6 ms·

Show HN: Personal Data Management Dashboard

176 points by volmarg_reiso 5y ago

twobitshifter 5y ago
The app itself looks great and I agree with the need to free your data. I don’t know what your long term goals for the project are, but I would suggest a different art style for the landing page. The tiny head people are generic and overdone at this point and I don’t think it really jives with the style of the app or the logo.
karlicoss 5y ago
Nice work! > The end goal is to have an application running on terminal or raspberry 24/7 plugged into my home network, without access to internet. As far as I understand you're using it as the primary interface for all your data, but in case you want to import some external data sources too, you might be interested in a project I started [0]. You can take periodic snapshots of you online data, and then use it as a fully offline programmatic API to integrate with other services, and potentially use in your dashboard as well. Perhaps if you glance at the diagram [1] it might become clearer how it fits :) [0] https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#readme https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#readme [1] https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html#fs https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html#fs
- jwithington 5y ago
  this is super cool! thanks for building. i'm extremely busy these days but will take a look...may even contribute if you're open to it and time permits. i've done some similar kind of stuff with peloton / strava metrics.
  - karlicoss 5y ago
    Definitely open to contributions, feel free to reach out if something is confusing!
wj 5y ago
Nice. I modified Dashing to do something kind of similar many years ago. Dashing then got discontinued and I didn't have time to extend it as much as I wished. Still own the domains I bought for it.
alfonsodev 5y ago
Nice idea! It would be awesome to link with Apple Health, since it already aggregates a lot of personal information.
aftergibson 5y ago
Uhh PMS? Might want to consider other acronyms.
- benatkin 5y ago
  There are plenty of three-letter acronyms that are used despite being overloaded with something worse.
  - aftergibson 5y ago
    I never implied worse or bad. It’s just a commonly used acronym that’s distracting from the message.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - groby_b 5y ago
    Yes. There are also plenty of people who are OK with being insensitive, or with offending half their userbase. And that's their choice. But at the same time, giving the author a heads-up that they might inadvertently sort themselves in that group is, I think, a kindness.
    - bachmeier 5y ago
      It's more along the lines of BOOGER or URINE than being insensitive or offensive. Some names are good and some are not. A name like that is not.
      - groby_b 5y ago
        Eye of the beholder, no? As a woman, my first reaction to something being named "PMS", I'd book it in the "insensitive" category. I know lots of other women will too. We've heard a few too many PMS remarks from men to not have a reaction. It's not just insensitive if it's insensitive to you.
benatkin 5y ago
I like that it stores passwords. I don't think it's an especially good idea to use a simple piece of software like this, but I don't think it's a good idea to use some popular commercial password managers either, and at least this is open source and self hosted. I recommend using 1password though. It has issues but is a solid piece of software that syncs to multiple devices.
- sascha_sl 5y ago
  I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Yes? No? Yes? Bitwarden has the advantage of being both self-hostable and being available hosted, and I found it to be similar enough to 1password to not substantially interrupt my workflow. In fact I was missing the URL matching feature in 1password (and their ages-old version of the public suffix list too).
- gen220 5y ago
  If you're already a UNIXy kind of person, you might want to check out https://www.passwordstore.org/ https://www.passwordstore.org/. If you're comfortable in the UNIX world, it's easy to migrate from all the big players, it's trivial to host the encrypted passwords on gitlab.com or git@tunnel-to-your-lan.com. To me, the key differentiating feature, that made it better than bitwarden + co, is that it implements nothing on its own, it's just a wrapper around git, gnupg, etc. This also means that, 10 years from now, if you want to migrate to a hosted solution, you can (since everything is plaintext at the deepest level, migration-out should be easy). It has mobile clients / multiple-device-sync, too. And it's easy to manage, because it's just git under the hood. I hadn't heard of them before doing some deep searching in this space recently. It's a product with zero marketing budget, but a good-sized community, so you wouldn't hear of it unless you were googling search terms in the space.
  - vdqtp3 5y ago
    Of course it's a fucking zx2c4 project. Does jason do anything that's not cool?
  - qudat 5y ago
    I’ve been using gnu pass for years and love it.
philote 5y ago
I would suggest putting the description of what PMS is at the top of the page rather than the very bottom. My pet peeve is homepages of products that don't actually tell what the product is in concise terms. This looks like a great project but I almost ignored it due to not seeing the description at first. EDIT: Also, you have a typo in "Powered by Symfony and Typscript"... missing the "e" in "Typescript".
- hansvm 5y ago
  > missing "e" You piqued my curiosity. Perusing the web I found a fun "typscript" job opening [0]. "Tyescript" also seems to be a hot topic [1]. [0] https://www.dice.com/jobs/detail/2608c733240961fea68d0c803a335b6a?src=32 https://www.dice.com/jobs/detail/2608c733240961fea68d0c803a3... [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40863252/tyescript-how-to-define-typings-for-strongly-typed-array-of-array https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40863252/tyescript-how-t...
- volmarg_reiso 5y ago
  Thx for info
camillomiller 5y ago
PMS is, to me, pre-menstrual syndrome. The acronym choice was probably not the best.
- always_left 5y ago
  GSW is known as golden-state warriors (basketball), but my mom worked in the ICU and would remind her of Gunshot wound.
  - bigbossman 5y ago
    That's what being a Warriors fan was like until 2013
    - ainiriand 5y ago
      Best comment.
  - simonw 5y ago
    I imagine the number of people with that preconceived notion of the acronym PMS is an order of magnitude higher than your GSW example.
