Show HN: Spotify and Apple Health data as art | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Spotify and Apple Health data as art

apps.apple.com

47 pointspcybr24 comments

For the longest time, I've been interested in the idea that the personal data we have logged across platforms can "paint" a pretty clear picture of who we are. And, as individuals, this will reveal fun and maybe sharable stories about us.

So I made this app, Day by Data, to connect with and visualize your personal data like step count, music listening habits, and more into tiny visualizations and data art right on your iPhone.

The launch version has a few year-in-steps breakdowns and a few Spotify data-visualizations.

Over time, the goal is to make more data sources available to connect and empower users to learn from their personal data stored across these platforms. Think data about the food we eat, places we travel, or shows we watch.

Data accessibility and cleanliness is the hardest part, but I'm always open to different sources and visualization types.

Let me know what you think and if there are certain data sets you'd like to see visualized!

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These Spotify visualizations are from the same app that went viral earlier this year among Swifties: https://x.com/PobBase/status/1796603662275694919

And the OP is too humble to flog it, but he also writes a cool newsletter about developing the app over at https://ngenart.substack.com/

Source: I am the OP's brother!

This is indeed true, thank you bruddah :')

I tried it and it’s funny. I liked the Highscore output. But the distance is only measured in miles. As a metric person this saddens me :). Keep up the work. I also like these kinds of visualizations.

You can turn off imperial units in settings > account preferences

Thanks so much! I found it funny to look back on those days and see what I did to merit those steps too!!

And yes! You can toggle your units in the Account Preferences under settings, but I should add a note that the option is available because it is buried a little too deep.

Very cool! I've been playing around with exporting my twitter archive & visualizing it/finding semantic clusters/changes in my beliefs over time etc. There's a couple initiatives of people making their personal data publicly accessible/building tools on top of it:

[1] https://www.community-archive.org/ [2] https://www.openhumans.org/

Woahhhh thank you for sharing! I had never heard of these initiatievs, they're really interesting and I'm going to take a closer look at each of them.

Also sounds really cool with what you've done with your own Twitter data! Would love to connect and hear more about it if you're willing to share some of the outputs -- I'm @_re_pete on X and Instagram!

Thanks. That looks amazing. I wish there was an app which can use last.fm data, as it can collect listening data from various sources. Btw. your privacy policy is missing an E-Mail address: Email: [Your Contact Email] There should also be a space between "December" and 2024 in the top of the page. Also the linked Instagram account doesn't seem to work.

The app and visualizations are great. Keep up the good work. Do you have a Mastodon/Fediverse account to follow your progress on the development?

Thanks! Appreciate the notes on the app site, just updated to make those edits!

For socials, I am sharing progress on X and Instagram @_re_pete -- fixed the link on the site as well.

I will definitely look into adding last.fm, great suggestion. Agreed that it does a nice job of collecting data across streaming services, so it definitely merits its own integration and set of visualizations.

I will say, the nice thing about Spotify is it has stats about the songs and artists themselves (genres, stats, etc.) that other platforms and last.fm lack.=, so would have to rethink a few of them.

Nice! I don't use Spotify but the Apple Health ones are really cool :)

FYI it doesn't seem to work on macOS, it lets you install it from the Mac App Store and step through the onboarding but it seems like it doesn't have the Health data API you're using. It doesn't request access to anything and just carries on, then "get started" doesn't do anything.

On iOS it works great though! One small thing I noticed is that after the onboarding it was showing the health visualisations as still requiring me to connect. After a few taps it updated and worked though.

Thanks for the heads-up on the bugs! Super weird on the MacOS download…it’s iOS only so I’m surprised it’d let you download it on Mac.

Thanks for letting me know about the connection bugs! Will hopefully have an update for that ASAP

It would be neat if it would take cycling from health - I’m the least capable runner that’s ever existed. Give me a bike and I might get somewhere.

Strava and Apple Music might be good additions.

Thanks so much for giving it a look!

I can definitely add a cycling data piece or make it a toggle for the existing pieces too!

Will look into adding Strava as well, have worked with it in the past but they recently further restricted their APIs.

Have looked into Apple Music and unfortunately they only make your recently played songs available via API, so have been digging to see if there are other ways to make the visualizations with the same depth as the data I am able to get from Spotify's API.

Will share updates on these as I add them across X and Instagram @_re_pete!

Thank you for even considering those things.

Interesting stuff.

Would be VERY interested in having visualizations of Apple Music data. I've had 20+ years to build up pretty significant play history.

Certainly being able to look into every type of health data would yield interesting insights.

One minor thing that does bug me: US date format. Probably be better to default to whatever short-date format is the user's preference in iOS. Same goes for metric/imperial.

Looking forward to seeing more visualizations!

I'd love to be able to pick data input myself! For example I swim and I might want to see my swimming pace or total distance for each month like a high score chart. Though many people are into different sports so being able to iterate all available Health data and having a dropdown would be great.

Keep up the good work!

Great idea! I’ll work on integrating swimming, cycling, and more. Really helpful feedback and thanks for trying it out!!

Looks interesting. Has an off-by-one error though; YTD steps receipt starts with December 2023. I'm in UTC+1.

Ahhhh interesting, thanks for pointing this out!

Looked into it and it has to do with how Swift and JS (for the WebView visualization) handle dates. Will push a bug fix in the next update!

This is awesome—nice job! It was so cool to see when I started running and what year I started to get injured :/

This looks really cool! Do you have any plans for an Apple Music integration for those who use that over Spotify?

This is very good! I love the creativity in the visualizations. Do you have any plans for Android?

Thank you. What a wonderful app and beautiful design.

Thank you so much, I really appreciate you checking this out and the kind words!

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