Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome to another episode of App Stories. Today's episode is brought to you by Waterminder. I'm John Voorhees and with me is Federico Vatici. Hey Federico. Hello John, how are you? I'm doing great. I'm doing really well. We have lots to do today, lots of apps to talk about.
I would like to first, though, remind everybody that we have a feedback form. I'm going to do this a couple more times because I know that, you know, people aren't used to it. We get feedback on, you know, social media, email and stuff like that. But we thought it would be easier if everybody had a handy dandy form, which you can find at macstories.net slash podcasts.
Easy to remember. You can find a form for all the shows, not just app stories, and leave us a note. And we appreciate everybody who has written in so far. We'll be looking at all those and also where it makes sense, talking about here in the future. So that's the feedback form. Federico, today I thought we would talk about tracking apps. Okay. Okay. What did you have in mind? Well, one of the things that I think about
a lot about apps is so many categories of apps that we talk about are really nothing more than databases of some sort. - Sure, yes. - Right? - When you think about it, everything is a database, really. - Yes, it is. That's kind of as we have reduced all of humanity to a database. But it goes back to the original iPhone and table views. Table views are a lot like a spreadsheet. They're lists where you can have columns
And in those columns, you can put data. And that's really what everything is, a health tracking app, a media tracking app, an actual database app, all sorts of things kind of fall into that category. And we've been talking about some other categories of apps recently, things like email and calendars and the like. And I thought today, maybe we'd broaden the scope a little bit, talk about the kinds of tracking apps that are out there,
you know, what makes a good tracking app and then mention a few of our favorites. Sure. Yeah, that's a good idea. And I've kind of always struggled with keeping the consistency when it comes to tracking apps. There's a way to overdo it, you know, when you start tracking everything about your life, whether it's time tracking or habit tracking or, you know, tracking your fitness, for example. And I've
been through many phases of my life, you know, I've seen both ends of the spectrum, tracking nothing and tracking everything. There's also like that, there's also like that other aspect of like this, these aggregators of different tracking statistics. So like what if you took multiple trackers and you created your own system to see everything? So you have people, for example, you know, doing complex automations with stuff like Zapier, for example, and everything goes into a Google Sheet.
And there are people who are really religious about it, like tracking absolutely everything. And, you know, there's people...
Calendar can be a form of tracking, especially for people who time block, you know, people who track every single moment when they're awake and the things they're doing during the day. And I don't think either of us have ever been that kind of person, but it's part of the spectrum of tracking. So it's an interesting topic because it's kind of like task managers or email clients. There's really no objectively good or right way to do it. There's multiple ways to do it.
depending on the kind of person that you are. Yeah, there really is. And I think one, it reminds me also of recent stories that Devin Dundee has done for the club about his life tracking, which is, you know, for him, it starts with journaling.
but he's been using journaling apps that pull in other data besides what he writes himself. Right. And so like a year ago, he started that process using some of the new APIs that were available in, in journaling apps for pulling in information about the media you're consuming and photos and other aspects from other apps and,
And then he revisited it just a few weeks ago on the club to talk about what has stuck, what hasn't, and kind of where he's taking that. And a lot of those articles was about the balance and trying to balance, you know, what is useful to track and what isn't. And I, when I think about these things, I feel like there are like at least a few different categories depending on how you look at it. I always think of, first of all, like,
A general tracker is to me something like a database app, something very customizable that you can use for just about anything. And a good example of that would be like the collections app.
or chronicling, for instance. Those are both very general database apps that can be used to track all sorts of things, whether it's health, fitness, journaling, whatever it happens to be. Then there's specific, which to me benefits from having the
focus on a particular kind of thing. And by thing, it could be, you know, media tracking. And even here, you know, you can split hairs and we'll get into some of the apps, but you can have a general media tracker that covers lots of kinds of media, or you could have a very specific one that's just dedicated to maybe books or music or whatever it
or whatever. And then there's to me the third, which is like transient trackers. And this is a new one that I thought of the other day, which are like, yeah, well, weather apps, right? Or air quality apps, things that you want to track what's happening today, maybe what's happening tomorrow or the next day, the week.
