Jamie Thingelstad's dashboard

Jamie Thingelstad started following the idea "Auto-Complete Twitter Names" in atebits.

Jamie Thingelstad started following the idea "Growl integration" in atebits.

Jamie Thingelstad started following the idea "Hide dock icon" in atebits.

Jamie Thingelstad shared an idea in atebits on April 20, 2009 15:28:

AppleScript support

It would be really nice if you offered AppleScript support in Tweetie for the Mac. Even if very simplified. Right now it seems Twitterific is the only Mac client with scripting support.

Jamie Thingelstad shared an idea in Benjamin Ragheb on December 13, 2008 15:07:

Feedback on New Screenshots

[Moving this out of Twitter...]

Benjamin, more feedback on my comment about the new color zones in the screenshots you posted.

I'm not real hip on the colors for a couple of reasons. I think it makes the chart look really noisy and crudded up. Makes me think of Windows. :-) Additionally, for someone like myself with a lot of weight still to lose (but making progress) I would likely just see a big huge screen of red. BMI is troublesome in that regard since "big guys" like me, even at <18> and I could just not use it, but it would be nice to have BMI, in fact, it would be nice to be able to establish a BMI goal as well.

Jamie Thingelstad replied on November 19, 2008 05:02 to the idea "Seeing your Goal weight in other views" in Benjamin Ragheb:

I'd love to see your weight to goal appear as a 3rd column in the list view of daily weights too. I love having the delta to the smoothed weight, but it would be nice to see the delta to goal too.

Jamie Thingelstad replied on November 19, 2008 05:00 to the idea "Chart Improvement in y-Axis" in Benjamin Ragheb:

Thanks for the reply. I'm not sure why a 3rd solution isn't considered, simply dynamically calculate the min and max range based on the period of time shown in the view.

I'm going to make a guess that you are pre-rendering the entire image though, and that that is how the fling works so smoothly. Calculating the y-scale on the view would require regeneration of the chart.

You could do that recalc in a background thread, and "snap" the view after it is redrawn for the time period. This would give smooth scroll but would have the impact of possibly scrolling the chart out of the view.

Here is a current view of my chart. Sort of a bummer to not have the y-scale tighter, on the other hand it's further encouragement to keep moving the line down. :-)



Hopefully the other priorities you are working on are sharing weight history with friends via URL's. :-)

Jamie Thingelstad shared an idea in Benjamin Ragheb on October 23, 2008 16:15:

Chart Improvement in y-Axis

I really [really!] love the chart improvement in 1.3. It is a huge win. However, I'd love to see a further improvement. I think this is a behavior I'm seeing since I imported 7 years of data into FatWatch. The issue is the y-scale. Right now it seems FatWatch is making a calculation of the range of the y-scale based on all data, not just the data in the current view. For example:



It would be really nice if the y-scale range were localized based only on the data in the current view, with some minimum so the chart doesn't look silly.

Jamie Thingelstad replied on October 04, 2008 02:04 to the idea "Sharing Weight Data with Friends" in Benjamin Ragheb:

Okay, I've now gotten married to this approach and love it. :-) I'm probably way too far down the rabbit hole and will now insist that any other approach is rubbish. :-P

Let me try to sell with a few more points:

• I love having the sharing files be simple URL's. Why? You could send an email (created for you by FatWatch) to someone in your address book that has a URL that links straight to FatWatch. Something like fatwatch://foo.bar.com/weight.csv and then register FatWatch.app to handle that URL prefix. Awesome!


• I still like this all being on the device. Imagine a personal trainer using this with several clients. They wouldn't have the time to sit down at a computer and do all this, instead they could just tap on FatWatch and get updated data for the client that just showed up.


• I also like the idea of the FatWatch sharing inside the app as a sort of "exclusive club". Doesn't go out onto the big old web...

Jamie Thingelstad replied on October 02, 2008 18:57 to the idea "Sharing Weight Data with Friends" in Benjamin Ragheb:

I'm not sure I agree. Sure you get a bigger screen and all going to the laptop but it is also a big context switch. I'd like to see friend activity in the same context, right on my phone.

I could easily see adding a 5th button along the bottom between "Goal" and "More" called "Friends". Clicking on that tab would show a list of friends you are "subscribed" to and clicking on them simply does the exact same thing that clicking on Log does (including rotate for chart) but it does it with their data.

I have no idea how the app is designed under the covers, but at least this way you could leverage all the existing display code and just point it at a different data set.

