Year in Pixels | Hacker News Reader

Year in Pixels

year-in-pixels.glitch.me

132 pointsingve35 comments

Hi HN, author here.

This is small tool I made during Friday and Saturday. The idea for this tool is not new at all, but I've never seen this format online before.

The tool is based on an image I found on the internet[0] and was coded using a Node.js server with basic jQuery for the frontend on the Glitch platform[1]

Hope you like it!

[0]: https://i.pinimg.com/736x/06/9a/02/069a02a83aca933e7a2e5edbd...

[1]: https://glitch.com

This is so cool! (I work with the Glitch team, and we loved seeing that you mad this.) For folks who don't know, since it's on Glitch, people can view the source and remix this here: https://glitch.com/~year-in-pixels

I like it. I personally don't have an affinity with the colours. Red for amazing? Red, to my mind is danger, and I would naturally associate that with bad things. I think green for an amazing day.

Also I'd find it easier to read if it were rotated 180 degrees and the months were stacked horizontally.

I think it would be easier to see some effects if you would change the layout to one row per week or 14 days per row. That way seasonal effects like a November depression would be much clearer.

The current layout would be a good choice to display the financial situation, as the cash level tends to change on a monthly basis for many people.

Nevertheless, nice tool :-)

Looks neat. But I'm not getting the font on the buttons to select today's state. Instead they're either blank or they have the Firefox "no font" glyphs.

Reason is: Cross-Origin Request Blocked: The Same Origin Policy disallows reading the remote resource at https://allyoucan.cloud/cdn/icofont/1.0.0beta/css/icofont.cs....

I just want to commend you for very clean code. It is a pleasure to look at something written this clean, even if it is a smaller app.

This is great! It reminds me that I need to do smaller projects with faster turnaround. They're much more fun!

Btw, "Your Life in Weeks" is probably (?) the originator of this kind of visualization: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html

It's incredibly sobering to see the weeks of your potential life shown like that. You think about the weeks lost to work and weekends spent burnt out recovering or sick or dodging bad weather. :|

It makes me so freaking sad to see it like this.

I wish someone would have shown me those charts when I was like 15 ;-)

There was a comic about it in 2008: http://abstrusegoose.com/51

Could someone please make a calendar app out of it? :)

Great idea for a personal tool! Two things:

The way this is organized isn't great for visualization. We read left to right, but since days are laid out vertically this means that horizontally adjacent cells are actually a month apart. A standard calendar interface would be more appropriate for seeing how your mood changed day-to-day (and be less confusing to interact with).

Also noticing that the line graph is deceptive; it only interpolates one point for each month, by averaging the entire month together. That's more of a bar graph.

I made something similar to this[0] a few years ago for my own use (except I would record my mood every hour). Honestly, using it ended up making me sadder - most of the time you feel "meh" (5/10) and seeing that quantitatively can really dishearten you. In fact, my average monthly mood fell from around a 6.3 to a 5.8 while using it, with no other major changes in my life.

[0]: https://frank.salmick.com/indexfiles/images/full/mood.jpg - the red line is stress level and green line is mood

Well, given that people tend to perceive swings in things rather than absolute values of things, wouldn't you expect to feel 'normal' unless things are getting noticeably better or worse at that point? And given the coarse granularity of the inputs, a drop of 0.5 seems well within what you'd expect just from random noise.

I can imagine something like this being useful in psychotherapy. Your phone could ping you to answer once-per-day, allowing you to optionally enter comments.

American Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry are strangely devoid of routine outcome measurement. This would be a step in the right direction. Similar Likert-type scales could also be useful for people who struggle with intrusive thoughts or hallucinations.

I started using such an app (pings you each evening to choose your mood and select some tags that describe your day).

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.daylio (not affiliated in any way)

I've been using that app too, but I haven't found the data particularly interesting or meaningful.

The other thing I've also been doing that I've found much more fulfilling is writing down a daily highlight at the end of each day. I just add an event to a dedicated calendar that summaries the best moment of my day.

It's been really interesting to look back over, and it's a great memory prompt, because it gives me a way of looking back at the enjoyable times throughout the year. I've been going for just over a year, and I really don't see any reason to ever stop!

Great idea. Especially because it's low effort. People just don't stick with things that feel like a chore, but this just takes a moment and gets you thinking about what's right in your life. Nice.

This is nice, I would like to see an output of that, but there's no way I'd be doing this daily through a web page. Something like a notification each day on a smart watch (which I don't have) would work. Even phone would be a bit much I think.

Which brings me to - definitely show the input before output on the phone. The output is a huge empty grid for most new users, even for returning users it might not show anything recent, input is something user would want to interact with ASAP when using this service.

I used to do the same but in analog way when I moved to the Netherlands. The weather there affected so much my mood that I started to keep track of it together with the daily color of the sky.

I kept a big paper sheet next to my bed with a bunch of pencils. The problem I realized later on is that mood changes quite a lot during the day, so just checking once a day might not be very representative.

I had "the diary" for 4 or 5 months until I moved out to a sunnier place :)

I think it’s great. I’d love to see somethin similar for chronic diseaseas. When you see a doctor once per several months, it’s impossible to really tell him if you are doing better or worse due to recency bias. I’d love to monitor pain in my joints on a daily basis and have a real data points to show.

Hi everyone ! The year in pixels is @PassionCarnets idea (first one is here : https://www.instagram.com/p/BOiEjvjA5Bm/ ). She explained how it works here : http://bulletjournal.com/year-pixels/

Hi, author here. Camille sent me an e-mail asking to add credits and I added the corresponding text in the About section of the tool.

Dang, I was planning on writing nearly this exact app as a side project. In any case I've set a daily calendar reminder to update it, thanks!

This is perhaps similar to the nikoniko board, although the point of that is that it's public:

http://agiletrail.com/2011/09/12/how-to-track-the-teams-mood...

Awesome app, congrats on launching! I love the idea. One thing I would change is font, it's really hard to read now.

Shameless plug - I'm working on a similar project, a habit tracker with a github-like heatmap(turn it on in menu>calendar):

https://helix.startuplab.io

I love the font. Was thinking to use it for one of my side project. But only for titles , not for critical information?

I like the idea. One small suggestion though. I'd change "great" to "good" or "OK" or something. At current state the jump from "average" to "great" seems too big to me somehow.

Edit: The difference between "Difficult" and "tough" are kinda vague too actually IMO.

verbatim what i've wanted to implement. if the creator reads this, thanks.

It's hard to tell how I feel on a given day. One minute I could be happy, the next I could be sad. Maybe I need 'the last 20 minutes in pixels'

Facebook and Google probably already can tell you what your personal map looks like for the last years.

Very cool! I wonder if a slightly more elaborate tool could help with tracking of mood disorders.

Amazing = Red Difficult = Green ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Beautiful!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com