But you don't go back very often to see what the weather was last week. It's kind of irrelevant in most circumstances to most people. They're in the moment kind of transient trackers, tracking what's going on in the world around you for the purposes of today, tomorrow, the next day, but not the long term or as a means of looking back. So those are kind of like the three categories I want to talk about. And I feel like
There are like a handful of features that make apps in all of these categories really good. And the things that I have pinpointed are, for instance, ease of entry. I think whenever you're tracking something, one of the things is it has to be easy to get information into these apps because if it becomes a chore, if it becomes tedious, if it's hard to do, people will stop. And if you have...
figured out something that you want to track that you think is going to be valuable for you to track, the worst thing that you can have is an app that throws up roadblocks that makes it more difficult to do that because the likelihood is you'll stop doing it. Maybe that's weight tracking or maybe that's following your finances. Whatever it is, maybe it's not like a fun thing like what movies did I watch? It's like how much money did I spend and did I eat too much? Things that...
that maybe you might be hesitant to track anyway, if the app makes it even harder, you'll drop off even faster. - Yeah, and that's where I think both collections and chronicling are excellent options, especially when it comes to the shortcuts integration that they have. So the ability, when it comes to the quick entry, like in collections, for example, how they have really good shortcuts integration with customizable parameters, right?
And so if you want to make tracking easy and you can set up like automations or you can set up complex shortcuts, let's simplify the process of taking, I don't know, like a webpage or a photo and to be able to have that going quickly into the database. I feel like that stuff really helps. And also chronicling is another excellent example here, especially looking ahead at the future. I could see a scenario in which if...
And if Apple intelligence with app intents ever launches in, in, in the form that Apple promised last year, but I could see a scenario in which you can use natural language to track your stuff into your favorite general purpose tracker, and also to be able to retrieve using natural language from the tracking app. So I feel like that is one of the many potential advantages. I say potential because obviously that Apple intelligence stuff doesn't exist in
But the idea would be taking the complexity out of carefully, manually putting in data and instead relying on shortcuts and natural language to simplify that process. I see a lot of interesting possibilities in that space.
Yeah, I think that touches on another interesting and important aspect of this, which is not just ease of entry, the importing process, but the exporting process, getting the information out. And shortcuts is obviously a big piece of that. But we have other means of getting the data out.
And I think for a lot of these tracking apps, widgets is an important one because you don't want to have to like tap through a bunch of layers in an app all the time to find out some of this information. You know, maybe you're tracking your weight and all you want to see is,
what's my trend line for the last week? And that's very easy with a widget. You just open up your phone, you take a look, you're done. You only go into the app when you want to do some deeper analysis, maybe look at more historical data, maybe do your entry, whatever it happens to be. But you can get a nice overview simply by using widgets. And I think that
Export is one of those areas, too, where I think there are a lot of apps that don't do a good job because they want to keep you in their app. And so they don't make it easy to get the data out in a usable form. Now, maybe they use widgets so you can see it and maybe they use shortcuts for some limited purposes. But.
The best way to have good export is to let people take it out in like a universal format, like maybe a CSV file, for instance. So if someone decides, oh, I'm kind of done with this app for whatever reason, and they want to move to another one, they can get the data out in a format that's easily importable into a new app or even a spreadsheet, whatever you use. Speaking of the more dedicated media trackers, do you use any for music or video games?
I do. Over the years with video games, I have gone up and down with this stuff. And right now, I've been using Game Tracker by Simone Maltato. And he has done... Sorry, I'm always nervous when I pronounce an Italian name in front of you, Federico. That was correct. That was correct. But...