ijustwanttovote 5y ago
Great idea, 'PMS' = weird name. I can definitely see a market for this.
dvdkon 5y ago
> It's very important to use strictly given NodeJs version. There were already few reports that after JS recompilation the project started to act strange. After further analyse it came out that this was caused due to using the latest available Node. I hate to bring node-bashing to this thread, but this further cements my dislike for the platform. I don't know why, but this happens much more often with node than Python or most other languages.
- fake-name 5y ago
  It's a dependency thing. JS (and as such, node) developers seem to love breaking everything down into little tiny bits and then having enormous dependency fan-outs for everything. With so many different parts written by different people, the likelyhood that any project with have a part that can be affected by any eratta change increases substantially. ------ I have a casual hypothesis that each person tends to settle with a subset of each programming language that they deeply internalize. As such, unless that one person is deliberately trying to, they're unlikely to write code that hits lots of the odd implementation corner cases that are natural in any language/implementation. However, the subset each person settles on is different, so if you don't have some sort of overarching style/quality management, you will trend towards a project being sensitive to any change in any implementation corner as you increase the number of dependencies. Dependency management (and possibly more critical, dependency quality) is becoming more and more important as things become more complex, and the tooling is not keeping up either.
candiddevmike 5y ago
If you're looking for something similar that does budgets, recipes, calendars and more (also self hosted!) checkout Domestica: https://about.domestica.app https://about.domestica.app. It's designed for families and couples, more of a "household data management" solution. Also, since this is HN, I'm looking for a marketing cofounder. And if any VC is interested, we are looking to raise our first funding round. Contact info is in my profile.
- movedx 5y ago
  This looked really promising at first, but then I realised it's self-hosted-with-crippled-features. This thread on Reddit was enough to put off: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/m9nfsi/self_hosted_domestica_budgets_meals_calendars/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/m9nfsi/self_hos...
deftnerd 5y ago
This looks very promising. I use several self-hosted solutions to handle several of the things this provides. The one thing that will keep me using Monica instead of this is the ability to access my contact info and their birthdays using CardDav and CalDav. CalDav for the Calendar would also be very useful.
asidiali 5y ago
This is incredible, I have been looking for something like this, congrats on such well done work!
szej 5y ago
The feeling I get from this page is that the branding seems a bit all over the place. The acronym "pms" just reminds me of "pre menstrual syndrome", and "personal management system" is not a very memorable, original or catchy name. The logo of the product looks a bit akward as it reminds of a car company logo, and doesnt really communicate anything related to a management system. The page doesnt look very coherent, with cartoonish drawings, a unmatching color scheme, several typos, and a logo which doesnt fit with the general look neither. I dont mean to tear down the page, but I hope this can help you to design it to give a better first impression. Edit: typos
- volmarg_reiso 5y ago
  Hello, Yeap I got this feeling about the logo as well, I was thinking about changing it, still might do. But the name remains :D Thx.
vbsteven 5y ago
This is cool. Working on something similar. I was wondering, are the tasks/notes/calendars/contacts all in your own system? Or can they be bridged using open protocols like CalDAV/CardDAV/iCal? My current approach for building something like this is to build only the processing/dashboard side, and keep using Todoist for storing tasks, Google Calendar for calendars etc, and then piece by piece migrate to fully self-hosted solutions like Owncloud/Nextcloud that provide standard protocol based storage. The main reason for my approach is that I do not want to implement Todo/Calendar/etc from scratch with UI's for every platform. Todoist works fine (and other open source CalDAV apps too), same with Google Calendar, so I want to get up and running using those apps on my phone, but still track the combined data in my own system.
- volmarg_reiso 5y ago
  All the task, pretty much everything is saved in the system.
Roark66 5y ago
This is pretty cool. Personally, I would love a multiplatform app like this. My wish list for it would be to: - Run on Android, Windows and Linux - Have a self hosted Web front end (this is already here) - Use encrypted flat files for storage with data stored in a way that lets the app do incremental synchronisation between instances (examples of what I mean: git, rsync). Perhaps use different encryption types and password recovery mechanisms for different kinds of data. For example encrypt your forum passwords with an easily resetable pin, encrypt your Web banking details with a secure password(or 2fa) you can reset with a key you can print out and store in a safe. - Finally, support scripting so you can extend the app's functionality.
ekampf1 5y ago
Why does anyone still use PHP?!
- volmarg_reiso 5y ago
  https://linuxhint.com/10_best_programming_languages_2021/ https://linuxhint.com/10_best_programming_languages_2021/ And so on.
jimi_d 5y ago
Well thought and designed! I'm just wondering how it exactly works, do you have to set things manually or does it have access to your data and is automatically managing your schedule, tasks, payments, passwords…? I reckon the idea itself is pretty interesting but I would fear relying on it too much and missing to type something if I have to use it manually, but I'd also fear relying on it too much and seeing it crash for one reason or another.
RobKohr 5y ago
I disagree with those ragging on the PMS acronym. Own it! They should play on the acronym in very subtle ways. Icons that semi look like tampons and pads, slightly reddish hues, etc. But keep it subtle. You are in a super crowded market, and using something people are uncomfortable about, that they shouldn't be uncomfortable about is a great way to attract attention and keep you at the top of peoples minds.

