Momentum

I’m getting back into blogging about in-progress projects, because otherwise I hardly blog at all. Expect posts soon about the following coding projects, all at varying stages of completion:

  • Vinci (notebook app)
  • Bookshelf (successor to Bookkeeper)
  • Codex (successor to Unbindery)
  • Quill (successor to Codex, sort of)
  • Storybook (writing app)
  • Speed (desktop writing app)
  • Liszt (todo list app)
  • Endless (mindmapping app)
  • Botswana 2 (revamp of Botswana)

Brief sidenote: I switched a while back to Python/Django, and I’m very glad I did. I can often get to a working prototype within only an hour or two. Back in my younger days I wanted to write everything myself from the ground up, but I see now that I was foolish. Life is short. I’d rather focus on the interesting parts — the app itself — and let the framework handle the routine grunt work.

Momentum

Momentum is the app I’d like to introduce today. It’s a web app written in Django, started back in January to help me track my goals.

More specifically, I wanted something that would help me spend more time reading scriptures and writing fiction. I don’t always have a free half-hour, though, so I needed something to track little bits of time throughout the day, and Momentum was born. I’ve been using it pretty much every single day since then.

Here’s what it looks like on my phone (with dummy data):

momentum.png

Some quick notes:

  • It currently supports tracking minutes, times, or words per day.
  • When I reach a particular goal, it disappears from the list for the rest of the day so I can focus on the goals I haven’t yet reached. (This is a change I made last night, actually.)
  • If I don’t make any progress toward a goal at all within a set time period, the goal goes stale and turns red. (There’s a system-wide stale period setting and each goal can also have its own.) I started using this staleness idea in Bookshelf (more on that in a later post) and it’s been motivating enough that I ported it to Momentum.
  • It supports folders. I have Projects and Health folders, where I have specific projects (stories/apps I’m working on), and things like squats and pushups.
  • Right now you have to add/edit goals via the Django admin. It works but isn’t as nice as something in-app. I just need to get around to doing this, since this is the main thing keeping it from being releasable.
  • The code is on GitHub as usual. Again, this is unreleased, in-progress code, YMMV, grain of salt, etc.