Simone has done book tracker and habit tracker, music tracker and movie tracker, all great apps for tracking various kinds of media. And I think, you know, the experience there really shows because those apps are,
are consistent in their flexibility, their customizability, and the ability to get the information in and out. And so I've been using Game Tracker recently. It's got a very Swift UI look to it. I like that it has playtime stats in it. But what I like the most is that the sorting and filtering options are really,
really good. They're really fine grained and you can view your information in a multitude of different ways, which I think is another aspect of these apps in general that is important is to be able to
to massage the data the way you find it interesting and useful. And sometimes that is in actually customizing the UI or using something like shortcuts, but other times it's just a matter of filtering. So you're only seeing certain things that are important to you in the moment. So that app uses things like tags and custom notes and user ratings and the ability to create like hand, you know, personally curated lists
of games that are just based on whatever criteria you're making them. It may just be, here are my favorite Zelda games, not just like, I don't know, Nintendo games from the 90s or whatever. So that's the game I've been using. They're the app I've been using for tracking games. But I don't really track music. I mean, I do throw things in...
I do look at Music Harbor and I do use Music Box in order to kind of keep tabs on new music. But I mostly just, I guess, surf around in Apple Music more than anything else there. Yeah. I've also been...
over the years using different video game trackers. The one I settled on for a few months at this point is Backlogged, which is not a native app. It's a web app. What I like about Backlogged is that it's obviously designed for people who spend a lot of time playing video games. And there's a community aspect, which sort of makes Backlogged like something in the middle of a personal game tracker, but also something like letterboxed,
It also helps that both are missing the letter E. I think that, you know, letterboxed and backlogged, that's sort of the same kind of idea from a marketing perspective. So there's a community. And for every game, you can see, you know, people can leave reviews. You don't have to if you don't want to. I never do. But you can see the public ratings and that allows you to have a discovery page where you can see all the games that are trending. They do seasonal collections. They do their own Game of the Year roundups. But you can also use it for...
personal tracking and what i've been doing is since they have these really advanced filters uh there's a sidebar where you can really filter down your collection or your wish list for example with with criteria like platform uh genre release date you know all that sort of stuff i've created bookmarks in my web browser and i created a folder just for my backlog bookmarks
And so, for example, right now, I have my backlog, my backlog from last year, the games that I'm playing now, the games that I started playing but then I shelved and I got to make a decision if I want to come back or not, but also platform-specific backlogs. So, for example, my PSP backlog, which is something that I'm working on this year, or my 3DS backlog, which is something that I want to test for 3DS emulation on MPC. So I really like the flexibility of...
like having both a a public aspect where i can go in and see what's popular but also my own account my own stuff my own smart lists and uh sure it would be nicer to have a native a native app on the iphone especially but the web app is really solid and they have a patreon where you can sign up you can get early access to features and they have they have a public roadmap so uh
Brandon actually got me into Backlogged and especially when you get into like making your own lists and saving those filters for later use, it's very convenient. Yeah, that's a great recommendation. Another one that I've been enjoying lately is GamePal, which is a relatively newcomer on the scene. What's interesting about this one to me is that it has a focus on journaling as well as things like Streaks, which Streaks
Streaks is an interesting concept for video games. I mean, it's, it borrows from the habit trackers. But, you know, if you really are kind of finding it hard to find the time to play games, tracking a streak might be a good way to do that. It's got a bunch of other stuff in it too, like a release calendar, stats, and I know they just had a big update. So that I'm going to be putting in the Club Mac stories newsletter.
