I am begging all you wonderful bees @dreev@bee@adamwolf : please add a “current rate” field (preferably one that can be changed) to the “breaks” page before officially launching it!
The page is incomplete without it. How can you meaningfully add a break at a lower rate when you don’t know what the current rate is?
It would be incredibly helpful and useful to be able to see a table of all goals with their current rates and weekends-off status, and the “breaks” page would work perfectly for this once the current rate is added!
Curious how this would work. Do you mean “current rate” as in “rate at the end of the road”? That’s what you’re changing when you change the rate on the goal page.
If so, does adding this actually solve your problem, since you have no guarantee that the segment of the road where you’ll be adding the break is actually at the same rate as the rate at the end of the road?
The notion of ‘current rate’ seems tricky in this situation. It’s pretty much got to be the rate over the time period that you’re considering changing.
Which in turn could be several rates, and the current text-based display isn’t very comprehensible.
Best UVI that I can think of in the moment is to generate a mini graph of that section so that you can see what’s going on while you’re trying to change it.
In the fullness of time, an embedded version of the visual road editor, also focussed on the relevant time period
Great point about the value of seeing the rate when setting breaks!
And smart points about how tricky this is to get right.
We need to get this puppy out the door so let me propose the minimal possible thing for now that should be slightly helpful without requiring more agonizing or fussing with the UI:
Hovertext/tooltip on the “set the weekly rate to” field like so:
Final ${FREQ}ly rate: $RATE
(I think @adamwolf is the one to implement this and should feel free to put it after the rate field instead of as hovertext if it fits fine and looks good without fussing, or if he thinks of an alternative to final rate that will be more helpful than final rate without ever being misleading. Mainly I’m anxious to do the easiest possible thing for now that lets us call this feature good enough to ship! (I mean, it’s already kind of shipped, just not officially and not linked to anywhere in the UI. You have to know to go to beeminder.com/breaks currently.))
It’s true that you could have already put in a break over a time period where you’re contemplating adding another, but so what? The point is to have a “baseline” reference of what the normal rate is.
No, not at all, I am specifically saying it needs to display only the “end of the road” rate, as @narthur put it, and it should allow you to change that, separate and independent from whether or not you’re adding a break.
I’m envisioning using this to get a bird’s eye (or should that be bee’s eye?) view of all my goals and what their “end of the road” rates are, so I can look at them all and monitor them and see what rates I want to increase or decrease. And, optionally, if I want to enter any breaks, but - and here’s the key point - I need some idea of where everything is in order to even decide that.
You’re putting the cart before the horse (bee before the flower?) in suggesting it display the rate over the time period you’re considering changing - before you know the real rate, how do you even know if you want to change it and by how much?
Lots of love and honey to everyone for all the good discussions
Lol, I guess when I said “current rate” I meant “current end-of-the-road rate,” as opposed to “rate that happens to be temporarily active today.”
Like if I have a daily goal with weekends off set, and it happens to be a weekend, I would never think of the “current rate” as 0 - I’d think of it as whatever the real rate is.
All great points! I think it means that my proposal above (now highlighted in “staff color”) is fact the right answer. (For now. The righter answer, in the fullness of time, as @philip says, is to have a mini embedded road editor!)
The only problem is that tooltips are hard to see or be aware of if you don’t already know about them, and they’re also hard to view on mobile. So if @adamwolf can fit it in after the rate field I would suggest that.
and honey 
to everyone for all the good discussions 