176 points by volmarg_reiso 5y ago

The app itself looks great and I agree with the need to free your data. I don’t know what your long term goals for the project are, but I would suggest a different art style for the landing page. The tiny head people are generic and overdone at this point and I don’t think it really jives with the style of the app or the logo.

karlicoss 5y ago

Nice work! > The end goal is to have an application running on terminal or raspberry 24/7 plugged into my home network, without access to internet. As far as I understand you're using it as the primary interface for all your data, but in case you want to import some external data sources too, you might be interested in a project I started [0]. You can take periodic snapshots of you online data, and then use it as a fully offline programmatic API to integrate with other services, and potentially use in your dashboard as well. Perhaps if you glance at the diagram [1] it might become clearer how it fits :) [0] https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#readme https://github.com/karlicoss/HPI#readme [1] https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html#fs https://beepb00p.xyz/myinfra.html#fs

jwithington 5y ago
this is super cool! thanks for building. i'm extremely busy these days but will take a look...may even contribute if you're open to it and time permits. i've done some similar kind of stuff with peloton / strava metrics.
- karlicoss 5y ago
  Definitely open to contributions, feel free to reach out if something is confusing!

wj 5y ago

Nice. I modified Dashing to do something kind of similar many years ago. Dashing then got discontinued and I didn't have time to extend it as much as I wished. Still own the domains I bought for it.

alfonsodev 5y ago

Nice idea! It would be awesome to link with Apple Health, since it already aggregates a lot of personal information.

aftergibson 5y ago

Uhh PMS? Might want to consider other acronyms.

benatkin 5y ago
There are plenty of three-letter acronyms that are used despite being overloaded with something worse.
- aftergibson 5y ago
  I never implied worse or bad. It’s just a commonly used acronym that’s distracting from the message.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- groby_b 5y ago
  Yes. There are also plenty of people who are OK with being insensitive, or with offending half their userbase. And that's their choice. But at the same time, giving the author a heads-up that they might inadvertently sort themselves in that group is, I think, a kindness.
  - bachmeier 5y ago
    It's more along the lines of BOOGER or URINE than being insensitive or offensive. Some names are good and some are not. A name like that is not.
    - groby_b 5y ago
      Eye of the beholder, no? As a woman, my first reaction to something being named "PMS", I'd book it in the "insensitive" category. I know lots of other women will too. We've heard a few too many PMS remarks from men to not have a reaction. It's not just insensitive if it's insensitive to you.