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tracking everything in markdown in obsidian yeah i was i meant to ask you about that yeah
which is something that a lot of people can take to an extreme, which is, oh, like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, like, sure, you can track absolutely everything in Markdown. I don't do that, but there are a couple of things that I do track in Markdown and Obsidian now. My YouTube videos, so videos that I either want to watch later for myself or videos that I want to link on Mac Stories, I save all of those in Obsidian. If anything, because I've been, you know,
this, you know, and also speaking of AI as we did a few minutes ago, like this idea of being able to search absolutely everything that I wanted to track. So I've been building this project of like building a perfect memory in Obsidian that I wrote about in Mac Stories Weekly and the Automation Academy. So being able to save those YouTube videos, but also albums on Spotify that I want to listen to, it gives me not only a way to visualize those items using data view so I can create custom views, custom dashboards,
for myself to see all the things that I want to track. But also it allows me to search for those items. Like I can use Obsidian Copilot and I could say, hey, did I ever watch a video about how, I don't know, how the large language models work? And it's going to pull from my personal archive. And since everything is in plain text and it's an open format,
It's very easily searchable by an LLM. So this idea of, you know, it's just plain text, it's just marked down, you can dump everything in Obsidian, you can take it to an extreme where it kind of feels like too much. But I feel like if you do it in small doses with very specific data sets, there's...
There's a lot of interesting things that you can do since, again, everything is plain text. So it works great with shortcuts. It works great with data view. It works great with LLMs. And yeah, I do track YouTube videos and music in Obsidian now. Yeah, that's interesting. I have not ever done a lot of that. I'm still of the mind where I clear a lot out of Obsidian, but I think the...
of LLMs is starting to change my thinking on that a little bit, just because having a database that I can search more easily, it's not that Obsidian didn't already have great search itself and other search plugins that you can use, but having the large language model available to gives you new ways to kind of connect those things in ways that were harder before with just straight up regular search. Um,
I do want to talk to you a little bit about media apps because I always find general media apps to be
one of the more interesting categories. We already talked about video games and I think video games are one of those categories that really lends itself to having an app that's dedicated to just video games. That's just because of the kind of metadata that you get with a video game, because, you know, there are other kinds of media don't have like what platforms is it available on? Or, you know,
I don't know. There's aspects of video games that you just don't see as much in things like TV or movies or music. And so I think that that is a category that does really well having its own app. Although many media players allow you, or media tracking apps allow you to do video games too, which, you know, I think that that's fine. I think it's good. You have to kind of decide like,
Like how much detail and how much of this sorting, searching and filtering do you want to do? Because a more generalized media tracker probably isn't going to give you as much granular detail for the specifics of a particular kind of media as you will get if you get a dedicated app.
But a lot of times, the more generalized ones is perfectly fine depending on your needs. And for me, for things like TV and music and books and movies, a lot of times that's just SOFA. Because what I like about SOFA is that I don't have to worry about being...
really organized with things, I can just put it in what Sofa calls the pile. Basically, you dump something into Sofa and you know it's going to be there next time you go. And so if I'm in a hurry, I can just drop something into the pile. And when I want to find something to watch,
or listen to or whatever, or if I'm getting ready to do an episode of Mac Stories Unwind and I need a recommendation, a lot of times I can just go to the pile and say, oh, what of this stuff did I actually do recently? And what can I talk about? And that's usually enough. But if I have time,
And there's things that I'm not going to get to for a while. I can move them off to a dedicated list and I can create my own specific lists for different kinds of media or different categories. It's what I like about Sofa is how customizable it is. And the fact that although it started as kind of a media tracker, you can track all kinds of things in it. Now you can track like restaurants I want to visit or websites I want to read or articles. It can only, you know, it even has podcasts built right into it now.
Yeah, yeah. I don't listen to podcasts in so far, but I think it's interesting that it's an option. What can you tell me? Because I know that you've been doing this for...
for a long time, and it's not the kind of thing that I do, health and fitness tracking. And specifically, I know that you're a big fan of Gentler Streak. Yeah, I've highlighted in our notes two apps that I think are very similar in the way Gentler Streak is. There's Gentler Streak, and then there's Happy Scale. And Happy Scale is a weight tracking app that I have used on and off
Gentler Streak is something I've been using pretty much consistently for the last two to three years. And what I like about it is that it's a tracker.
but it's more trend oriented and friendly than it is focused on the nitty gritty details. You can get those details. Those are all available. You know, you can know exactly how far and how fast you went walking one day or running or whatever it is. But what I like is that that information gets collected automatically when I do a workout and
And when I open the app, what I see is a trend line. And I see a trend line that shows me kind of whether where I am over the last several days in terms of my workouts. Am I kind of pushing it really hard and maybe I should take a break? Am I slacking off and really could use some encouragement to do something a little more on a day? And yeah.