Added benefit of automatically sending your own data to a server is having an automated backup solution.

Mark me in the camp of people that would like to keep it on my phone. You could see this extend to showing one of those red numbers over the friends button when it detects your friends have updated (simple HEAD call to the remote URL to detect modified date). I'd much prefer this over logging into another website and dealing with all that...

I think attempting to overlay friends weight data on one chart would be a huge change, and I'm not sure that would even be so cool. I'd rather see each person independently. Just my $0.02.

Jamie Thingelstad replied on October 02, 2008 02:08 to the idea "Sharing Weight Data with Friends" in Benjamin Ragheb:

I was thinking about this a little bit more and it's actually easier than I thought. People don't need to share accounts at all. All that you need to do is be able to have a URL that can pull the weight.csv file. So...

1. Provide a way for someone to automatically keep a weight.csv file on a server somewhere. iDisk? WebDAV? SFTP? FTP? Note, this is not shared.


2. Friends are added (via Address Book would be best) and the URL to their weight.csv file is associated with them.

Done. Each person just keeps there own file updated and there is NO centralized repository. Sweet!

Jamie Thingelstad replied on October 01, 2008 16:25 to the idea "Sharing Weight Data with Friends" in Benjamin Ragheb:

Not a big fan of using a spreadsheet as the middleman. It would be nice if there was a fairly generic hook to "post your weight" to different services, since there are a lot that do it. I've used Traineo some and I know that they have an API hook for this.

Perhaps the best approach would be to survey the market and just create coded hooks to report to a few different sources. It would be a shame to pick "just one" and force everyone to have to use that. I like the Hacker's Diet Online, but the user interface is just atrocious.

It would be nice to figure out a way to do this with just a WebDAV URL.

Proposal:

1. Have people share a WebDAV URL with write permissions.
   
2. Each person using that automatically exports (in the existing format) their history to that URL with a given filename.
   
3. You can then "subscribe" to any files detected at that URL and have that as a feed.
   
4. Offer ability to "switch views" initially and then extend the visualization/competition options in the application.
   

I like this since it's decentralized. It reminds me a lot of how Delicious Library shares your library (for example, see my library).

Biggest challenge here is finding WebDAV access that people can share account handles with... hmmm...

I like this direction though, super simple and just relies on files being exchanged. I think making a formal WebService is probably not needed for the simplicity of this and introduces a ton of other challenges.

Jamie Thingelstad marked one of Benjamin Ragheb's replies in Benjamin Ragheb as useful. Benjamin Ragheb replied to the problem "Slow Chart/Crash on Chart View".

Jamie Thingelstad replied on September 30, 2008 16:39 to the problem "Slow Chart/Crash on Chart View" in Benjamin Ragheb:

Okay -- it seems I cannot add an attachment in Get Satisfaction (ugh?!). So I just emailed the CSV file to your support address.

Jamie Thingelstad reported a problem in Benjamin Ragheb on September 30, 2008 16:38:

Slow Chart/Crash on Chart View

I'm a new user to FatWatch and am really liking it. I used the import feature to bring over 8 years of weight data going back to 2000. The readings are weekly, and then more sporadic, for a total of around 260 data points.

After adding this data the chart view has gotten much slower (a bit expected, but more than I figured) and it even occasionally will cause FatWatch to crash when looking at the chart.

I'll try to attach the CSV export file of my data so you can load it in for testing if you'd like.

Jamie Thingelstad shared an idea in Benjamin Ragheb on September 30, 2008 16:34:

Sharing Weight Data with Friends

I would really love to see FatWatch incorporate some sharing of information. I realize this would be a big jump from where the app is now, but it would a big feature addition.

The idea would be to allow you to share your weight information with friends and see how you are doing with them. It's likely a can of worms with tons of edge cases, but could be really cool.

Jamie Thingelstad replied on September 30, 2008 16:31 to the idea "New Chart Preview: what do you think?" in Benjamin Ragheb:

I think this new chart is an immense improvement. Looking forward to seeing it in a future update.

Jamie Thingelstad started following the idea "New Chart Preview: what do you think?" in Benjamin Ragheb.

Jamie Thingelstad started following the question "Is there a date for an iPhone App?" in Brightkite.

Jamie Thingelstad shared an idea in Brightkite on August 17, 2008 20:38:

Check-in for Airplane

It would be nice if you had a special check-in for a flight. Check-in with flight # and have Brightkite automatically get flight details and populate as appropriate your check-ins on both sides.