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Show HN: Hyper minimalist habit tracker for Chrome

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29 pointsbrenzenitho15 comments

I'm an undergrad at cal who's trying to get better at React and building apps. I'd love any feedback on the general UI and user experience, new to coding products!

If you don't want to download it, but still want to give me feedback, app demo vid & pictures in official launch https://tinyurl.com/reactlaunch

Please let me know your thoughts, critical or supportive! Looking to learn

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It looks really nice, but may I ask why it's a Chrome extension? Seems to me that one of the habit people might try to kick is "goofing around on the internet", so adding the habit tracker to the browser is counter productive.

Still it looks awesome.

It seems much easier to develop a extension than, say, a full desktop app or an website with a runtime you have to maintain.

Actually the funny thing is, unexpectedly, I found developing a Chrome extension much harder than building a generic web app. The closest thing to hot reloading my React app could get to was to use npm watch and rebuild on very change, which was much slower. As even the slightest FE change would take ages to visually check (so much so I had to build parts of the FE styling in another project).

The main thing is I couldn't ever use the Chrome API on the default React npm start page, I would get an error unless I actually ran npm run build and unpacked the extension to use manually. (I heard from a friend this is because that Chrome API is only usable by an actual built extension)

yeah that makes sense, the original thought was just that it would be easier to adopt a chrome extension into my workflow, instead of having to manually go to a download page and natively install an app I have to personally open everyday.

I did consider a web app, but then I found it unlikely someone would want to have to go to a specific link everyday just to track their habits. Just felt that since a chrome extension icon would always be there everyday, and because we all need to use the browser at some point, it would be more likely we would use that naturally.

Would love anyone's views on that though. Not saying that initial train of thought was right or wrong, just putting it out there

Personally, I find opening web apps to be much easier then clicking on an extension. I don't think I'd be addicted to HN if I had to click an icon to get here. But the combination

    Ctrl+T => n (it autocompletes to news.ycombinator.com) => Enter

is deep in my muscle memory. For a new app of course it would take time until the URL autocompletes.

Nice design! Would love something like that for the apple watch.

I assume for chrome it also works, but only for people who more or less live in the browser.

A little closer to Apple Watch … https://flathabits.com on iOS

disclosure: I’m the author

Love this, was looking for something similar this morning.

if I ever get into developing apple watch apps I'll lyk I gotchu

link to actual launch, with vid demo & UI images: https://tinyurl.com/reactlaunch

would love any feedback on the demo and UI! (if you can't download it)

The idea of building minimalist apps on a stack that is famous for being awfuly bloated, and on a browser of all things, which more often than not finds itself to be the cause of even worst habits, seems like a bit of an oxymoron.

fair! though personally still a fan of React

> New habit

> Create weekly recurring habit schedules.

Caveat: I haven't downloaded and tried this (apologies)

However having tracked events in the past:

* Where are your design thoughts on recurrent habits and habits that follow other habits ?

Any move towards "pick lists" that gravitate expected habits (by time of day | day of week | last habit) to the top of the pick list to minisise key movement?

Opinions vary and there is overlap here with various command history | fuzzy search | etc. applications.

(( Okay - I looked at the video - I see you are scheduling habits for "later on" - 25 pushups might be wishful aspirational thinking, so where are you heading on the "planned this - did it actually happen?" front? ))

BTW: I'm just spitballing thoughts in the application space - congrats on getting an app started :-)

1. recurring habits: I studied a lot of the largest habit tracking apps and got the gut feeling that it was a good paradigm to view recurring habits as a kind of menu for f u t u r e days. You could remove Wed from a habit's schedule today, but that won't remove the habit from every other Wed before, since the history is important.

2. habits that follow other habits: yeah this is an interesting case I didn't think of. if I wasn't trying to be super minimalist this is a feature I would consider

3. pick lists: I developed a kind of drag an drop "algo", so for each day a user can drag and drop habits on that day. Over time, the master list becomes more and more accurate for the time of day they expect (since chronology for tasks/habits is typically viewed from up to down)

appreciate the discussion!

An other spyware

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