I like that because it's, I found that it's an approach that makes it less likely that I will obsess over the details and which, which keeps me from hurting myself basically, or overdoing it and burning out. So that, that I think is a really good approach to health and fitness and happy scale does something that's very similar in that it's not,
obsessive about what's your weight today or what was it yesterday? It gives you a trend line. It's like an average trend line of where you've been over time because, you know, like
a person's weight fluctuates pretty, can fluctuate quite a bit from day to day based on all sorts of things like how hydrated you are. And so just because you weighed one pound less in a particular day doesn't necessarily mean you lost a pound. It may just mean that you're very dehydrated and tomorrow you'll be hydrated and you'll be up a
But that's not that you put on more weight in the same way. It's not like fat necessarily. So I think that having that kind of average space system is good for that because you can have those fluctuations from measurement to measurement. What you really want to see is the trend line. And if you've got a goal to reach a particular weight,
You can get there over time and see yourself making progress to the goal without getting too caught up in what it was. How much did I weigh Monday versus Tuesday versus Wednesday? So I think that for both those kinds of trackers, that's a really good way to approach them. Yeah. The other thing I wanted to mention is something a little strange, but I've seen people do it. I've seen people track things in chat GPT.
which is, well, not exactly a tracker, obviously, but it goes to show how people can take a piece of technology and if it's flexible enough, they can do things that you were not necessarily expecting with it. I've seen friends in real life use Spackle,
specific conversations with ChatGPT to keep track. It's basically like a journal, right? To keep track of things they do or things like grocery lists. And obviously, I don't think those people are even aware of the technicalities involving like ChatGPT memory, for example, but that's exactly what they're doing. And so this idea of using different conversations with a large language model to keep track of things using natural language
It's almost like a hybrid of a note-taking app with a chatbot UI that has memory built in. And I was very fascinated when I saw this. Like when I saw a friend, for example, she was keeping track of the different hairstyles that she tried over the past year because she had a conversation with ChatGPT where they discussed all of the different options that she had. It was like, this is so fascinating. You could have, you know...
Me, as a nerd, I could have used something like, I don't know, like Airtable or something to keep track of a visual database of my haircuts, right? But here, instead, we're looking at, no, you basically have a quote-unquote assistant that keeps track of your preferences and keeps track...
keeps track of the things that you've done, but you're doing that using natural language. And I see more and more people saying, yeah, I take notes in ChatGPT because it remembers. And I find it both so weird and fascinating at the same time. There must be something to it, you know, to the idea of just text and it's going to remember for you. Yeah, that's very interesting. I actually find...
I find those chatbots too restrictive because I find like the list that you get in the sidebar is just a mess. It's just chronological. You know how a lot of people only keep a few chat GPT conversations and they keep going and going and going in the same conversations for months.
and they have no idea about like at some point that conversation is going to lose its context window from the beginning right uh but yeah that's i think that's the thing is i think about things like that i'm like oh i need to do and i don't want to pollute i don't want to pollute one question with the results of another question exactly but i've seen people have the same conversation with chad gpt and one moment they're asking about like hey why should i cook for dinner because i only get
I only have tomatoes and, I don't know, and some rice to, let's talk about politics. It's like, are you doing all that in the same conversation? Okay. But people are doing it. Because I guess when you don't, I guess the thing is, when you don't put a restriction on what people can do,
People are just going to do the weirdest imaginable thing you can think of with technology. And that's both awesome and kind of scary at the same time. A little scary given the way those LLMs tend to hallucinate. Because you're giving them, you know, you're kind of maximizing the potential for random stuff back when you're throwing all kinds of random stuff in, I think. But all right. Well, that's very interesting to hear people doing it that way. I've not seen anybody do that.
