5 ms·

I got really excited after reading the submission title because I thought someone had finally created a service I've wanted for a while. This is great, but you

by kyro 14y ago

I got really excited after reading the submission title because I thought someone had finally created a service I've wanted for a while. This is great, but you should take it further! Here's the idea: I've wanted a personal dashboard to track everything in my life at a quick glance, like weight/health metrics, financials, to-do, schedule, emails, twitter replies, etc; something that'll give me a quick and comprehensive view of everything going on personally, socially, financially, professionally. Basically a Mint meets Ducksboard for my life, or even better, a universal life platform that services can hook into. Email me if you're interested!

alexpak 14y ago
42goals.com
- kyro 14y ago
  Not quite what I had in mind.
mechanical_fish 14y ago
Yes, as I die I'll be able to look back on my life and see that I had everything properly organized into neat folders.
- kyro 14y ago
  Not sure what the snark is for. Perhaps I didn't explain its usefulness that well. I may write a post about it because there seems to be some interest.
  - icey 14y ago
    It sounds interesting to me. I'd like to hear more about what you're thinking. I love tracking data like this.
  - mechanical_fish 14y ago
    Okay, sorry, let me spend some more time and give you an example. One big problem with a unified dashboard is that not everything in your life should be monitored on the same frequency. Here's one example: You probably need to check your email several times a day (if not, god bless you!) but checking your 401k balance several times a day is almost certainly harmful to your well-being. It probably doesn't make you happier; contemplating your money rarely does. Instead it will alternately make you worry (as every dip in the stock market causes nightmarish visions of a retirement spent in a cardboard box), or make you irrationally exuberant (as every good trading day makes you dream of buying a second home). The net effect is that it will subtly encourage you to trade, because if you don't trade your 401k is the most boring thing imaginable, and you feel the subconscious urge to tinker with it to make it do something. But trading is a disaster, because churning your investments makes other people rich at your expense, and because timing the market doesn't work, and telling yourself not to time the market usually doesn't work, either. For much more on this topic see the work of e.g. William Bernstein (The Four Pillars of Investing, The Investor's Manifesto) or any of the so-called Bogleheads, or try Ramit Sethi: https://wordsofward.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/the-single-best-investment-choice-intro-to-index-funds/ https://wordsofward.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/the-single-best... Here's another example: The ideal amount of time to spend monitoring your weight is none, unless your weight is unhealthily large or is increasing significantly. (If you're prone to anorexia, a continuously updated dashboard showing your weight is potentially dangerous. You need to avoid playing that game.) And unless you're some sort of edge-case athlete, by no means should you monitor your weight daily: You should either weigh-in weekly, or weigh yourself daily but compute a running average (and have a deep understanding of what a running average is and why you're computing it). Otherwise day-to-day fluctuations are likely to destroy your confidence in your diet. (I'm told that, for this reason, Weight Watchers explicitly trains members to weigh-in weekly, not daily.)
    - philwelch 14y ago
      So why can't your dashboard show different metrics each day? You can just configure the different widgets to show up at different frequencies. Perhaps your 401k widget only shows up the first time you log in each quarter. Your weight tracking widget only shows up Monday morning. Your banking and monthly budgeting widget shows up daily. Your Amazon order shipping widget shows up only when you have an open order. Your meal plan widget shows up all the time. You can choose which widgets you want. If you're poor and don't have a 401k, don't turn on the 401k widget. If you're rich and skinny and don't have problems maintaining either of those, don't turn on the budgeting and weight loss widgets. But a shared dashboard doesn't imply everything on the same frequency.
  - aamar 14y ago
    Please do write about it. I'm pretty interested in this space as well, and I'd love to hear some other people's real-life use cases. A couple dangers with "track everything" apps: (A) the app may track nothing well, and (B) it may be exceedingly hard to communicate its benefits to people. On the other hand, there may be some significant benefits to a having a data hub for personal metrics: easy cross-referenced reporting, etc.