benatkin 5y ago

I like that it stores passwords. I don't think it's an especially good idea to use a simple piece of software like this, but I don't think it's a good idea to use some popular commercial password managers either, and at least this is open source and self hosted. I recommend using 1password though. It has issues but is a solid piece of software that syncs to multiple devices.

sascha_sl 5y ago
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Yes? No? Yes? Bitwarden has the advantage of being both self-hostable and being available hosted, and I found it to be similar enough to 1password to not substantially interrupt my workflow. In fact I was missing the URL matching feature in 1password (and their ages-old version of the public suffix list too).
gen220 5y ago
If you're already a UNIXy kind of person, you might want to check out https://www.passwordstore.org/ https://www.passwordstore.org/. If you're comfortable in the UNIX world, it's easy to migrate from all the big players, it's trivial to host the encrypted passwords on gitlab.com or git@tunnel-to-your-lan.com. To me, the key differentiating feature, that made it better than bitwarden + co, is that it implements nothing on its own, it's just a wrapper around git, gnupg, etc. This also means that, 10 years from now, if you want to migrate to a hosted solution, you can (since everything is plaintext at the deepest level, migration-out should be easy). It has mobile clients / multiple-device-sync, too. And it's easy to manage, because it's just git under the hood. I hadn't heard of them before doing some deep searching in this space recently. It's a product with zero marketing budget, but a good-sized community, so you wouldn't hear of it unless you were googling search terms in the space.
- vdqtp3 5y ago
  Of course it's a fucking zx2c4 project. Does jason do anything that's not cool?
- qudat 5y ago
  I’ve been using gnu pass for years and love it.

philote 5y ago

I would suggest putting the description of what PMS is at the top of the page rather than the very bottom. My pet peeve is homepages of products that don't actually tell what the product is in concise terms. This looks like a great project but I almost ignored it due to not seeing the description at first. EDIT: Also, you have a typo in "Powered by Symfony and Typscript"... missing the "e" in "Typescript".

hansvm 5y ago
> missing "e" You piqued my curiosity. Perusing the web I found a fun "typscript" job opening [0]. "Tyescript" also seems to be a hot topic [1]. [0] https://www.dice.com/jobs/detail/2608c733240961fea68d0c803a335b6a?src=32 https://www.dice.com/jobs/detail/2608c733240961fea68d0c803a3... [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40863252/tyescript-how-to-define-typings-for-strongly-typed-array-of-array https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40863252/tyescript-how-t...
volmarg_reiso 5y ago
Thx for info

camillomiller 5y ago

PMS is, to me, pre-menstrual syndrome. The acronym choice was probably not the best.

always_left 5y ago
GSW is known as golden-state warriors (basketball), but my mom worked in the ICU and would remind her of Gunshot wound.
- bigbossman 5y ago
  That's what being a Warriors fan was like until 2013
  - ainiriand 5y ago
    Best comment.
- simonw 5y ago
  I imagine the number of people with that preconceived notion of the acronym PMS is an order of magnitude higher than your GSW example.

ijustwanttovote 5y ago

Great idea, 'PMS' = weird name. I can definitely see a market for this.

dvdkon 5y ago

> It's very important to use strictly given NodeJs version. There were already few reports that after JS recompilation the project started to act strange. After further analyse it came out that this was caused due to using the latest available Node. I hate to bring node-bashing to this thread, but this further cements my dislike for the platform. I don't know why, but this happens much more often with node than Python or most other languages.

fake-name 5y ago
It's a dependency thing. JS (and as such, node) developers seem to love breaking everything down into little tiny bits and then having enormous dependency fan-outs for everything. With so many different parts written by different people, the likelyhood that any project with have a part that can be affected by any eratta change increases substantially. ------ I have a casual hypothesis that each person tends to settle with a subset of each programming language that they deeply internalize. As such, unless that one person is deliberately trying to, they're unlikely to write code that hits lots of the odd implementation corner cases that are natural in any language/implementation. However, the subset each person settles on is different, so if you don't have some sort of overarching style/quality management, you will trend towards a project being sensitive to any change in any implementation corner as you increase the number of dependencies. Dependency management (and possibly more critical, dependency quality) is becoming more and more important as things become more complex, and the tooling is not keeping up either.

