iOS is open source again, request for feature/bugfix requests

The version of the iOS app that’s in the app store is now open source. If you’re interested in contributing take a look at the Readme and fire away with pull requests!

And if you’re a regular user of the iOS app, use this thread to list the top feature requests/annoyances/whatever that you currently have with it! I’ll be doing a bunch of cleanup and other work on the app in the next couple weeks so it’s open season on improvements.

7 Likes

Yay Andy! These should probably be lowest priority but the tally counter (I use it for pushups, @shepheb (and lately @bee) use it for bite-counting) and the timer built in to the Android app are pretty brilliant.

Another impressive thing about the Android app is the deep robustness to flaky network connections. It keeps reminding you of beemergencies even in airplane mode and any datapoints it can’t send it shows them as red and just keeps trying until it confirms they got through.

The Android app’s homescreen widgets are also super elegant and practical.

2 Likes

I could really use the timer built into the app. I currently use timecamp + zapier for this but this is the only reason I have timecamp and I can’t use this for more than one goal with a free zapier account.

2 Likes

This is now included in the latest version of the iOS app (5.0).

2 Likes

grr, @apb. I’ve supposedly got more important things on my todo list than “finally learn swift to how to I can figure out how to build Apple Watch viewing”. Why must you tempt me so?

2 Likes

With iOS 12 and the official release of Siri Shortcuts (formerly known as Workflow), manual tracking could potentially get a lot easier on iOS… if the Beeminder iOS app supported adding a datapoint via URL scheme.

URL schemes are a pretty common inter-app communication method on iOS. The Markdown notes app Bear is a great example of a comprehensive URL scheme.

If Beeminder had a URL for creating a new data point, I’d use it with Shortcuts to create shortcuts for manually logging various goals – the Shortcuts app provides a kind of visual scripting interface for iOS, which can be triggered by custom Siri voice commands.

I’m imagining a URL scheme something like this:

beeminder://create-datapoint?goal={slug}&value={x}

Which could be used to give you push-button logging for manual tracking (e.g. something like a grumps goal)

beeminder://create-datapoint?goal=grumps&value=1

Or for logging a health sample to both Apple Health and Beeminder at the same time… like mg of caffeine. The Apple Health logging would happen inside the shortcut, followed by an action to create the datapoint inside Beeminder.

beeminder://create-datapoint?goal=caffeine&value=120

I beemind alcoholic beverages in units of drinks, where 1 drink = 0.6 oz. of alcohol (i.e. a 12 oz. beer at 5% ABV). I’d also create a Shortcut that popped up some form fields for me to fill out volume and estimated ABV, which would then do the calculation for me to log the equivalent drinks with Beeminder.

I had formerly cobbled together a similar system with Workflow and IFTTT, but that was not super reliable. It would be tremendously cool to have first-class URL scheme support in BeemiOS.

9 Likes

In lieu of a URL scheme for the Beeminder app, I was able to create an iOS Shortcut to call the Beeminder API directly:

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/b03d66193a89440da7af6d22133695f3

It’s less convenient than delegating the API call to the iOS app would be, but this has made it easy for me to make a whole bunch of other shortcuts for quick entry of my manual data points.

This shortcut is intended to be called with the “Run Shortcut” action rather than run on its own. I’ve been building goal-specific shortcuts with some interactive prompts for composing the datapoint and comment, then passing those values into this “Create Beeminder Data Point” shortcut.

6 Likes

I love this, please please for the love of everything make Beeminder available to Shortcuts.
I’d go a step further than “just” providing a URL scheme, though.
Have an actual action for Beeminder-things in the shortcuts app! Other apps do that too. But I can’t imagine a better fit than adding Beeminder in there.

4 Likes

@dehowell Thanks for sharing your shortcut, I just added it to my library – it looks great, it got comments, awesome!
And indeed a prime example for the “Run shortcut” action. I love how it allows you to make shortcuts that are essentially functions that you can call from other shortcuts.

The fact that we carry our phones with us all the time + that you can glue so many things together with shortcuts really amplifies beeminder. I always found the one widget the iOS app provided a bit… lacking. It never showed just the goal that I was working on right now. Now I can fix this :slight_smile:

3 Likes

I was about to chime in that I’ve done something similar with Apple’s “Workflow” app, only to discover that we’re talking about the same thing… seems that I missed the renaming! :blush:

A related wish for the iOS app is that clicking on a zeno reminder should load the goal page, not just launch the app…

4 Likes

for what it’s worth here’s the docs for the shortcuts API in SiriKit:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/sirikit#2979425

2 Likes

Old thread, but I’ll just mention that Beeminder now has an iOS Shortcuts integration.

However, it doesn’t seem to be working, see:

2 Likes

UPDATE: As discussed in the linked thread, iOS Shortcuts do now work with the Beeminder iOS app!

http://beeminder.com/changelog#4291

1 Like