers from there being to many clicks if you have a bunch of values to track.
I think it would be unusable for my morning tracking because I have to make 3 clicks for every yes/no checkbox.
It reminds me of the story that when Jeff Bezos told his engineers to do 1-click buying they came back with a solution that took 4 clicks.
That’s incorrect if I understood right. Here’s how I use it:
Click reminder notification (or tracker-specific shortcut) to open
Click yes or no (you can have multiple of these in a single tracker)
Click save
So it’s 1 click to begin, 1 click for each choice, 1 click to save. There’s also support for input fields and lists with predefined values.
If you know an app that does this better, I am looking..
That’s three clicks.
If you have a Google form with a checklist of 10 items and you answer half of them with “yes” (tick them) you have 7 (if we count opening the form and sending the form) clicks instead of 30 (or maybe 25 if if you play with predefined values).
The main argument I’m making here is that there’s no app out there that really solves this problem well and there’s room for Sandi to create something better than the present options.
I probably explained badly. You can have 10 yes/no questions and fill half with 7 clicks using this app. It works exactly like the example you gave.
Is this what the paid “Multi value” feature does?
Yes.
I recommend the app warmly, but at the same time I’d be happy to switch if something with better design or features came up. I haven’t found anything as good yet.
Is there somewhere where I can see a good demo of how the multi value feature looks like in practice?
Thanks! I didn’t know this was such a developed concept already and that there are so many people trying to measure stuff about themselves. Pretty cool. I’ll check out Quantified Self and what’s linked.
I just went through my app list and found https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.odk.collect.android&hl=en
The Quantified Self facebook group is https://www.facebook.com/groups/quantifiedself/ . It might be another good place to get answer to your question.
Gleeo Time Tracker lets you define categories, and then use one click to start or stop tracking the category. You can edit the records and include more specific descriptions in them. You can export all data to spreadsheet. I use it to track my daily time, on very general level—how much I sleep, meditate, etc.
(Note: When you start integrating with other apps, there are almost unlimited options. You may want to make some kind of plugin system, write a few plugins yourself, and let other users write their own. Otherwise people will bother you endlessly to integrate with their favorite app.)
Looks like a database with some input forms.
That’s a reduction that is valid for many, many applications.
A fair point :-)
Yeah, that’s why I kept comparing it to a spreadsheet. Ease of use is a big point. I don’t want to write SQL queries on my phone.
The point is, this kind of problems is the wheel that every starting coder feels the need to reinvent. How much innovation there is in linking an on-screen UI element like a button with a predefined SQL query? (eh, don’t answer that, I’m sure there is a patent for it :-/)
Sure, you may want a personalized app that is set up just right for you, but in that case just pick the right framework and assemble your app out of Lego blocks. You don’t need to build your own plastic injection moulding machinery.
If you want to use spreadsheet software to do your data management you usually just use Excel instead of writing your own code for your own spreadsheet needs.
There’s no comparable well-developed app that does data entry on smart phones very well.
There are Android databases, e.g. Memento. Doing data entry “well” depends on your needs.
Data entry is a different problem than just having a database.
I installed Memento and let my start by listing how it screws up:
① The multiple choice field starts by showing me an empty drop down menu. I have to click on it for making it expand. After selecting my choices I have to click on “Ok” to get back to my form. That’s clearly two clicks to many.
② Automatic time tracking is even worse than Google Forms. The field that tracks the time get’s shown to the user with “current time” with the term current time meaning. There’s no reason why it can’t do the time tracking in the background. And if I fill out 5 entries there’s no reason why it can’t give me 5 time stamps. I would also want 5 time stamps with milliseconds and Memento apparantly thinks that nobody needs milliseconds.
③ It doesn’t do notifications. For a use case like morning tracking it’s good to have a notifaction. That means that I can press “on”, “click on the notifaction” and I’m right at my form. There’s no need to unlock the phone to enter data.
④ Many of the buttons are just to small. Yes, I can click on small buttons but it’s not as fast and if I want to build the habit to track something for QS purposes convenience matters a great deal.
So go complain to Memento’s creator how it doesn’t fit your use case :-P
I don’t think “data entry” is the problem that Memento is designed to solve well. From a QS standpoint a feature like notification seems key but from a “build a database”-standpoint it isn’t.
Thinking in terms of QS leads to getting as much timestamps as possible but if you design a database than you don’t add columns that the user doesn’t explicitly suggest he wants to have.
Your post reads as if you read my mind. :)
I currently use a mix between TapLog (for Android) and google forms (with an icon on my home screen so that it mimics a locally installed app).
