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Dosecast CloudSync Disappoints 22 Mar 2015 9:41 PM (10 years ago)

Since I posted on Managaing Medications in iOS three months ago, my choice of app in this category—Dosecast—has been updated to version 9. Do the latest changes to the app merit a bump in a major version number? Not in my book.

I already wasn’t excited by the design of Dosecast. Ever used a Mac app that has been ported from Windows and been disappointed that it just doesn’t feel right? That’s how I feel with Dosecast. It’s as if the developer doesn’t get the iOS design language—and now there’s even a glossy effect to its alerts that hearkens back to iOS 6. (And I still hate the “Updating” overlay that blocks the UI whenever changes are made.)

Version 9 gave me a feature that I’d asked for: that reminders would repeat every minute until the medication was taken or skipped. However, 9.0.4 removed this feature in favor of the previous behavior of a single secondary reminder. Although that secondary reminder period is now configurable (previously it was 15 minutes only), the loss of the continuous reminder is disappointing.

The biggest change in Dosecast, though, has been the addition of CloudSync: a “service which automatically keeps all your drug data up-to-date across an unlimited number of Apple [iOS] and Android devices and enables dose reminders to be delivered to all devices simultaneously.”

But CloudSync isn’t what I was hoping for and I find it hard to believe that the user base has been clamoring for this. Syncing between devices is not the same thing as syncing between users—and the latter is far more important. After all, do you really need to make sure that your reminders are showing up on both your iPhone and your iPad? Probably not. No, what you really want is the reminders for your child’s medications to show up on both your iPhone and your wife’s iPhone.

Now, to be clear, this does happen. But you also get every other medication and reminder shared between those devices, meaning you’ll be reminded of your wife’s meds and she’ll be reminded of yours. Thank you, no. Worse, bedtime settings (which allow you to suppress reminders during a set period) are synced, as well, and apply to all patients instead of individually. Other apps, like CareZone Meds or MediSafe allow for sharing of meds for only a specific patient or family member.

CloudSync is a subscription service for which you’ll pay $3 monthly through an in-app purchase of the Pro edition. Unfortunately, if you don’t want syncing but do want additional features—multiple drug types, dose history, quantity tracking, refill alerts, doctor/pharmacy tracking, drug database, custom drug photos, and multi-person support—that used to be included in the $4, one-time, in-app purchase of the Premium edition, well, you’ll also now need the Pro edition. (Existing Premium users apparently get Pro for free, but the Premium upgrade is no longer available within the app.)

In sum, Dosecast 9 is a disappointing upgrade and I am hard pressed to recommend anyone spend the money for the Pro edition.

A Habit App for Every Day of the Week 17 Feb 2015 3:33 PM (10 years ago)

In 2015, I, like many of you, made some New Year’s resolutions, fully expecting them not to last. So far, though, they’re holding up pretty well, thanks to a handful of apps I’ve been trying out on my iPhone.

While catching up on Mike Vardy’s new Productivityist podcast, I was introduced to several new-to-me apps and decided that this would be a good time to put them (and some others) through their paces. What follows are the apps I thought were noteworthy.

Good Habits

I picked up Good Habits [App Store, Free with IAP] shortly after its 1.0 release, but in the last two years I unfortunately couldn’t make using it a habit. (That was my fault, not the app’s.) The app uses the “Don’t break the chain” metaphor attributed to Jerry Seinfeld: each day you complete a task forms a link in a chain and your goal is to avoid breaking the chain by skipping a day.

Like all of these apps, Good Habits is easy to use. When creating a new habit, you give it a name, choose a color, and set an optional reminder. You can also specify days off for each habit, so skipping a task on a preset day doesn’t break the chain. Habits can also be paused, should the need arise. Marking a task done requires one tap; to mark it missed, two taps (or just leave it alone—Good Habits doesn’t track skipped tasks).

An optional ($1) in-app purchase allows you to see stats for individual habits: current chain length, longest chain, and more, including distribution. Very geeky stuff. And you can note the reason you broke a chain.

One downside of Good Habits is its limitation to a single daily repetition. A habit that I’m working on is drinking eight glasses of water daily; however, I can’t use the app to track each glass. I’d like to see the developer add the ability to track tasks that need to be done on a “nn times per day” basis.

