I built the alternative UI for Beeminder. I use it for a while now and I find it useful. Instead of competing with default Beeminder web app or mobile apps, it compliments them with extra data visualisation.
I started with this thread: Visualizing beeminder data but moved onto creating my own app to get better performance, more flexibility and to make it easier for everyone to see the data.
It’s excellent to see more alternative Beeminder UIs. When I started building Altbee I was unsure of just how crazy an idea it was to build such a thing—so it’s gratifying to see that if I’m crazy, at least I’m not crazy alone.
Altbee has around ten monthly active users, and six weekly active users—that is, on average, at any given point in time around ten users will have used Altbee in the past month, and around six in the past week. (This is a steady-state number, but it spikes higher when Altbee is discussed on the forum.)
More stats: A total of 227 users have ever used Altbee, 112 of them more than once. Interestingly, about 2/3 of the monthly active users are in a European timezone, compared to only about 1/3 of all-time users—my guess is that it’s a matter of latency, the server being in Europe. (One of Altbee’s design goals was to have a snappy, low-latency interface. But perhaps it isn’t succeeding at that task for those with more distance between them and the server.)
So cool!! It’d be really cool if we could see further out for the amount due by day. But I’m guessing that would be a headache to calculate more than Beeminder gives you…
I noticed that the hourly breakdown in all my goals seemed to be very heavily or even exclusively weighted toward the exact deadline, even for goals that I often fill data for well before the deadline. Specifically, half of my goals had literally no hours before 2300, and the others had at least 85% of datapoints in the last hour. For one such, with 22 pre-eleventh-hour times and 168 at the eleventh hour, the most recent 30 or more data points were, without exception, entered before 2300. Was there some very recent anomaly in the data such that no previous records have the correct times?
Fixed, thanks for this.
You have to refresh the page to see the changes (do twice if doesn’t help).
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Beeminder for some reason sends me timestamps always (or almost always) with the same time for certain goals. Why is that? What I did was: Math.min(datapoint.timestamp, datapoint.updated_at).
Wow, I adore this. Any additional ways to visualize data is an automatic from me.
A few things:
This loads my data faster than the actual Beeminder website (specifically my /productivity goal which definitely has way too many data points).
On goals where data is added daily, there seems to be a limitation with the calendar heatmap which only loads the last 8 months of data up until Octoberish 2021.
Thank you! If you have some specific idea of what you would like to see, let me know.
All of these observations are correct and related to each other. Performance gain comes partially from limiting number of datapoints loaded to 250. I didn’t want the app to crash on low-end devices.
I will handle this issue soon. This isn’t obvious how it should work. There are many options to choose from: remove the limit by default and allow to opt-in (my favourite), allow to choose date range, configure dashboard per goal, configure each widget etc.
I thought I’d let you know I found a discrepancy between BUI and Beeminder that I suspect is related to the “data at the deadline” issue mentioned above or maybe a timezone issue. On some (but not all) of my goals the data on BUI appears on the day after it does on Beeminder. E.g. for my ebike goal:
I will no longer limit amount of datapoints fetched from beeminder by default. So you will see more data, but performance might be a bit worse. I don’t think I solved the problem, this is sort of a journey where I learn more about use cases and address things in more complex ways, step by step.
For those who experience performance degradation with long running goals, consider using new setting called “App limits” that will bring the old mechanism back.
Thanks for the quick response! I’m impressed. Even with all datapoints, it’s still a lot faster than Beeminder haha, just a few seconds of loading.
Also, I love the urgency load metric! I’m assuming 108 is pretty high
Thanks! I predict we’re going to run into issues sooner or later, but if it sparks joy, it’s great! Maybe my optics are a bit distorted, because this is literally my job to make apps feel fast.
Today we’re experimenting with comparing goals.
Anki (blue) vs commits (green). You can squeeze a lot of micro/minihabits around the day or as a first thing in the morning, while creative work requires more focus:
But maybe they come hand in hand sometimes; is deep work draining my water levels? Water (blue lol) and commits (green), there’s some weak correlation:
@skorytnicki, this is insanely cool! While I mainly interact with Beeminder via my Emacs client (obviously), I love the visualizations (also, the speed). I will definitely want to use it!
One minor thing that triggers my OCD is the default React favicon, though.
from me.
