This post is a random assortment of items and announcements. Normally we use the beemails for that, but (a) it’s an emergency blog post day and (b) we wanted to let you blog readers know that we’re actually sending regular beemails, so if you want more of this kind of thing, bump up your beemail frequency (it’s in your account settings)!
Huge progress on the Android app lately. You can sign in with Facebook and Twitter, and the widgets are improved a lot. For example, widgets for Do Less goals now tell you, right on your Android desktop, how much more you can do today. Same goes for Do Less goals in your gallery, even if you don’t use the widgets. We (by which I mean Uluc) are working on proper push notifications, but we think we have a reasonable stopgap if you set it to check for graph updates every 15 minutes. There seems to be no perceptible battery impact from that, but please let us know if you see otherwise.
We caved slightly on the New World Order, aka universal precommit-to-recommit. You can opt out of that in goal settings. See the update to our New World Order post. We’re pretty sure that almost no one wants to opt out but we got a particularly persuasive complaint and decided there was little harm in having it be a setting.
We got covered in SHAPE magazine this month! On page 130, we’re one of their three suggested apps for “turning your smartphone into your cruel, heartless taskmaster”. Actually it was for “making your smartphone smarter”.
Beeminder cofounders Daniel Reeves and Bethany Soule will be at the global Quantified Self conference (sold out!) next week. Hopefully we will see some of you there? We’ll be giving out tshirts and stickers, and Bethany will be presenting. We’re also thinking about selling tshirts afterwards, so let us know if you’d potentially buy one.
There are some excellent discussions going on on Akratics Anonymous right now. One is about the fact that we’ve been been adding and changing functionality (precommit-to-recommit and concomitant changes to make that sufficiently friendly, retroratchet and max safe days, scheduled breaks) so fast that it’s causing both confusion and outright brokenness. We agree. We’ll keep plugging along at one UVI per day but we intend to focus them on fixes and streamlining and de-confusing for a bit. We’ll get back to piling on the awesomeness soon enough. (Thanks so much for all the feedback on that; it’s been amazing!) Another Akratics Anonymous discussion is about the overwhelmingness of trying to beemind lots of goals and how Beeminder’s interface can ameliorate that.
[UPDATE: After repeatedly pointing people to the bottom section of this blog post about beating Beeminder burnout, we finally turned it into it’s own post: Beating Beeminder Burnout.]