Full

Mike Vardy’s app of choice is Full [App Store, Free], but after several weeks of using the app I had to delete it. Although its swipe-and-drag interface is easy to use (and it handles not only “nn times per day” tasks, but also “per week” and “per month” tasks), I found that its history feature is too limited to be of any use.

History in the app is displayed per time segment—you can’t look at an overview of daily habits for the month, for example, and instead you must swipe through each day to see your successes and failures. In other words, no chains, no stats.

I also ran across several annoyances: the app opens to a view of your monthly habits (I have none) rather than daily and, since the app never asks for permission (and doesn’t show up in Settings > Notifications), I never receive reminders of my tasks. This would seem to be an issue with the app itself, since most other apps work just fine in this regard. Lastly, an Internet connection is required.

Way of Life

A popular app among those in the know is Way of Life [App Store, Free with IAP]. I like that you can view your list by week or month, not simply by day as most of the other other apps show, and that you can mark a task as skipped. You can filter your view to show only today’s remaining activities and tags offer additional filters. And notes can be added for any day’s activity, not just those that are missed.

Statistics in the app are displayed by charts and they’re very well done. But what’s exceptional is the ability to set multiple reminders and have them focused on individual habits, all habits, your remaining tasks, or tasks with specific tags. You can even choose to have reminder notifications only when tasks in your chosen focus are undone. Smart.

However…

Habits are limited to single daily repetitions, making Way of Life unsuitable for tracking my water consumption. And it’s somewhat annoying that marking a task done requires two taps.

Balanced

Balanced [App Store, Free with IAP] is different enough to make it interesting, but its take on habit tracking doesn’t work for me. To start, “[reminders] are built around mindfullness. You get two each day, but only if you haven’t checked the app.” I’m not sure what that first sentence means, but the second one means I won’t be reminded when I need it.

Next, history is limited to (it appears) the prior 14-15 actions per habit, showing you a vague timeline of tasks done, skipped, or late. That’s right: late. The app doesn’t track missed actions, so missing three cups of water in a row in one day, for example, only counts as one late.

Habit

Habit [App Store, $4] is similar in many respects to Way of Life, both in usage and in stats. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that its developer took some cues from the other. However, there are differences. Marking a task done takes only one tap, but you can’t mark a task skipped. You can have up to six reps of a daily task and note entry is slightly easier, but there is only a single reminder per habit and the app, like Way of Life, only tracks daily habits.

If you care to, both Habit Builder and Way of Life allow you to share your habits with others, although only the former uses a standard iOS share sheet—Way of Life shares to email or Twitter only.

(Habit Builder [App Store, Free] is the lite version of Habit.)

Habit List

Habit List [App Store, Free with IAP] is in some ways similar to Good Habits and, like Way of Life, has a wide following. One advantage this app has over the other two is its wide number of options for habit frequency: specific days, every nn days, every two weeks, every month, or 1-6 days per week. But, like most of these apps, you can’t specify “nn times per day.”

A nice touch is that your remaining tasks shuffle to the top of the list, while completed tasks are greyed out. Only a single tap is necessary to mark a task done, or a tap and hold to mark it skipped.

Depending on how you like your stats served, you may find Habit List tastier than Good Habits. Although there’s not as much information about chains, you can see your current and longest streaks, as well as six-week and six-month timelines.

Strides

Here it is: the Holy Grail. With a caveat. Strides [App Store, Free with IAP] is really more than I need, since it has trackers for not only habit building, but also target value by a specific date; average target value (more or less) by time period; and project completion (with milestones) by a specific date.

But for habit building, it’s very good. There are no limits on reps over a day, week, or month and there seems to be no limit on the number of reminders you can set for an individual habit. (I haven’t actually been able to test reminders, since the app has the same problem as Full, but the developer believes an upcoming update will fix this.) My only nit is that it takes two taps to log a “done” entry.

Stats show your current and best streaks or your goal streak (a separate tracker option), as well as your completion rate. And you can see your completion status by day over the last week and by week for the last seven—but no further.

I have found a few bugs in Strides, but none of them worry me; the developer has been very responsive to my contacts and the version history shows the app is being actively developed. Version 3 is pretty new and it appears it was a massive update that syncs iPads and iPhones with a web-based version of the app.