- batista 14y ago
  >Yes, as I die I'll be able to look back on my life and see that I had everything properly organized into neat folders. Whereas you are mr. Joe Adventure, middle name "Unpredictable" now? The same thing could be said for all "todo", "time management", "GTD", etc solutions. Why the snark for this particular idea, which sounds a lot more involved and useful than 90% of the GTD apps out there? Actually reminds me of the "personal customized web portal pages" of old, which could be even more interesting in this day and age, showing latest tweets, mails, bank balance, upcoming events, RSS feeds you follow, etc, on top of basic stuff like todos etc.
- mgallivan 14y ago
  This is coming from a person who probably hasn't seen a benefit from using services like Mint.com. Since I've started using it I have been drastically more aware of my finances. The stuff that you are able to put into neat little folders _should_ go into neat little folders.
  - mechanical_fish 14y ago
    I use a service like Mint.com. I check it about once a month. That may well be too often, and a sign that my automation and budget aren't fully mature; once a quarter would be more ideal. A continuously-updated Mint dashboard? If I needed to micromanage my money that closely it would be a sign of trouble. And it would certainly be stressful. Most of the money-management advice I trust emphasizes the role of automation. If your budgeting system requires constant mindfulness it's not working well.
    - samspot 14y ago
      But you assume that all users of mint have a mature budget. When you are first starting out you do need to monitor it heavily as it helps you adapt to your budget. Not to mention initial budgets rarely work because there is always some expense that was forgotten.
    - mgallivan 14y ago
      I understand (and my budget may vary differently from yours). But the original poster's point was that if you have a number of these services (similar to Mint), then it sort of sucks having to check x different sites for a general overview of your "status". EDIT: I saw your above comment and you make a good point about different check-in times.
corry 14y ago
Have you checked out http://daytum.com/ http://daytum.com/? Simple tracking for lots different things.
- Groxx 14y ago
  I like the idea, but the app hasn't been updated in a year and a half (see also their "what's new" section - not a good sign for system health), and there are a lot of gaps in what I'd end up using such a site for. Would you happen to know any alternatives? They've always been hard to google for, in my experience :|
  - Cederfjard 14y ago
    How about https://www.lucidtracker.com/ https://www.lucidtracker.com/? I believe it was on here some time ago.
    - Groxx 14y ago
      Finally decided to poke at it a bit. I hit login bugs, an infinite redirect loop, really inefficient UI, unhelpful graphs (where they were graphed at all - I filled in a week of fake numbers, it just spit it back out in text, and didn't even validate a number field), and a cost that isn't even remotely justified. It looks like a short-term project that has been left to rot. tl;dr: no thanks. Daytum is infinitely better, and cheaper.
krobertson 14y ago
That sounds depressing... who you are summarized down to a status dashboard. I think the OP's idea is great and can go further. The distinction is between what I am doing/need to do and who I am.
- kyro 14y ago
  What? I'm talking about glancing at a dashboard in the morning and being able to tell how much money I should or shouldn't be spending, whether I'm on track to hitting a weight goal and be reminded to watch what I eat, if my afternoon is free to hang with friends, if there are any events of interest in the area, if I've got any important to-do's, etc, etc. The point is it's all updated in real-time. We've got the services and biosensors to do it. Now it's just a matter of integrating it all together. Hardly depressing.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - TillE 14y ago
    Yeah, that sounds amazing. You'd have to integrate with a lot of services that don't necessarily expose APIs, though. Well come to think of it, most of them do. Seriously, this is one of the most interesting software ideas I've heard in a long time, and I don't usually get excited about productivity software. Do it.
- pjscott 14y ago
