Outdoor goals! Bad weather! They do not get along well! I at least am not so desperate as to go ride my bike in the rain or a thunderstorm.
There’s machine readable weather forecasts, quite a lot of them. And forecasts especially for the coming three days they are very accurate. Definitely accurate enough to flatten the road in case of precipitation.
The obvious elephant in the room is the 7 days akrasia horizon. Forecasts tend to enter maybe-land rather quickly once you look past the next three days, let alone a full week. Especially rain is very hard to predict then.
I think this would make a great addition to the premium tier, but maybe to the free tiers as well. Think about it: It saves support from having to deal with the “not legit, today’s weather was a big nope, no way I’m gonna go climb Mt. Everest when it’s snowing!” storm of derailment mails.
Also it would just be a very cool feature and it would make the road smarter and feel more relevant.
If it were me, I’d have a goal with am “or” built into the success criteria. For me, that’d be something like a goal called “Rain or Run” to which I add a +1 whenever it’s either raining or I go running. Then I’d connect it to IFTTT to trigger sending a +1 to that Beeminder goal whenever it starts to rain.
(If it were me, I’d also set the way the (custom) goal aggregates datapoints over each day, so that it takes the “max” of the day (i.e. 1), rather than adding them all up, so that if it rains 4 times in a day, it’ll still only count as a +1 for that day. I’d probably also set the IFTTT recipe up to add a simple and clear comment to the datapoint it was entering, so that it’d be easy for me to separate out the number of times I ran from the number of times it gave me a +1 for rain.)
Having Beeminder change your road based on your weather requires too many components to be reasonably prioritizable for a very long time if ever, but this might be a workaround that would work for your goals and would only require that you enter your running datapoints, cause the rain ones would always be taken care of.
Oh, wait, this won’t work for the particular goal I have in mind as it is fed through the Apple Health active calories integration. Any data points that IFTTT added would get removed on the next sync, right?
Darn! Yeah, that’s right. I can’t think of another workaround either. IFTTT triggers when we get the first Apple Health data, which doesn’t really work when that datapoint is updated later. A non-manual version of this might have to wait until sometime down the line then, I’m afraid.
Not really, I’m afraid. IFTTT fires when the datapoint is created and iOS goals update existing datapoints, so IFTTT only fires with your first steps or first active calories burned, and not later in the day as you accumulate more. It’s fine if you want a “take at least one step” kind of goal or a “make sure to sync at least once” kind of goal, but it won’t sync the final numbers for the day.
But if you use IFTTT to copy the datapoints from one Apple Health backed goal to a regular goal and use the latter to actually hold you accountable (aka have a road that makes you do stuff) while the former has a flat road and won’t derail ever…
…then you could use IFTTT with Underground Weather to automatically add datapoints to that regular goal when it’s raining. No?
I think I’m either not understanding what you’re saying or not explaining what I’m saying well.
Let’s say you want a goal to do 10,000 steps/day (STEPS). If you have an IFTTT goal that fires when data is entered on STEPS, call it METASTEPS, then when you get up, head to the fridge and grab a glass of orange juice and register your first 17 steps of the day, STEPS will receive data from Apple Health and METASTEPS will receive that datapoint. Then, as you walk more and more throughout the day, the datapoint in STEPS will keep growing until you reach your 10,000+ steps, but METASTEPS will stay the same, since it will have fired when that datapoint in STEPS was created, not when it was updated, so it can keep you accountable in the sense of ensuring that you take at least one step, but it can’t keep you accountable for anything that relies on the IFTTT METASTEPS goal having an accurate total amount for that day.
That’s probably fine for a goal where you want to have at least a 1-minute workout or at least a 1-minute meditation session (like my mini-habits goals) since it’ll count that there was a session, but if you want that second METASTEPS goal to rely at all on the total at the end of the day (like if you meditate or work out 3 different times), it can’t.
Okay, so that’s what I meant, but I might be misunderstanding what @phi and @adamwolf meant, so let me know if I’m not getting what you’re meaning!
Oh, right, of course. Damn! The Apple Health integration doesn’t create any new data points after the first one but only modifies it throughout the day.
These later updates will be missed by IFTTT since there is currently no trigger for modified data points, only for new ones, right?
