Fairly often, I’m using the iOS app as my primary interface with Beeminder. I noticed that some time ago (and maybe this never existed) the app stopped showing either a) the rate of the current goal or b) the delta to the next day of safety for goals that aren’t in the red.
I’d love to be able to (even for safe goals) get a quick visual reminder of how much I have to do for one more day of buffer on the current goal. Doesn’t have to live on the goal list like the message for red goals, but a simple string with “+x in 5 days” under the graph would make it much easier for me to use the iOS app without having to go to the web ui (I know it’s only one more click of the “open in web” button but it’s a trivial obstacle that I encounter 5 times a day).
As far as I know, the official Beeminder iOS App did not show the rate. It did, however, show the deltas between the graph and (up to five) datapoints on the goal screen.
The deltas shown were based on something called delta_text in the api. Apparently its values could be silly for do-less goals. The deltas UI was removed from the app 8mo ago with what became the Release 6.7.
Another source for such data is the ‘due-by table’. The Android app shows the deltas from this source (actually the whole table, styled like the website).
PS - What else from the website might you like to see in the iOS app? What else might you like to see in the iOS app? The Android app shows both the rate and also the deltas.
Yes, I also miss this very much, assuming we are talking about the same thing
I loved it for books goals (odometer): if I was in the red, it told me how many pages I needed to read to get to orange, blue, and green. I loved it for my bedtime goal: I could see whether the number to get in the green (or blue) was creeping closer or further away.
AFAICT this was something unique to the iOS app. I have never been able to find the same information on the web.
So, in your example, if I added 0.42 today I would end up in the green? (I’ve never understood why the colors and days are both there and how they relate.)
ETA: That’s helpful for book goals, but for my do-less bedtime goal, that doesn’t provide the same information. I can’t make any sense of these positive numbers.
Yeah, today is Friday, being in the green means being safe for 3 days – ie until Monday. And in the above example there’s 0.42 due by Sunday. So do that and you’ll have done everything due up to and including that day. And note the color-coding…
Ah, just saw your edit. Now I’m super confused because I’m struggling to imagine what else that table could tell you other than your hard cap for each upcoming day.
Maybe the confusion is that the colors don’t mean much for a Do Less goal. Being blue just means that you’ll derail in 2 days if you let the Pessimistic Presumptive Reports stand. But you won’t/shouldn’t do that, so that’s not particularly helpful information. The only thing that actually matters is the hard caps.
Although the current store version of the app (6.7) no longer has this directly, when at a goal, tap the action button which loads the goal in the inapp browser. From there tap the statistics section header and be presented with the due-by table.
The colors may not mean the same thing (how many days to derail) as they do for other goals, but they are a quick visual shortcut for urgency/importance. If my bedtime goal is in the orange and my book goal is in the blue, I know it’s more important to stop reading and go to bed than it is to get another couple of pages.
I suppose that’s wandering a bit off topic. Previously, if I could see that a datapoint of 9:45 would end up blue, I would be motivated to get to bed by 9:45 instead of my standard goal of 10. But now that the only number is the hard cap, that motivation isn’t there. Currently the hard cap is 22:59, and there is no world in which I am going to bed 23 hours after noon! I could ratchet to keep the hard cap lower, but I don’t want to live with the hard cap always close—too stressful. I am someone who is always, always motivated to keep my goals green.
If you’re saying you don’t even know where those numbers were coming from, though… well, I don’t know what to do about that
Your do-less goal here may be a special case due to the fact that your data entry is always “your bedtime relative to noon”. You’re relatively safe, at the time of the screenshot, in that you could technically stay up all night and go to bed at 10:59 am the next day. But that would wreck “tomorrow”, since you’d have to get up and “go to bed” again by 9:53PM if you burned all that buffer by staying up all night.
whereas if you go to bed at 10pm tonight, then you’d have 12 hours and 59 minutes of bedtime buffer left and could go to sleep at 12:59am tomorrow night.
I think part of what’s causing these numbers to misbehave for you is that you get ten hours of bedtime buffer to burn every day because of the slope of the road. Because the goal thinks in terms of “days of safety” for its color scheme, green means you’ve been going to bed so early for so long that you have 42 hours of buffer (ie you’ve been going to bed an hour early for 42 days).
What I think this graph is telling you is that today you’re in the yellow. Tomorrow, if you enter 0, you’ll be in the blue. and if you enter 0 again on sunday, you’ll be in the green. But the way your goal is constructed, that means going to bed at noon three days in a row.
I’m wondering how it would look for you if you used “bedtime relative to 9” so that your daily “do-less rate” is 1; that is, you want to go to bed before 10. You’ll still have to divide the numbers by 1, 2, or 3 to get your “average bedtime” though.