  Hey now, don't dehumanize yourself! A dashboard of your life could summarize the boring, fiddly details that you have to keep track of -- budget, to-do items, reminders, package tracking, whatever -- so that you can stop wasting time thinking about them. You are more interesting than your credit card bill, or your list of upcoming events, and automating that crap would almost certainly be a net win for you as a person. Or me, for that matter.
samstave 14y ago
Have you tried cue? Cueapp
armandososa 14y ago
I think that http://lift.do http://lift.do is making something similar to what you are describing.
- dwynings 14y ago
  Not really. Lift is more about changing personal habits.
whouweling 14y ago
You might want to have a look at https://trackpanel.net https://trackpanel.net , it is a side-project which I have created (and use) for just this purpose.
xyzzyb 14y ago
Check out your.flowingdata: http://your.flowingdata.com/ http://your.flowingdata.com/ It allows you to record and create beautiful charts from any arbitrary data you want to send it. It gets the data by you tweeting direct messages to it, so it's really easy to do from just about any device.
- unreal37 14y ago
  I wanted to try this, but it doesn't autofollow you so that kind of breaks the whole "send a DM to yfd" interface.
  - xyzzyb 14y ago
    That's odd, it should autofollow. I've seen it go under heavy load before where the autofollow took several hours to complete.
    - unreal37 14y ago
      It has followed me now. So problem solved. I also noticed in a few places on the site where it says "we've turned off autofollow"... All good.
qdot76367 14y ago
If you're already on emacs and org-mode, there's the memacs project: https://github.com/novoid/Memacs https://github.com/novoid/Memacs
ClintonWu 14y ago
Give Skim.Me (http://skim.me http://skim.me) a shot when we release. Integration is the hard part but it's the next step in the evolution away from widget based dashboards to better designed experiences that display that info. I think the experience should be multi-tiered - from quick glances to deeper functionality for repetitive actions. You might just want to track some things but you should also be able to do X or Y without going to another destination.
- awa 14y ago
  the homepage of skim.me totally confuses me... just 3 bullet points and you want my email address. No demo, no pictures. Asking and getting email ids from users shouldn't be so cheap.
  - ClintonWu 14y ago
    yeah, I hear you. we're working on a new homepage with a demo video. we initially threw something up quick so we could focus on the product.
  - yessql 14y ago
    The laminate flooring is nice though. You have to give them that.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
njx 14y ago
You can do this very easily by putting your data in Google spreadsheet and use https://my.infocaptor.com https://my.infocaptor.com to track it. Here is how you would connect to google spreadsheet http://infocaptor.com/help/google_spreadsheet.htm http://infocaptor.com/help/google_spreadsheet.htm A while ago I built a similar tracking tool for my kid and then introduced to his friend's parents in our neighbourhood and they love the concept. We still use but haven't checked if his friend's parent still use. Basically it is a google form, so we trained my son to go in and add the time and note down the activity http://www.infocaptor.com/help/kid_activity_dashboard.htm http://www.infocaptor.com/help/kid_activity_dashboard.htm And here is the sample google spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgQUzbm48k2ydDJESkZQd1ZrWkVHSmtXSVVLMnVHUHc#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgQUzbm48k2ydDJ...
pkaler 14y ago
Basically a Mint meets Ducksboard for my life, or even better, a universal life platform that services can hook into. I'm working on that and looking for TestFlight Beta testers. http://makeperfect.me http://makeperfect.me
- Domenic_S 14y ago
  > I'm working on that I sincerely never would have guessed that from your landing page.
  - freehunter 14y ago
    Yeah, even after the creator saying what it does and reading the site, I still have no idea what it actually does.
  - pkaler 14y ago
    > I sincerely never would have guessed that from your landing page. I've spent about 2 hours buying the domain, setting up email, Twitter, Launchrock, etc. So yes the pitch and landing page are very rough right now. My goal is to do just enough marketing to get 100 good BETA testers. Ship to Testflight. Refine the App and the pitch. Rinse, repeat. It'll get better every week but pardon the rough edges at the moment.
kmfrk 14y ago
On the other hand, this is such a privacy information goldmine that you'd have to increase your security efforts by orders of magnitude.
ricardobeat 14y ago
What can't ducksboard do that you need? Everything you listed can be added as long as it has an API.

