BUI - the alternative Beeminder UI (more charts)

Will design some cool favicon for you this weekend xD


Meanwhile I try to implement some filtering:

Also filtering by “done today” status:

This is not final looks, definitely.
If you have any feedback, let me know. I assume we want to filter by urgency (then: what horizon? Red, Orange, Blue and this week? Next 7 days?) and by goal name for sure, nothing else apart from “has datapoint today” comes to my mind.

1 Like

In my client, I have filtering by “did at least X% of the daily rate today”, set to 120% by default (to have some buffer). Very useful.

3 Likes

Amazing work! This needs to be part of the official interface!

2 Likes

I’m probably missing something obvious and/or can’t read, but what does filtering by :sparkles: do? I thought it might be newest goals but that doesn’t hold up.

Personally I’d really like filtering goals on whether they are inside or outside the 7 day akrasia horizon, and would love it if the “bubbles” at the top split out the goals like that too.

2 Likes

This is great feedback, thank you.

I’ll elaborate a bit on that.

My problem with filtering is that while specific goal page might be endless, on main page screen real estate is in high demand, especially on mobile. When you enter goal page, you want to get lost, dive in information. Main page is meant for general overview, hence we need to negotiate more. We can have only a limited number of filters.

One objective of filtering could be to get to a particular goal (like without scrolling).
What I think I start to notice, is that there are two trends. One is the need to see what’s urgent (like “color” filters, or “Akrasia Status” like k1rsty described it). Second is the need to see what hypothetically could be done (this is what I gather from my filter “has datapoint today” or mbork’s “did-120%-daily-rate”). Those two concepts are a bit different and I hope to address both of them some day.

Third level of depth of this filtering story is this :sparkles: filter. I didn’t describe it anywhere. This is my urgency + “could-be-done” filter.
The logic as of today is: 1) pick goals that have safety buffer <= 1 day 2) pick goals that in recent days have 2 (odometer) or 3 (other types) datapoints. This is because I have some goals like “clears-anki” and I want them to be my daily chores.
In other words these are urgent goals and goals that you seem to log often (so maybe log now?).

I don’t know where will we end up with this, either some solution will dawn on me or I will ship all things you mentioned. I will add a 7 days filter in a couple of minutes :slight_smile: Also, when you tap/click on the bubbles you will toggle akrasia horizon view.


The favicon has changed, but make sure to refresh the browser to see the changes (or format your disks, because it’s quite hard to invalidate the browser’s cache these days).

4 Likes

No big changes recently. Some care for inboxer goals, I will probably use these more often:

2 Likes

Better calendar for odometer goals:

Note they might have multiple datapoints a day. What is coloured here, is the difference between top datapoints between the two days.

And non-odometers received a list of top datapoints. I wanted to see my best and worst data from Strava goal:

Not the most beautiful thing we can think of, but very handy.

I exclude datapoints that say RECOMMITTED.

6 Likes

I love seeing the hourly breakdowns. I have some goals that are like 90% done in the hour before they’re due

4 Likes

The daily breakdowns that are in there now are also really useful. Handy to see when I actually get stuff done the most.

2 Likes

You have a typo here:
image

“Login in with beeminder” should be “Login with beeminder” (or perhaps “Log in with beeminder”.)

3 Likes

Nice catch.
Also spelling of “Beeminder” is inconsistent (Beeminder vs beeminder)

1 Like

Fixed typos.

I added the ability to compare goals on Daily breakdown charts, as @k1rsty finds these useful.

I’m on vacation now, but do expect new features in the upcoming month :slight_smile:

4 Likes

Thanks for your work!

I’ve been checking BUI out for a few days. I like that I can keep an eye on urgency load metric so easily - I wanted to focus on that for a while. You made it so easy for me! :raised_hands:

Also, I got motivated by the streak information and went for an “extra run” - just so that I can see this and maybe reach a streak of 4 days tomorrow :slight_smile: :rocket:

I’ve found the"week by week" graph’s X-axis tick labels a bit too unconventional for my expectations:

Inspecting the graph, it’s clear that the labels are formatted with <year>-<week number>. At first sight, I think it’s a bit too much like <year>-<month> that I’m familiar from other contexts (ISO, but also daily life in the Netherlands where we also use - as date separator).

