Altbee — the alternative Beeminder web interface

If the catch-all were listed with the others, I would move it around accordingly. As is, it is first and I created the filters to highlight a few in particular.

I was not planning on tagging all of my goals nor was I planning on creating goal categories for all of them either.

The catch-all is nice and makes sense. For me right now it has higher prio than the ones I specifically tagged and grouped via tags because the catch-all is very much not empty and first.

Would you also be adding “due in” filtering? One could then create a further filter criteria to filter based on when the goal is due - today beemergeny, tomorrow, this week (within the akrasia horizon), or later.

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I have a couple feature requests:

  • Allow entering data from the main page. As it is, you have to click on each goal to enter data, which makes it frustratingly slow and inefficient. There should be a field where you can just input datapoints from the main page to facilitate rapid data entry of many goals.

  • Put the date and time of data entry in the comment field by default, and add “via altbee” so users can keep track of when and how data was entered (beedroid does something like this, but oddly without the date, which is important to have)

  • Allow deletion of multiple datapoints at once, rather than having to click delete on each individually

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The origin of the datapoint should be present for the datapoint and since we authorize Altbee I would guess this shows up as such. It does not show up in the comment text itself but does appear when hovering over the datapoint listed in the Beeminder webapp.

From the sounds of it, you would like the comment’s text to also contain ‘via Altbee’.

The origin of the Beeminder iOS app shows up as ‘beemios’, for example.

(edit: back from the dead; scheduled delete canceled; thanks for catching it, zzq )

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Ah, got it. My impression from what you said earlier was that you wanted the catch-all group to be something you could remove and replace entirely with your own categories. But OK, I see, what you actually want it for is to be able to sort the categories such that some are before it.

That’s an interesting suggestion—I’ll have to think about it. It doesn’t quite fit with the way I’ve been thinking about it until now, but it could be quite an interesting feature. On the other hand, the point of it including the red goals were for the red goals to be at the top—if the catch-all group is buried in the middle, that kind of defeats the purpose of that.

Don’t the colors already solve this problem? I don’t really see this as a goal-categorization issue… but I don’t know, maybe it should be.

I’ve been meaning to get to this at some point. With my particular workflow this isn’t a major issue, but I know that it’s a generally useful feature.

As @krugerk pointed out above (but then deleted?) Beeminder already keeps track, automatically, of this information. It’s in the tooltip you get when you hover over a row of data on the Beeminder goal page.

Like this:

This information isn’t shown anywhere in the Altbee UI itself, in part because Altbee attempts to be somewhat minimalistic. (Given that one can always fall back to the Beeminder website for the more obscure kinds of information.) But I’d be open to showing it in the Altbee UI somewhere, maybe, if you feel that it is important.

But I really don’t think it’s appropriate to put that information also in a comment. Not only is it redundant, it also takes over the comment field, which is supposed to be user-controlled. It drowns what might be useful data associated with each data point in a sea of formulaic details.

Interesting idea. Yes, I could see this being quite a useful feature.

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Good to know - unfortunately, that doesn’t show up on the Android app, or on zedmango – dashboard – beeminder - only the comments do. And the tooltip is of limited use because you have to hover over each item one at a time, so you can’t see more than one item’s info at once.

If that’s available in the API (is it?), you could write a script to get all that and put it in the comments where it belongs, but that’s a pain and you shouldn’t have to do that to see basic information laid out for you.

It’s not redundant, for the reasons explained above. And my suggestion is to have that info as the default, just like Beedroid does, so the user can freely delete or modify it as they wish, but it’s there in the comment where it should be if they want it to be. And the date and time that a datapoint was entered is useful data.

Yay thanks!

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I love this tags feature very much!

I’d like that but it’s a low priority for me.

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I’ve just now deployed a new version of altbee with support for entering data on the main page. Opening the triple-dot menu on the goals now gives you a version of the datapoint entry form right there in the dropdown.

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I didn’t find this too useful at first, but I’ve actually been taking a look today and I think I’d switch to it… if it weren’t for the fact that I can’t mark a goal done for the day and tuck it out of sight like I can on the main site with the help of the browser extension! But I don’t really know how you’d implement that in Altbee. :thinking:

Given I touch every goal every day and being able to send it to the bottom when I’m done works as a good checklist for that, I’m not sure if I can make this work for me, but maybe I’ll have it open in a tab for the alternate way of looking at my goals.

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Both the browser extension and Altbee were experiments in alternate ways of viewing one’s Beeminder goals. The have slightly different design philosophies—Altbee is more for seeing all your goals at a glance, and the browser extension is more for processing your goals one by one. Insofar as you have a workflow that touches each goal every day, the Beeminder website with the browser extension is probably better.

I’ll mention that I myself don’t use Altbee exclusively! Altbee is meant as an alternate way of looking at your goals: there are things it can do that the base Beeminder interface can’t, but also vice versa.

So I find great value in having them both open in separate tabs! But also: one of the things Altbee does better than the Beeminder website is that it’s super fast to load. I can hit Ctrl-t to open a new tab, then al and Enter (firefox will autocomplete the URL for me), and then see my goals a hundred milliseconds or so later (i.e. pretty much immediately.) That’s pretty cool; and specifically it means that Altbee is always at my fingertips even when I don’t already have it open in a browser tab.

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This is kinda not what’s intended, but I’m getting some of my “check off once done” use out of Altbee by the way I’ve set up the categories. Once everything in the “morning” category is done, I move that label below the others:

…by changing the order the categories are listed in.

Just as a note though, on compact mode I can’t submit data properly for the leftmost item because part of the modal is off-page:

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Just realized I could install this as an app on my Android phone! I’m going to give using Altbee exclusively on my phone a go.

One thing I wish is that the filter box filtered by goal name only. :thinking:

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This is amazing. Thank you.

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