candiddevmike 5y ago

If you're looking for something similar that does budgets, recipes, calendars and more (also self hosted!) checkout Domestica: https://about.domestica.app https://about.domestica.app. It's designed for families and couples, more of a "household data management" solution. Also, since this is HN, I'm looking for a marketing cofounder. And if any VC is interested, we are looking to raise our first funding round. Contact info is in my profile.

movedx 5y ago
This looked really promising at first, but then I realised it's self-hosted-with-crippled-features. This thread on Reddit was enough to put off: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/m9nfsi/self_hosted_domestica_budgets_meals_calendars/ https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/m9nfsi/self_hos...

deftnerd 5y ago

This looks very promising. I use several self-hosted solutions to handle several of the things this provides. The one thing that will keep me using Monica instead of this is the ability to access my contact info and their birthdays using CardDav and CalDav. CalDav for the Calendar would also be very useful.

asidiali 5y ago

This is incredible, I have been looking for something like this, congrats on such well done work!

szej 5y ago

The feeling I get from this page is that the branding seems a bit all over the place. The acronym "pms" just reminds me of "pre menstrual syndrome", and "personal management system" is not a very memorable, original or catchy name. The logo of the product looks a bit akward as it reminds of a car company logo, and doesnt really communicate anything related to a management system. The page doesnt look very coherent, with cartoonish drawings, a unmatching color scheme, several typos, and a logo which doesnt fit with the general look neither. I dont mean to tear down the page, but I hope this can help you to design it to give a better first impression. Edit: typos

volmarg_reiso 5y ago
Hello, Yeap I got this feeling about the logo as well, I was thinking about changing it, still might do. But the name remains :D Thx.

vbsteven 5y ago

This is cool. Working on something similar. I was wondering, are the tasks/notes/calendars/contacts all in your own system? Or can they be bridged using open protocols like CalDAV/CardDAV/iCal? My current approach for building something like this is to build only the processing/dashboard side, and keep using Todoist for storing tasks, Google Calendar for calendars etc, and then piece by piece migrate to fully self-hosted solutions like Owncloud/Nextcloud that provide standard protocol based storage. The main reason for my approach is that I do not want to implement Todo/Calendar/etc from scratch with UI's for every platform. Todoist works fine (and other open source CalDAV apps too), same with Google Calendar, so I want to get up and running using those apps on my phone, but still track the combined data in my own system.

volmarg_reiso 5y ago
All the task, pretty much everything is saved in the system.

Roark66 5y ago

This is pretty cool. Personally, I would love a multiplatform app like this. My wish list for it would be to: - Run on Android, Windows and Linux - Have a self hosted Web front end (this is already here) - Use encrypted flat files for storage with data stored in a way that lets the app do incremental synchronisation between instances (examples of what I mean: git, rsync). Perhaps use different encryption types and password recovery mechanisms for different kinds of data. For example encrypt your forum passwords with an easily resetable pin, encrypt your Web banking details with a secure password(or 2fa) you can reset with a key you can print out and store in a safe. - Finally, support scripting so you can extend the app's functionality.

ekampf1 5y ago

Why does anyone still use PHP?!

volmarg_reiso 5y ago
https://linuxhint.com/10_best_programming_languages_2021/ https://linuxhint.com/10_best_programming_languages_2021/ And so on.

jimi_d 5y ago

Well thought and designed! I'm just wondering how it exactly works, do you have to set things manually or does it have access to your data and is automatically managing your schedule, tasks, payments, passwords…? I reckon the idea itself is pretty interesting but I would fear relying on it too much and missing to type something if I have to use it manually, but I'd also fear relying on it too much and seeing it crash for one reason or another.

RobKohr 5y ago

I disagree with those ragging on the PMS acronym. Own it! They should play on the acronym in very subtle ways. Icons that semi look like tampons and pads, slightly reddish hues, etc. But keep it subtle. You are in a super crowded market, and using something people are uncomfortable about, that they shouldn't be uncomfortable about is a great way to attract attention and keep you at the top of peoples minds.