Now for the caveat: while the app is free, to continue using it after the 30-day trial you’ll need to pony up $5 a month or $50 a year. That’s their “sustainable business model” which will allow them to continue developing the app and the amount is well worth the value you receive if you use the app.

My recommendation

If you need to track daily tasks with no concern for stats or multiple reps, get Good Habits. If you need highly-configurable reminders for daily tasks with no need for multiple reps, get Way of Life.

But to track multiple reps per time period, the only way to go is Strides. If you need multiple reminders and multiple reps for serious habit building, you can get that for about the cost of one of those blended drink thingies at a snooty coffeehouse. And you can use Strides to help you cut back on those, too!

Managing Medications in iOS 30 Dec 2014 6:08 PM (10 years ago)

Although the built-in Reminders app, or any such third-party app, can help you schedule the medications you take, a dedicated medication management app will go beyond reminders and may provide additional features that help protect from overdose, incorrect medication, and harmful interactions; aid caregivers and healthcare professionals; and connect medications to doctors and pharmacies.

For the last few years, Pillboxie [App Store, $1] has been my go-to app for pill reminders. It handles multiple patients (think family members) and has great looking reports (medication lists and history) and its nagging reminders feature—which repeats reminders every minute until you take your meds or snooze the reminders—has overcome my forgetfulness.

So why would I look for a replacement? I’d be willing to overlook that Pillboxie still looks like a pre-iOS 7 app if it weren’t for the fact that it handles neither medications taken “as needed” (PRN) nor those taken at an hourly interval. To simulate the latter I could schedule multiple doses per day, but the reminders wouldn’t be rescheduled based on the time I took my meds. For example, say I take a drug every four hours and I set the first dose for 7am; if I actually take the first dose at 7:25am, the next dose should be taken at 11:25am—and Pillboxie would have me taking it early at 11am.

It turns out that very few apps get this right. Two, as a matter of fact.

When I previewed Easy Pill [App Store, $2] in the App Store, I had a sense I was in the presence of greatness. However, unlike most apps in this category, it’s strictly a paid app, so I didn’t download it until I’d waded through all the free and free-with-in-app-purchase apps first.

The app is gorgeous! It’s not just that it looks like a post-iOS 6 app, but the developer has made it very simple to add and track medications as well. Unlike most other apps I looked at, a single tap is all that is necessary to mark a drug “taken” and you can tap once again to adjust the time taken, if necessary. If you like, you can enable the display of a progress bar for each med that shows how far along in the cycle you are. And if you’re keeping track of how much of a medication is left, you can find the quantity right on the My Meds list.

Development of Easy Pill has been slow but steady over the last three years, perhaps reflecting the thoughtfulness of the developer. But I’m disappointed that in that time one feature important to me hasn’t been added: multiple patients. I could add my children’s names to the medications, I suppose, but it’s not quite as clean as having the feature built in.

Of the 27 apps I interviewed, Dosecast [App Store, $4 in-app purchase] was the final one. While looking at screenshots in the App Store, I wasn’t excited by the app’s design; however, its modest exterior belies the wealth of features inside.

Yes, it tracks medications taken. Yes, it reminds you to take your next dose after a pre-set number of hours. So it hits the two features that I’m needing now and includes (with the in-app purchase) the multi-patient feature that Easy Pill lacks. But wait…there’s more!

With the in-app purchase, you can track the doctor who prescribed the medication, as well as the pharmacy where you had the prescription filled; if you track the quantity, Dosecast will remind you when it’s time to refill. One nice touch is the ability to suspend reminders during bedtime hours, although I’d prefer that this be a per-patient and per-medication option. And I’m looking forward to their upcoming CloudSync service, which I hope will synchronize either select patients or individual medications between different users of the app—which would be great for me and my wife to coordinate our children’s schedules.

This is one of those times where I can’t have both form and function. Because Dosecast supports multiple patients, I’m reluctantly turning to it over Easy Pill to replace Pillboxie. But if you only need single-patient tracking, I wholeheartedly recommend Easy Pill—and I’ll keep my eye on it for future improvements in that area.