by kyro 14y ago

alexpak 14y ago

42goals.com

kyro 14y ago
Not quite what I had in mind.

mechanical_fish 14y ago

Yes, as I die I'll be able to look back on my life and see that I had everything properly organized into neat folders.

kyro 14y ago
Not sure what the snark is for. Perhaps I didn't explain its usefulness that well. I may write a post about it because there seems to be some interest.
- icey 14y ago
  It sounds interesting to me. I'd like to hear more about what you're thinking. I love tracking data like this.
- mechanical_fish 14y ago
  Okay, sorry, let me spend some more time and give you an example. One big problem with a unified dashboard is that not everything in your life should be monitored on the same frequency. Here's one example: You probably need to check your email several times a day (if not, god bless you!) but checking your 401k balance several times a day is almost certainly harmful to your well-being. It probably doesn't make you happier; contemplating your money rarely does. Instead it will alternately make you worry (as every dip in the stock market causes nightmarish visions of a retirement spent in a cardboard box), or make you irrationally exuberant (as every good trading day makes you dream of buying a second home). The net effect is that it will subtly encourage you to trade, because if you don't trade your 401k is the most boring thing imaginable, and you feel the subconscious urge to tinker with it to make it do something. But trading is a disaster, because churning your investments makes other people rich at your expense, and because timing the market doesn't work, and telling yourself not to time the market usually doesn't work, either. For much more on this topic see the work of e.g. William Bernstein (The Four Pillars of Investing, The Investor's Manifesto) or any of the so-called Bogleheads, or try Ramit Sethi: https://wordsofward.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/the-single-best-investment-choice-intro-to-index-funds/ https://wordsofward.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/the-single-best... Here's another example: The ideal amount of time to spend monitoring your weight is none, unless your weight is unhealthily large or is increasing significantly. (If you're prone to anorexia, a continuously updated dashboard showing your weight is potentially dangerous. You need to avoid playing that game.) And unless you're some sort of edge-case athlete, by no means should you monitor your weight daily: You should either weigh-in weekly, or weigh yourself daily but compute a running average (and have a deep understanding of what a running average is and why you're computing it). Otherwise day-to-day fluctuations are likely to destroy your confidence in your diet. (I'm told that, for this reason, Weight Watchers explicitly trains members to weigh-in weekly, not daily.)
  - philwelch 14y ago
    So why can't your dashboard show different metrics each day? You can just configure the different widgets to show up at different frequencies. Perhaps your 401k widget only shows up the first time you log in each quarter. Your weight tracking widget only shows up Monday morning. Your banking and monthly budgeting widget shows up daily. Your Amazon order shipping widget shows up only when you have an open order. Your meal plan widget shows up all the time. You can choose which widgets you want. If you're poor and don't have a 401k, don't turn on the 401k widget. If you're rich and skinny and don't have problems maintaining either of those, don't turn on the budgeting and weight loss widgets. But a shared dashboard doesn't imply everything on the same frequency.
- aamar 14y ago
  Please do write about it. I'm pretty interested in this space as well, and I'd love to hear some other people's real-life use cases. A couple dangers with "track everything" apps: (A) the app may track nothing well, and (B) it may be exceedingly hard to communicate its benefits to people. On the other hand, there may be some significant benefits to a having a data hub for personal metrics: easy cross-referenced reporting, etc.
batista 14y ago
>Yes, as I die I'll be able to look back on my life and see that I had everything properly organized into neat folders. Whereas you are mr. Joe Adventure, middle name "Unpredictable" now? The same thing could be said for all "todo", "time management", "GTD", etc solutions. Why the snark for this particular idea, which sounds a lot more involved and useful than 90% of the GTD apps out there? Actually reminds me of the "personal customized web portal pages" of old, which could be even more interesting in this day and age, showing latest tweets, mails, bank balance, upcoming events, RSS feeds you follow, etc, on top of basic stuff like todos etc.
mgallivan 14y ago
This is coming from a person who probably hasn't seen a benefit from using services like Mint.com. Since I've started using it I have been drastically more aware of my finances. The stuff that you are able to put into neat little folders _should_ go into neat little folders.
- mechanical_fish 14y ago
  I use a service like Mint.com. I check it about once a month. That may well be too often, and a sign that my automation and budget aren't fully mature; once a quarter would be more ideal. A continuously-updated Mint dashboard? If I needed to micromanage my money that closely it would be a sign of trouble. And it would certainly be stressful. Most of the money-management advice I trust emphasizes the role of automation. If your budgeting system requires constant mindfulness it's not working well.
  - samspot 14y ago
    But you assume that all users of mint have a mature budget. When you are first starting out you do need to monitor it heavily as it helps you adapt to your budget. Not to mention initial budgets rarely work because there is always some expense that was forgotten.
  - mgallivan 14y ago
    I understand (and my budget may vary differently from yours). But the original poster's point was that if you have a number of these services (similar to Mint), then it sort of sucks having to check x different sites for a general overview of your "status". EDIT: I saw your above comment and you make a good point about different check-in times.

corry 14y ago

Have you checked out http://daytum.com/ http://daytum.com/? Simple tracking for lots different things.

Groxx 14y ago
I like the idea, but the app hasn't been updated in a year and a half (see also their "what's new" section - not a good sign for system health), and there are a lot of gaps in what I'd end up using such a site for. Would you happen to know any alternatives? They've always been hard to google for, in my experience :|
- Cederfjard 14y ago
  How about https://www.lucidtracker.com/ https://www.lucidtracker.com/? I believe it was on here some time ago.
  - Groxx 14y ago
    Finally decided to poke at it a bit. I hit login bugs, an infinite redirect loop, really inefficient UI, unhelpful graphs (where they were graphed at all - I filled in a week of fake numbers, it just spit it back out in text, and didn't even validate a number field), and a cost that isn't even remotely justified. It looks like a short-term project that has been left to rot. tl;dr: no thanks. Daytum is infinitely better, and cheaper.

krobertson 14y ago

That sounds depressing... who you are summarized down to a status dashboard. I think the OP's idea is great and can go further. The distinction is between what I am doing/need to do and who I am.

