Oh, wow, you’re super serious! (No flat spot, no freebee, a full 20 hours/week. [1]) You’ve completely converted me from “I’ll believe it when I see it” to “edge of seat!” (:
[1] Too bad we don’t have a way to precommit to a high pledge cap. I guess you could always declare such on your blog or here and that would certainly suffice since going back on it would require taking specific action – in other words, you’re promising not to do something which is much easier to keep than promising to do something. Either way, I’d probably reserve the right to archive or flatten the goal. Then you’re firmly on the hook only as long as you rationally decide to be.
*Warning: I’ve only been testing this on my android phone, which is the newest version. While in theory older versions should be just fine, there might be weird UI problems. Let me know if you run into any!
Great work.
Downloaded the apk and tried it out for a bit, I’ll put together a message with my feedback later when I get some time.
But it’s looking really good so far.
Development is going steady! I have a new version for you crazy people who are helping me test this.
What is new:
Actionable Notifications - The notifications now have a ‘done’ button so you can mark the task as done without having to open the app.
Icons - Now we have a proper app icon, and a notification icon that is different from the beeminder app.
Countdown Timer - When you are looking a task, it will display a countdown until the task is due.
Test Tasks - Any task with the name “Test”, “Test2”, etc. will always have a penalty of $0. Just so you can get used to how things work without burning freebies.
Beeminder Integration - You can create a beeminder goal for X tasks a week, and whenever you create a new task we’ll add to your selected goal.
Custom starting penalty - If $5 doesn’t motivate you, then now there is no need to derail X times until you find a motivating amount. I’m unsure if I want to stick with this idea, but I want to play around with it
Confirmation on new tasks - Since tasks can now have a large penalty, there is a confirmation dialogue that shows how much money is on the line and when it is due.
What is fixed:
The settings screen now has a background, so it works properly when you have tasks waiting to be done.
For more information and pictures, here are my blog posts:
I’ve started using this and love it! The first thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve been spoiled by zeno polling. I dismissed the reminder that a task was due “in less than a day” expecting it to remind me again as the time neared. Of course that may be less of an issue as I get my whole to-do list into GTBee and I always have a task due date bearing down on me.
Thanks so much for building this, @yixler! I don’t think there’s any reason to hold off longer on getting this on Google Play.
-1. I mostly use it for doing things right now – in the next 15 or 30 minutes. When I push “Save”, there are two reminders: “Due in less than one day. DONE!” and “Due in less than one hour! Eek!”.
1a. Two reminders are redundant in this case.
1b. “DONE!” is not supposed to be here – it’s not done yet.
1c. In general, I don’t need a reminder at this moment. I need it later – like, 5 minutes before the deadline (or, an hour before if there is a 24-hour countdown).
-2. The default “PICK TIME” time is now, but obviously it cannot be now, as a popup says (“Due date must be after now”). Wouldn’t it be great to have an option to choose a default time interval? (for me, it almost always would be “15 minutes from now”).
Great job on the app, I like how clean and elegant the UI is.
Here’s my feedback, I think I’m using v4.
Philosophy:
This needs to be able to be used as a task tracking app without any beeminder connection at all.
Get rid of the freebee limit.
Allow use without signing up.
Bugs or feature requests that cause me to not use the app:
Notifications - Argh.
Don’t want notification on add, got two, less than 1 day & less than 1 hour.
Let me pick notification sound / vibration settings.
Remove date added from goal screen, or hide it.
Limited free tasks.
Done, where did my task go? I want to be able to see what I’ve done, and easily create tasks as copies of old ones.
Other bugs:
Countdown wrong for tasks in the far future (more than a month.)
Goal list says am but date is pm.
Goal list shows time twice but no date.
Other feature requests:
Add app version number to UI somewhere
Show 24 hr time (respect system options)
Edit goal titles.
Add fine print/criteria/notes.
Empty first screen, maybe some text explaining you’ve got no goals.
Needs more help text about derailing.
Don’t make default todo time “now” maybe now +15min
Make now+ time user configurable.
Forget settings/logout?
Tags for goals.
Watching goal derail, nothing happened.
Main screen menu button should open menu.
Ability to change pledge at task creation time.
Ability to increase pledge for existing goal.
Make it possible to change the due date. (Possibly subject to akrasia horizon)
Questions / things I’ve not tested:
What happens if you derail when you have no network connection?
Will the source code be available?
Summary:
The bugs I found I’d class as minor and all my feature requests are probably things that other people wont care about. I think it’s a great app, nice work.
If I can’t include free tasks, then I can’t use this as my One True Todo List and would need to use more than one Todo system. Also, I imagine a common use-case for me will be “quickly toss an item onto the list without giving it much thought” and then later come back to reclassify/assign dates/pledge money. The problem of never coming back to classify is Beemindable of course.
I’m guessing you were agreeing with me, but I just wanted to clarify that limited free tasks was one of the reasons I do not use the app.
I want unlimited free tasks and strongly agree with everything you wrote.
This is a good point. Limiting the free tasks could just mean that you use a second to-do app for tasks you don’t want to risk money on. It may not make sense to encourage that.
How about applying the same insight we had about freebees (embarrassingly still not implemented but it will happen!) and just default to $5 but let you change it to $0 when you create the task. (I also might argue for not letting you bump it up higher than $5 when first creating it. As in, you have to fail at $5 if you want to have $10 at stake.)
PS: I see you reached a similar conclusion while I was typing this. (:
Sorry for the dead air. I had a summer class taking up a lot of time, but that is now done, so I’ll be working on it more now. A lot of the changes I’m making now (notifications and viewing old tasks) are intertwined so I don’t have an incremental update at the moment. This does mean that the next update should make GTBee a lot nicer to use though!