Android App Frustrations

First I must note that I love the Beeminder Android app and I use it everyday. But there’s some bits that really irk me…

I’m sad about how it handles backburner goals. They cannot be found using the app’s search function, I cannot make them into a widget and I cannot target them with the Tasker integration. The latter two can be worked around by converting the goal to frontburner and creating the widget and setting up the targeting. It’s annoying though, especially since I have to do it through the website and then remember to go and change it back. The search thing is just incredibly frustrating. The goals are backburner because I don’t want them cluttering things up but I still want to be able to access them when I want them. I’m more likely to use the search for a backburner goal than a frontburner goal, precisely because I have put them out of the way.

Since we can’t do a lot of the goal adjusting in the app any more, can we please can we have a button to go to the specific goal’s webpage from viewing the goal in the app?

Also, I often find myself sending data to the email bot with Automate (similar to Tasker), rather than using the Beeminder Android app Tasker integration just because I want to comment on the data. The problem with emailing is that I use the ‘^’ shortcut for today but sometimes the data don’t arrive until tomorrow. This messes up the date and my quantified self data. I should probably just work out how to put the correct date into the email (just emailed support about that) but since I’m thinking about it, would it be possible to let the Tasker integration take a comment as well as the datapoint value? The app is really good at sending data to the correct days and not freaking out when there’s no connection so it’s better than my current email set up.

I’d also like to be able to delete datapoints that haven’t been sent to Beeminder yet. Sometimes I make mistakes and it’s much easier to deal with them immediately than wait until I’m online (and all the goal dependent IFTTT triggers have been set off!). At the moment the app just says that the selected point has no id if I try to edit or delete it.

Lastly, there’s the nuisance check mark bug that’s been mentioned elsewhere.

Again, thanks for all your awesome work, @saranli!

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Thanks for this great feedback. Adding backburner goals to both the search and widget features is definitely doable and I will include this in the next update. What do you think about respecting the “show backburner” setting in the preferences to include/exclude these goals from the search and widget creation?

As for including a comment in the Tasker interface, I suspect it would be doable, but would take a bit of effort to get right. Nevertheless, it is definitely something I can work on. Finally, deletion for buffered datapoints is a bit tricky since there are a lot of edge cases depending on whether data has been submitted and/or confirmed. This has been on my list for a while, I agree that it is annoying to not be able to delete these buffered points.

Once again, thanks for the awesome feedback!

– Uluc

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