An improvement could perhaps be a combination of:

  • ticks labeled with <year> for first days of the years, to mark year changes
  • ticks weeks labeled just with <week number>, to mark what we’re actually interested in

Or the ISO format, like 2022-W32

In any case, I really appreciate your work! Thanks!

4 Likes

(By the way the Github repository you’ve posted in the initial post takes me to a 404 page.)

1 Like

Inspecting the graph, it’s clear that the labels are formatted with <year>-<week number> .

Indeed. I like this format a lot: 2022-W32. Will implement this.

Another problem is “when the week starts?” and keeping it consistent across graphs. So if the week starts on Monday, it should do so on all charts across the app (think Calendar Heatmap). Ideally, this preference should be specified by the user, but guessed from their language settings.

Repo offline
I temporarily took the repository offline, because I’m tinkering with pipelines and new sensitive features. I don’t want things to leak. My users also don’t want this :slight_smile: I will bring the repo back for everyone (or a mirror, or anyways access to the code) in a foreseeable future. If you need something specific for your projects e.g. how to implement login in PHP, or curious about some graph, let me know.

Urgency metric
I didn’t expect this to be such fun, but indeed I now navigate Beeminder a lot with it. “If UM > 40, skorytnicki is in trouble”.
I have a backlog item that says “implement various urgency metrics”. There is a couple of threads with other implementations of this idea.
Would be great to track urgency metric over time, I’m thinking about it too.

I’ve been checking BUI out for a few days

Awesome! Your screenshots and stories make me confident that it was worth sharing the app.
One “stickiness” tip for BUI: pin it to your home screen. In iOS it’s possible for example via Shortcuts app.

2 Likes

Big day for BUI today - I just added a first iteration of Integrations.

I will use BUI to migrate away from my previous setup, which was basically polling services for new data: GitHub - szymonkorytnicki/beeminder-integrations. This new feature in BUI will allow me to centralise my efforts, simplify development and expose the integrations to everyone.

How to try it?
Currently I added only a support for Memrise.

First of all, re-log in. Then, go to integrations page and select a goal:

aaand specify your user name:

Future
Short term: I’m going to check if everything works fine before expanding the list of available integrations. Happy to hear your feedback. I’m all ears.

Long term: There are integrations I use myself that I would like to bring for everyone, and there are suggestions from the community that would be nice to have.

Under the hood, the integration can be whatever piece of code that a server can execute. For the majority of predicted use cases, I’m going to use apify.com - the service to scrape the websites. They do the hard work of making sure that everything is executed, they store logs, allow other people to reuse my code etc.

On that note, apify exposes an endpoint for scraper’s result and allows passing in some data. If I can simply pass a callback URL without registering an app, I don’t have to work on integrations inside BUI :slight_smile: Like this:

Or am I reinventing some wheel here? :thinking:

5 Likes

Clicking on “urgency load” on main screen will now take you to the special urgency load breakdown page.

I followed your suggestion and weeks are now labelled as “2022-W30”.

6 Likes

Is there any way to exclude a single datapoint from the trend graph? In the graph for my Focusmate goal, there is a large initial datapoint for adding the total number of sessions and then everything after that is basically flat. Thanks!

1 Like

Hey, unfortunately this isn’t available in BUI yet. I would like one day to filter datapoints or to specify date ranges to make this chart more customisable. If some quick fix comes to my mind, I will ship it for you.

If you know a bit of JavaScript you might want to look at my previous thread where I did similar charts in an Observable notebook: Visualizing beeminder data

1 Like

I added this to my home screen (again) for my November comeback.

Thanks again! :pray:

2 Likes