I want to close out, I guess, Federico, with that transient category because that is one that I hadn't really thought about before getting ready for this episode. And the apps that I'm using here, and I'm using more of these actually these days, but I use a couple of different weather apps. I'm using Mercury Weather and Lazy Weather.
Mercury weather I like because it has great glanceable widgets and it also has a very good watch widget, probably the best one in terms of the design as far as I'm concerned. Plus it has some neat features like the travel feature where you can say, I'm going to be in this other place on these days and
And then as that date approaches, you'll see not the weather where you happen to be now, but the weather where you're heading to. So when I drove up to Philadelphia, I could see, oh, this weekend it's going to be a little cooler in Philadelphia than it was in North Carolina. And that's just kind of a, that's useful as you're getting ready to plan for a trip. Lazy weather.
is kind of a fun one because all it does is it has, I have a small widget and all it does is tell me, is it going to be warmer or cooler or rainier or less rainy the next day? It just, it's just like, it's just a relative thing. It doesn't give you a lot of precision. Then if you open up the app, you get a little more precision. You'll get like five different times during the day, kind of like morning, noon and night, plus a couple of other time periods.
And it'll show you what the temperature is going to be. And I'll give you kind of an arrow pointing up or pointing down. So you get a sense for what the day is going to be like compared to the last day and has a little more information about the weather. But I like it because it's just in this very simple monospace font and I can look at it and I can say, oh, yeah, today is going to be pretty much what like it was yesterday without having to think about it very much.
And then the other ones I've used are ones that I've mentioned before recently. I've talked about Paku a lot, which is the air quality app.
It's a good one to have for just general pollution. But I also recently started using Allergy Plus because the springtime allergies are very bad in North Carolina. And this app just gives me a nice visual representation of where we are kind of in the pollen season. Are we in the extreme heavy pollen like we had been for a few weeks?
or are we starting to come down the backside where it's getting a little bit better each day, which is where fortunately we happen to be this week. So I keep an eye on that, maybe look at it once or twice a day or something. And it has a forecast as well. Those are all the kinds of
apps that are giving me a very small database. It's a window on like the next five days. And I look at it and by the next day, I don't care what it was yesterday. I just care what it is today and what it will be tomorrow. Do you have any in that category, Federico, that you've been using a lot? No, I just, I just check the weather on an Italian website because it's the only one that's accurate for my location. So that's what we do.
That's too bad. All of these weather providers, they're never good enough. Yeah, I know. And they've got them all over the place in Europe as well. All right, Federico. Well, what do you say we wrap it up there then? We are going to wrap it up here. And in the post-show, I want to ask you some questions. I think I'm going to quiz John on a few things. That's what I'm going to do today. I'm going to ask you some questions about your setup.
about what you've been up to with your automation. So I'm going to do a little bit of a teachy quiz. See, this is a surprise even for me, folks. I had no idea this was coming. But this is what it's like working with this guy. I mean, sometimes he just pulls the rug out from under you. Hey, sometimes I surprise myself. It's all for the entertainment, I suppose. Yes.
It's all for the show. It's all for the show. Everything's for the show, Federico. Everything's for the show. All right. Thanks for joining us this week, everybody. We will be back next week, of course. Thanks again to our sponsor, Fun Media, for supporting this episode. And of course, you can find us on MacStories.net and on social media where Federico is at Fatici. That's V-I-T-I-C-C-I. And I'm at John Voorhees.
J-O-H-N-V-O-O-R-H-E-S. Talk to you next week, Federico. Ciao, John.