I've made Dayta free | Hacker News Reader

I've made Dayta free

daytaapp.com

74 pointssahillavingia34 comments

Neat! I was looking for something very much like this!!

Two feature requests:

1) Discrete values: I want to track things say on a scale of 1 to 5, or 1 to 10. It shouldn't be too hard to implement this without cluttering the UI; you can have a check box that says

[x] on a scale of ___

and use the icon of the log as a rating slider.

2) I would like push notifications / alerts prompting me to enter things. E.g. Insulin every 3 hours, or mood every 5 hours.

I would totally pay 5$ for an app that does these 2 things reliably.

[edit: wow dude, this app is buggy :) 2 minutes and I already found one bug: +/- doesnt show up unless you first switch to keyboard and then back to +/-!! Hire a programmer / tester to fix these things and concentrate on the product, it's a better use of your time!]

Worth noting is the competing application and web platform http://www.daytum.com/. This one was built by the same guy who has been doing the annual Felton Reports for the last 4 years (http://feltron.com/).

Why? Don't get me wrong -- thanks for making it free! I'd really be interested in hearing the about the process that made you decide to go free. Would you be willing to share this?

Sure!

It's the New Year, and Dayta is great for tracking specific goals = New Year resolutions.

I also want to get it in front of as many eyeballs as possible.

Hence, free!

Neat app. Two suggestions.

1) Allow me to .csv import. I have a ton of data collected already and don't want to spend hours tripping through your UI to put it in there.

2. Allow me to default a day to '0' if I do not enter data for that day. For example, I track how many miles I am running per day. If I run 11 on 12/1, don't run at all until I run another 11 on 12/10, don't make me enter a '0' for all the days in between. Currently, Dayta will just show me a graph suggesting I've been running 11 miles / day for that entire time.

All in all - I think you're off to a good start. So, kudos to you.

Sweet, thanks for making this free! I actually have a bug report for you, though! ;)

To recreate:

- Add new folder

- In the new folder, add a new idea

- Select the idea to bring up the the data input view

- Make the text field become first responder

- Select the Recent History button to view Data Points

- Hit close

- App crashes

Tested on my iPhone 4/iOS 4.2.1

Dayta is a great app for tracking New Year resolutions, and I'm still on a quest to get it in front of every iPhone user's eyeballs.

I think making it free (for a week) to coincide with this event would help. As always, feedback me up!

Thanks for making this free. I'll install it tomorrow and hopefully come up with some useful feedback.

Looks like a very useful and nice app. Being a picky interface person though, I do have two very minor complaints: your wood texture for the nav bar is overly saturated. If you could tone down the saturation and maybe implement some custom nav buttons, you'd have yourself a much better looking interface (not that it doesn't look good already, though). The second is that the wood does not match that seen in the icon.

Solid app otherwise, though. Thanks for making it free.

Great app.

What else have you tried to get more traction? I'm in the same boat. I've got a couple of apps that I can't seem to get to take off.

Please let us know if this helps or not.

Would be neat for users to opt in and to be able to share certain data sets to a public API for developers to be able to play with.

http://daytaapp.com/

Link to the apps site itself instead of the iTunes Store site.

Thanks for making it free. I'm trying it out right now. For me, it lacks one critical feature that another competig app seems to provide: a timer. I'm using both discrete counters and timers to time tasks and completion time. Not a big issue, but something to keep in mind. Thanks for making it free and all the best!

Thumbs up for the inclusion of export to email/CSV; I wouldn't use this kind of thing if I couldn't make a backup.

I remember hearing about this app ages ago and spent a few hours searching for it last month. I couldn't remember the name and wound up buying some knockoff. I would have paid $5 if it had shown up in my searches. Thanks for making it free, but thanks even more for reminding me of the name!

For those who don't remember, Sahil built the first iteration of Dayta in one week. He logged his progress here: http://oneweekapp.com/

Put the initial description en englais.

Changed, iTunes takes some time to propagate, my bad.

anglais. (What's the point of using "classy" French if you mess up the orthograph? Maybe better to abstain.)

Touché.

Thank you.

It slightly reminds me of mercuryapp.com. That one asks you how you feel about stuff.

I didn't use it much, instead I wrote a diary where I rated my efforts every day and I added a little note.

Seen it before, was very interested, but have no iDevice to use it on or I'd be tracking everything. Free? Extremely impressive for a free app.

Out of curiosity, anything specific you would be using it for?

I've been leaning more and more towards setting up a track-everything tool myself. Mood, food, pains, sleep, weather, productivity measures, literally anything I can come up with. Combine that with a prevalent keylogger which also tracks applications, and I could build up some huge statistics on myself, and maybe find causes of problems (and I'd just be interested).

Of course, part of the fun of making it myself would be experimenting with ways of representing and extracting meaningful information. I haven't brainstormed on it much; so far I'm at "dump it in SQL" because I can build a query for just about anything really quickly.

This sounds like a great app, but is it really appropriate to link to an iPhone app on Hacker News? Personally, I think it's good that you linked to the direct source, but I did not see any news noteworthy content other than what you told us in the title. Perhaps you should link to a blog article you wrote about making the app free.

I think the direct link to the page on the Apple Store (which includes a good description of the app) is far more valuable than a link to a blog post that says "Hey guys, I made this app free" which may or may not include a link to where you can download it.

I don't have an iPhone anymore, but this app looks quite useful and I've forwarded this thread to a few friends. Thanks!

True, but what would be valuable is a blog post describing the thought process that led to this decision and what the perceived advantages and disadvantages are. If this is an experiment, it would be good to know the hypothesis.

It would be great to see a post in a couple of months time following up on the decision as well.

I'd love to see an iPad version. I will definitely use this as so far all the dedicated weight tracking apps are crap.

Thanks for making it free.

I played around with it a bit and it's a pretty decent app. Some minor nitpicks like the +/- thing someone else mentioned.

I'd say good effort and a good gesture but I think I'm going to be loyal and stick with Daytum ..

Installed, I'll use it to track my journey on slow-carb diet.

Can anyone recommend a Android alternative? It has to be free and must not require my data to be available to the provider (ie store it locally).

Thanks for making this free. The timing is perfect.

What drove you to the decision Sahil?

BTW, we need to catch-up sometime!

Androd port?

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