Feature request: Display Imported Historical Data

I recently created a Fitbit goal, and the resulting graph surprised me. So I thought I’d ask all of you:

What should the graph look like?

I recently got an iPhone, which has an inbuilt pedometer chip. I was delighted that when I installed the Fitbit app a few weeks later, its graphs reflected the history of my steps, starting from when I got the phone. In contrast, Beeminder successfully imported the historical datapoints, but displayed none of them.

I’m sure that with previous goals, when I pasted in historical datapoints, the graph adjusted accordingly. Normally you can use the t-min field in settings to show or hide history, but in this case the yellow brick road starts at today, and shows no history at all.

Of course, my current goal slope may not have been maintained throughout my step history. So it’d be wrong to impose the current slope on the historical data.

My proposal is this: for historical datapoints, lets set a yellow brick road slope that is the average from the first datapoint until the most recent datapoint. And that going forward is the slope that I specified when I created this goal. This will also create a visual signal of whether my chosen slope is more or less aggressive than the historical average.

If that makes perfect sense to you, click the heart to favourite this post. If you’ve got an alternate proposal please post a reply, and/or favourite the reply that sounds most right to you. Thanks!

2 Likes

Oh my yes, this is so correct I don’t even care how many people heart this. (: Actually this is one of many reasons I’m excited about the eventually-forthcoming generalized road dial. It will enable what-ifs like this. But absolutely this is the right thing to default to regardless.

Before we get to this, though, given some infrastructural changes we’re working on [1], what will happen is there just won’t be a yellow brick road for the historical part of the graph, but you’ll still see the datapoints plotted.

[1] For insiders: killing “sadreset” and making tini/vini universal.