
Show HN: Annex – What are you doing? - jathu
http://jathu.me/annex
======
wingerlang
Bit strong colors perhaps.

It's a nice idea, but opening an app to record each single change in activity
will be a hard sell, even with the reminders (eventually they will annoy you).

I think that if it is more effort to enter something than it is to
close/ignore it - then eventually it will get ignored.

I love tracking and I find the idea of this app awesome (because I have had
the same idea). A small example I have personally is "Day One" app for OSX. It
pops up on my screen once every 2-3 hours asking me what to do. 75% of the
times I press cancel - imagine if instead of cancel there were a number of
pre-sets I could fill the date in with. I would 100% press one of those. Quite
easy to implement, not sure about it on a smartphone though.

~~~
jathu
>Bit strong colors perhaps.

A lot of my users actually loved the colors. Maybe in the future updates, I
can let users choose their own colors. Although, I don't like giving users too
many frivolous options, it would depend if I get any more requests for this
feature.

>It's a nice idea, but opening an app to record each single change in activity
will be a hard sell, even with the reminders (eventually they will annoy you).
I think that if it is more effort to enter something than it is to
close/ignore it - then eventually it will get ignored.

The reason I left the activities broad and limited the number of activities
allowed is because of this reason. I would get pretty annoyed if I had to take
my phone out to record every time I went to the washroom, read a blog post or
played a game. However, if you broadly categorize those activities, they are
all "Chilling" in my view, something unproductive to my goals. So in reality,
people only change their broad activities few times a day and not as
frequently: sleep, eat, study, meeting and etc. I do plan on making this
easier by allowing people to update it via their Apple Watch, Mac and iPhone
notification center (I can't do this yet as I still have an iPhone 4, so I
can't develop for iOS9- living off of student loan sucks haha).

>A small example I have personally is "Day One" app for OSX.

As you said, one thing I hate about apps like this is that it requires so much
effort for me to update it. The idea of updating something everyday is
daunting because I have to fill a blank slate. Where as in Annex, all I have
to do is touch an option. It would be easier to touch an option rather than
touch cancel.

\---

Thanks for the feedback!

~~~
wingerlang
> Where as in Annex, all I have to do is touch an option.

The issue I can see is that I need to do multiple actions.

Worst case: Pick up phone, unlock/pin, find and open app, wait for a moment,
find option and press it. Best case: swipe on reminder, unlock, tap option.

The issue with the best case is that the 'cancel' action still has way less
friction than the other. It is zero friction to ignore it but still 1-2 steps
to do it.

The optimal case would be to be presented with the options on the lockscreen.

Perhaps you could schedule a minimum amount of notifications and display them
at the same time?

Like at 7pm:

I am cleaning.

I am making dinner.

Etc. This way only one swipe would trigger the action (+pin). But it might be
hard to get just right. But you see my point.

Anyway good luck. And for what it's worth, I'm still developing on an iPhone 4
as well :)

~~~
jathu
I really like that approach, but I think it may confuse people if I phrase it
like that. Maybe something like: "Swipe if you're making dinner". The biggest
problem is that friction, had it been Android I can give options directly on
the lock screen, maybe (hopefully) Apple would open up more as time goes on.

Thanks for the feedback and help, I'm definitely going try the lock screen
method to see if people like it.

------
mindcrash
How private is the data recorded with this app? E.g. is anything recorded
pushed to a online service?

~~~
jathu
Nope, nothing leaves the phone. Everything is stored in Core Data.

However, I did plan on switching to iCloud in the next version. I realized now
that some people might not want their data on a server somewhere, so I would
make it an option.