Two Years with Line2 22 Jul 2014 2:04 PM (11 years ago)

I’ve come to the end of two years with Line2, a cloud phone service that has replaced my business landline, and overall I’ve been pleased with the service. However, there are a number of niggling things with the iOS app itself which keep me from fully enjoying the service and which the company is slow—or unwilling—to fix.

The biggest issue for me is that there is no alert/banner or sound for new voicemail messages. Due to the lousy service from Sprint in my area, it’s not uncommon for a call to go straight to voicemail instead of ringing my phone. I only learn of the message through an email and I have to trigger the push notification through a Mail rule.

But there are more:

• It takes too many taps to initiate a phone call to a given contact: three instead of one
• Actions for voicemail messages are difficult, since the UI uses small tap targets
• The mic button is disabled 90% of the time for voice input of text messages
• The speaker turns off between messages when listening to voicemail
• Favorites show the wrong contact in some cases
• Anonymous callers are incorrectly shown as an existing contact in my recent calls
• Dialer key feedback is either too loud or doesn’t exist at all
• Contacts are mis-sorted
• The app takes far too long to access my contacts and update call history, etc. with contact names when I’ve not been in the app for a while
• The layout of the keypad screen is cluttered; the digits and contact name need to spread out a bit and the Call button needs to be smaller

In addition I’d like Line2 to support URLs to dial a number: line2://dial?885551212 for example. I could use this with Launch Center Pro and I’d step up my efforts to get Marketcircle to support third-party dialers in Daylite. But, as I said, Toktumi rarely fixes anything in the app and even more rarely shows up in their Community Forums.

Ember Keeps LittleSnapper's Flame Burning 27 Nov 2013 11:48 AM (11 years ago)

I’m a screenshot nut. I take screenshots every day for documentation, support, explanation, etc., and I’ve tried just about every Mac app out there that claims to do the job. Except for a short flirtation with Skitch that ended badly, my utility of choice for the last four-and-a-half years has been LittleSnapper. Back in July, Realmac Software released Ember, the next version of LittleSnipper, and now that a demo is available I’ve had a chance to put the app through its paces.

As expected, Ember [Mac App Store, $50] offers the standard fullscreen, object, and area snaps. Timed (5 second delay) snaps are available, but only for fullscreen captures. Of particular interest to me is the app’s ability to capture web pages, either by using a Safari extension or Ember’s own in-app browser. Like LittleSnapper, Ember allows the user to select a specific DOM element (button, text area, image, etc.) from the page in addition to the entire page, but—unlike LittleSnapper—it’s not possible to either open the current website in Ember or snap the current website from the menu extra. Sure, both actions are still possible with a couple steps, but with LittleSnapper it was possible with a single keystroke.

Once you’ve captured all or part of your screen, Ember saves it within its library and (optionally) shows the app. There are options in Ember’s preferences that allow you to add a drop shadow to window snaps and copy the capture to the clipboard; unlike LittleSnapper it’s not possible to include the cursor in a fullscreen snap. I’d also like the ability to toggle those options (drop shadow, cursor) on the fly, perhaps with a modifier, since it’s a chore to change the preference from the default—usually after I snapped a window with the wrong option.

LittleSnapper’s library has gotten a facelift in Ember: gone is the ability to add folders (which would group snaps, Collections and Smart Collections) and some viewing options have been moved around. Two changes I’m not fond of in the library are the removal of the thumbnail sizer and the placement of the inspector into a popover instead of the right sidebar. A new feature in the inspector, however, takes you to the URL of any web snap (only in your browser—the app won’t open the WebArchive itself in the in-app browser as LittleSnapper did).

Speaking of Smart Collections, the criteria for creating one have been halved. It’s no longer possible to filter on annotated state, tag, Collection, notes, sharing name, or sharing URL. But it is possible to filter (and search) on colors, a new feature in Ember that analyzes your images and figures out each snap’s primary color.

Snapping and organizing your snaps are nice, but also important is the ability to annotate your snaps. At first I was concerned that Ember had removed the bulk of LittleSnapper’s editing options; lines, arrows, ovals and rectangles seemed to have been replaced by a single freehand drawing tool. However, Ember adds a smart drawing feature that intelligently guesses if you’re drawing an oval, rectangle or arrow and smooths out the shape.