kyro 14y ago
What? I'm talking about glancing at a dashboard in the morning and being able to tell how much money I should or shouldn't be spending, whether I'm on track to hitting a weight goal and be reminded to watch what I eat, if my afternoon is free to hang with friends, if there are any events of interest in the area, if I've got any important to-do's, etc, etc. The point is it's all updated in real-time. We've got the services and biosensors to do it. Now it's just a matter of integrating it all together. Hardly depressing.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- TillE 14y ago
  Yeah, that sounds amazing. You'd have to integrate with a lot of services that don't necessarily expose APIs, though. Well come to think of it, most of them do. Seriously, this is one of the most interesting software ideas I've heard in a long time, and I don't usually get excited about productivity software. Do it.
pjscott 14y ago
Hey now, don't dehumanize yourself! A dashboard of your life could summarize the boring, fiddly details that you have to keep track of -- budget, to-do items, reminders, package tracking, whatever -- so that you can stop wasting time thinking about them. You are more interesting than your credit card bill, or your list of upcoming events, and automating that crap would almost certainly be a net win for you as a person. Or me, for that matter.

samstave 14y ago

Have you tried cue? Cueapp

armandososa 14y ago

I think that http://lift.do http://lift.do is making something similar to what you are describing.

dwynings 14y ago
Not really. Lift is more about changing personal habits.

whouweling 14y ago

You might want to have a look at https://trackpanel.net https://trackpanel.net , it is a side-project which I have created (and use) for just this purpose.

xyzzyb 14y ago

Check out your.flowingdata: http://your.flowingdata.com/ http://your.flowingdata.com/ It allows you to record and create beautiful charts from any arbitrary data you want to send it. It gets the data by you tweeting direct messages to it, so it's really easy to do from just about any device.

unreal37 14y ago
I wanted to try this, but it doesn't autofollow you so that kind of breaks the whole "send a DM to yfd" interface.
- xyzzyb 14y ago
  That's odd, it should autofollow. I've seen it go under heavy load before where the autofollow took several hours to complete.
  - unreal37 14y ago
    It has followed me now. So problem solved. I also noticed in a few places on the site where it says "we've turned off autofollow"... All good.

qdot76367 14y ago

If you're already on emacs and org-mode, there's the memacs project: https://github.com/novoid/Memacs https://github.com/novoid/Memacs

ClintonWu 14y ago

Give Skim.Me (http://skim.me http://skim.me) a shot when we release. Integration is the hard part but it's the next step in the evolution away from widget based dashboards to better designed experiences that display that info. I think the experience should be multi-tiered - from quick glances to deeper functionality for repetitive actions. You might just want to track some things but you should also be able to do X or Y without going to another destination.

awa 14y ago
the homepage of skim.me totally confuses me... just 3 bullet points and you want my email address. No demo, no pictures. Asking and getting email ids from users shouldn't be so cheap.
- ClintonWu 14y ago
  yeah, I hear you. we're working on a new homepage with a demo video. we initially threw something up quick so we could focus on the product.
- yessql 14y ago
  The laminate flooring is nice though. You have to give them that.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

njx 14y ago

You can do this very easily by putting your data in Google spreadsheet and use https://my.infocaptor.com https://my.infocaptor.com to track it. Here is how you would connect to google spreadsheet http://infocaptor.com/help/google_spreadsheet.htm http://infocaptor.com/help/google_spreadsheet.htm A while ago I built a similar tracking tool for my kid and then introduced to his friend's parents in our neighbourhood and they love the concept. We still use but haven't checked if his friend's parent still use. Basically it is a google form, so we trained my son to go in and add the time and note down the activity http://www.infocaptor.com/help/kid_activity_dashboard.htm http://www.infocaptor.com/help/kid_activity_dashboard.htm And here is the sample google spreadsheet https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgQUzbm48k2ydDJESkZQd1ZrWkVHSmtXSVVLMnVHUHc#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgQUzbm48k2ydDJ...

pkaler 14y ago

Basically a Mint meets Ducksboard for my life, or even better, a universal life platform that services can hook into. I'm working on that and looking for TestFlight Beta testers. http://makeperfect.me http://makeperfect.me

Domenic_S 14y ago
> I'm working on that I sincerely never would have guessed that from your landing page.
- freehunter 14y ago
  Yeah, even after the creator saying what it does and reading the site, I still have no idea what it actually does.
- pkaler 14y ago
  > I sincerely never would have guessed that from your landing page. I've spent about 2 hours buying the domain, setting up email, Twitter, Launchrock, etc. So yes the pitch and landing page are very rough right now. My goal is to do just enough marketing to get 100 good BETA testers. Ship to Testflight. Refine the App and the pitch. Rinse, repeat. It'll get better every week but pardon the rough edges at the moment.

kmfrk 14y ago

On the other hand, this is such a privacy information goldmine that you'd have to increase your security efforts by orders of magnitude.

ricardobeat 14y ago

What can't ducksboard do that you need? Everything you listed can be added as long as it has an API.