I occasionally see data points that were entered with tomorrow’s date. I’m using the app (on Android). This happens often enough to be a problem for me. Does anyone else experience this?
This might be an outright bug, but it’s much more likely that I’m just accidentally increasing the date.
EDIT: ANSWERED BELOW, IT’S A FEATURE, NOT A BUG. But even in the latter case, I would consider this a human factors design “bug”. I don’t think the interface should easily allow future data input. There should be some kind of friction before allowing that. Perhaps a pop-up warning.
What deadline do your goals have? A very easy way to end up with datapoints that have tomorrow’s date is to enter them after the deadline—the deadline being, after all, the point in time when the goal “rolls over” to the next day.
Suppose today is the 17th and the goal deadline is set for 4:00 p.m. Furthermore, suppose I’m ahead of the game, I have a few days buffer, so I’m not particularly concerned about the timing of data entry.
Now what you’re saying is that if I enter data today before 4:00 p.m., it will default to the 17th, but if I enter data today after 4:00 p.m. the date will default to the 18th?
If that’s the case, then I’ll definitely double check the goal deadline time next time I run into this issue!
Well that makes sense, in a way. I was just naturally assuming that number was a typical date stamp. But in The Beeminder Universe, each goal’s “day” can have a preferred start/end time.
I still can’t help but feel like Beeminder has been developed through a continual evolution that doesn’t have a strong, grounding metaphor for the interface. It kind of reminds me of this image.
M.C. Escher, Convex And Concave
There’s a lot of great stuff there. There’s a purpose for everything, and one can often find out that it does in fact have the functionality you want, or perhaps a good reason it doesn’t. But it’s not intuitive how to find the features, the features and intelligence is kind of hidden in a maze.
If you have any thoughts on how we could allow custom deadlines without this issue, then we’d love to hear about it! As it is, you need to be above/below the line on a given date on the x axis, right? It matters less on an early-bird goal, where you’d be entering the data early, but if you change your deadline and you have until after midnight to enter data, then you can see what would happen. You need +5 on the 18th, you have until 2am on the 19th, so you enter data for the 19th… and the graph derails, because your data on the 19th does not satisfy the goal on the 18th.
Personally, I’d be fine if we just scrapped custom deadlines and kept the simplicity of “midnight is the deadline”, same as for autodata goals, but enough users find them useful/essential that I doubt that idea would ever fly! But if you do have any thoughts on how to solve the problem, it could be useful to hear.
If you have any thoughts on how we could allow custom deadlines without this issue, then we’d love to hear about it!
I’m sure that I will come up with some ideas over time, but one thing that could really help a lot would be to have access to a log of all the actions that are performed. Perhaps if you have a developer mode that creates a log, if you could allow that for end users under some advanced setting. (Maybe you already do?)
Because I get really really confused sometimes as to whether or not I entered in some data, when I entered it, etc. A log with a true date time stamp would be a tremendous help for me.
