If you haven’t used it before, Trello is a web-based tool to organize the things from life to project collaboration. We use it at work to track sprint backlogs, I use it at home as a project planner and todo list. It’s pretty sweet, except for one thing…

Say you’ve got a brilliant idea for where to go on your next vacation. You’ve been choosing between destinations and planning your itinerary with your friend on a shared Trello board. Normally, you’d have to go to trello.com, open your vacation board, find the right list, click to add an item, and then type it out.

I started working on Tello App so that all you’d need to do is hit a keyboard shortcut, type “Mykonos, Greece”, and get back to your life. Small victories my friend.

The design’s still pretty early (I’d love your feedback), but I’ve already started scaffolding out the app. Native development is new to me though and Tello has a little bit of everything – communicating with a server API, parsing JSON, token security, saving data to coredata, and drawing some views.

I’m enjoying Swift, but not so much Cocoa yet. So far, this stack of seemingly simple things is being made complex by edge cases and inexperience. But I guess that’s how it always is.

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Umm… It’s been an eventful couple of months. I broke up with my girlfriend of 5+ years, I went from being a designer to a developer, and I learned how to be a slightly better human in the process.

I just wanted to make something truly great, damn the consequences. But living, and being haunted by, that kind of singular determination makes one harsh. Defining your personal worth solely by the quality of your work means that you’ll never be good enough.

A funny thing happens when you come up for air – looking back, the failures don’t actually matter. Maybe, I’m also hoping the same applies to relationships.

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Fit Report is a simple fitness visualization I made for myself that tracks my daily workout and nutrition activity and correlates that to how I feel.

The visualization attempts to app correlate mood, with whether I worked out and ate well that day. worked out, ate well and good mood are deliberately qualitative metrics which get redefined as I get fitter. A 5k run might be the workout of a lifetime for one person and a warm up for someone more experienced.

Over time, I’ve had to increase the frequency, intensity and variety of my workouts and get ever stricter about nutrition. This approach sees fitness more like a marathon than a sprint.

How it works

There’s far more detail on the github page, but here’s the gist:

The data for the Fit Report is recorded nightly using Reporter for iPhone. I choose to use Reporter because it’s the nicest, quickest way to answer simple questions on my phone and get JSON exported. The questions are set up like so:

Then a local shell script cleans things up and uploads the result, which is then processed by the Fit Report webapp to render the visualization.

(Writing shell scripts is the worst).

Purposeful Tracking

I’ve been working out for years now. In that time, I’ve fallen into my share of ruts – times of sloth or plateaus in my progress. But even looking back, I still don’t really know why.

Fit Report is tied to the hypothesis that how consistently I work out and eat well is strongly correlated to my mood and mental wellness. By being able to quickly identify these patterns, I’ve already been able to better understand the complex relationship between these three factors.

Translating time-series activity into visual patterns should also give me an earlier indication of when I’ve hit a fitness plateau. If I’m reporting a good activity streak but my mood or notes imply meh-fulness, I’m probably in a slump and should up my game or try something new.

Ultimately, the hope is that, by shining a light on my activity patterns, I’ll be able to tackle the root causes of defeat, instead of just the symptoms.

One size fits you

I think there’s a place for something between the worlds of passive wearable tech and hyper-accurate detailed manual tracking. Just like the endless ways to workout, everybody is going to have something that works best for them.

Fit Report is a purposefully simple and unrefined tool, because I built it for myself. Also, over-thinking things puts me in a bad mood.

Fit Report on github

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Much has been speculated on the future of ipads and mainstream computing. Most recently, that there needs to be a iPad Pro for real serious people that’s as large as a laptop, allows multiple windows - but also isn’t less ergonomic, more complicated to use, or less capable than OSX. So magic then.

Thing is, I think we may pretty much already have the iPad Pro - just buy another iPad and use them both together.

Imagine you have 5 sheets of paper stacked on top of each other, this is the ipad right now:

Even if you can quickly switch between pages, you can only view one thing at a time. This one screen, one app model is really easy to understand but doesn’t scale to complex workflows so well.

If you wanted to view two of those paper sheets side-by-side what would you do? You’d likely just put the pages next to each other.

In the same vein, if you wanted to view a news story, while editing a photo to put into a blogpost why wouldn’t you use a device for each task/app?

The reason you probably wouldn’t do that right now, is because iCloud isn’t sophisticated enough for this yet. But if it was?

• A designer working on a website with a stylus could have an image editor in one iPad, a copy of diet Coda in another and a site preview in another. iCloud would let you reference the image in your site’s code and the web preview would instantly update.
• Or, a programmer using a physical keyboard could grab an additional ipad to become a second (or third) text editing window. iCloud would detect the nearby device and enable a shared clipboard and a single active cursor between the devices.

You could probably come up with others, from everyday useful to full on apple ad.

Revolutionary products tend to look obvious in retrospect. Sometimes they’re obvious even earlier.

p.s. That being said, you’ll have to pry my Mac out of my cold dead hands.

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