Neither feels as if they really solve my needs, though. E.g. both lack a reminder feature.
What does TapLog lack, besides a reminder feature? It seems pretty nifty from the few screenshots I just saw.
TapLog is very nifty, it’s simply that it would be even better with a somewhat extended feature set.
Here’s one use case: I want to log my skin picking and skin care routine (morning/evening).
The first is easy. I just add a button to my home screen that increments by one every time I click it (which is every time I touch my face with my fingers). After a while I can plot number of picks each day, or month, or cumulative, etc. It’s very nice.
Logging my skin care routine is more difficult, since TapLog does not support lists. (Only quantity, and/or text-input [with an optional prompt], and/or gps position, for a single entry)
What I would like is for TapLog to let me predefine a list of items (shave, cleanse, moisturizer) then give me a push notification in the morning and/or evening requesting me to check off each item.
(If you use something like Wunderlist with a daily repeat of the list, it is very fragile. If you miss a couple of days you have to reset the date for the reminder, because there’s no way for unfinished lists to simply disappear unless you actually check them off. And in Wunderlist there’s no way to analyze your list data to see how well you did last month, etc.)
TapLog is designed for entering one piece of data at a time.
If you have a checklist with 10 items and on average 5 are “yes” you have to do 10 clicks. Basically “click 1 yes” “back” “click 2 yes” “back” “click 3 yes” “back” “click 1 yes” “back” “click 1 yes” “back” and “click 5 yes” “back”. If you have a Google form it only takes half as much clicks.
Besides pure click counting it’s also nice to see the checklist of 10 items together before clicking send to make sure that everything is right.
You could probably cobble something together with google forms.
https://docs.google.com/forms/u/0/
This can record the time and date of when the form was filled in. And it can go into a spreadsheet for easy analysis
Google Forms is very nice but it’s not optimized for the smart-phone form factor.
It’s not even optimized for gathering as much data as possible. It doesn’t give me a time stamp for every single data entry but only one timestamp when the form in finished. It also needs internet. There was a while when I purposefully deactivated my router in the first hours of the day to reduce distractions and that prevented me from doing my morning tracking with Google Forms.
Fair. I mentioned it as a way to validate how much use they would get out of the potential app and also as a way of finding the pain points.
I didn’t want to criticize that you mentioned it, I just wanted to provide the general reasons of why the solution has problems (which is important for someone wanting to build something better).
Not radical enough!
You not need to see a seagull, it is better to hear a seagull. Especially for the reason your vision angle is not all around and behind the tree.
Your hearing is.
And when you hear a seagull, your phone hears it too, and there is no need for “a popup insert record into the database Android/Apple gesture widget” shit. It can be done automatically every time!
You don’t want me to continue, do you?
I think this is the wrong way to look at this problem. You can easily build an app for detecting seagull by their sound but that app isn’t easily customizable and you can’t throw it easily against different problems.
There’s a reason why most of us still use paper from time to time. Multiple local rationalists I know use paper notebooks. That’s because paper is very flexible. For all it’s problem it still outperforms digital tool in many circumstances because it’s so adaptable.
Recognizing seagull by its voice, is a so called ARA—Absolutely Required Application.
We need a lot of them, billions, perhaps trillions. Or just one, flexible enough to substitute all of them.
Also known as the “better part of an AI”.
(Don’t bother, I have just invented this terminology. )
I’m not exactly sure how to respond, but maybe “don’t feed the trolls” is the way to go? I don’t see anything that Sandi did that motivated trolling her.
Some people have no imagination at all. In the “current year” is the database to feed on a smartphone. Which would be kind of okay, if it wouldn’t be:
Give me a break!
The answer is actually: There isn’t a good app for this purpose.
Writing complex AI isn’t the only unsolved problem. Writing a simple and functional general purpose data entry app for smartphones also happens to be a problem without a good solution.
This one wouldn’t be very good, either. To automatize the data input, that’s the way to go, if you ask me. He did ask, and I gave him an answer. Whether you folks like it or not.
The question he asked was “I would like to know if something similar exists before trying to create it”. Maybe, understanding the problem domain isn’t the only problem but also reading comprehension?
Answer only to what you have been asked?
“If you say X asked and I answered” that commonly means that you claim that your answer has something to do with the question. If you understand that your answer has nothing to do with the question there’s no need to point out that the person asked.
Just record everything (camera, microphone, GPS, your activity such as which web page you are reading), upload it to the cloud, and you can analyze it later.
Fixed that for you.
In most jurisdictions that runs into problem with the law.
Exactly!