You’ll note that straight lines are not supported. Ember also removes the ability to resize and fill objects and greatly restricts your options for colors and stroke width of objects. Further, the highlight and blur tools have been removed and, while text no longer has a bezel around, text formatting (font, size, style) has been removed. LittleSnapper’s callout feature is also gone.

Getting images out of Ember is as simple as before—just drag a thumbnail from the library to the Finder, a Mail message, etc.—and, if you use the Export feature, Ember adds an option to export as PDF. This replaces LittleSnapper’s more front-and-center Export Website to PDF command and extends the export format to any image. (Alas, the ability to resize an image upon export has been removed.)

Exporting is not your only option: while LittleSnapper only allowed you to publish to Flickr and FTP, Ember excels at sharing, adding options for Mail, Messages, Facebook, Twitter, CloudApp, and Tumbler. There’s also an option for sharing via iCloud, but I wasn’t able to test this (I believe) because I was using the trial version—only the Mac App Store version will work with iCloud. And AirDrop is supported, only not on my Mac.

Once again, where Ember giveth, Ember taketh away: FTP is not an option for sharing.

But an area where Ember steps beyond its predecessor is found in Subscriptions: online sources of inspiration that you can browse and select from for addition to your library. You can choose from the dozen or so recommended subscriptions or add your own (from RSS); whenever a subscription is updated, a notification is displayed and adding an image to you library is as simple as double-clicking.

For me, Ember is a disappointing update to an app I’ve used daily for quite some time. Although sharing options have been expanded and Subscriptions will be helpful for some, its annotation features have been stunted. Realmac has already released two feature updates, though, so I’m hopeful that annotating gets more powerful in the future. And I’m looking forward to using it with Ember for iOS, which was teased just yesterday.

An App Store Updates Bug 19 Sep 2013 8:41 AM (12 years ago)

It seems the App Store has a bug, something that I noticed first when I went to download an update to Daylite and then to Instacast. Neither of the apps was showing in Updates, even though an update had been released. And when I searched for the apps, both merely showed an “Open” button on their cards. However, tapping the card to review the listing revealed an “Update” button.

This doesn’t happen with every update, fortunately. Perhaps automatic downloading of updates will work around this, but users (like me) who have that setting disabled will have to rely upon other means to be notified of updates until this is fixed.

Instashare Adds Clipboard Transfer 12 Sep 2013 1:20 PM (12 years ago)

Last February, I reviewed Instashare, an app [Free ($1 in-app upgrade to remove ads), iOS; $3, OS X] for sharing files between your OS X and iOS devices. Although I didn’t find it to be a perfect app, I’ve been using it regularly over the last six months.

Since then, Two Man Show has continued to iterate and my two minor complaints have been addressed; I can drag from iPhoto to Instashare to transfer to another device and it’s now possible to transfer multiple files at once.

Today, the Mac version comes out of beta and it brings to the masses something beta testers have been playing with for the last few versions: clipboard transfer. Yes, you can now transfer clipboards between all your devices just as easily as you move files from one to the other. This is a boon for me, since I often want to get text from my iPhone onto my iPad; Pastebot, which I’ve used for ages, only works from OS X to iOS and vice versa.

(Although Pastebot is somewhat more versatile in clipboard transfer and includes additional text manipulation features, I’ll be retiring it today. Without iOS to iOS transfer it has become much less useful to me.)

Instashare still isn’t perfect. Preview within the iOS app doesn’t always work; the Mac app has no clipboard preview. And I’ll occasionally get a “Transfer was aborted…” error on iOS when I wasn’t transferring files. But I finally have the app I’ve been asking for for several years.

The Problem with Outsourcing Sites 6 Aug 2013 12:01 PM (12 years ago)

Anyone see a problem here? Need I say more?

Update 9/7/2013: Apparently I do. By “outsourcing sites” (without naming such sites) I mean sites where you go to outsource the work. Generally speaking, those looking to hire from those sites aren’t willing to pay for quality work, hence the project asking for a Drupal programmer at $10/hour.

Monitor an App's Internet Usage 5 Aug 2013 11:22 PM (12 years ago)

Every once in a while I want to watch how an app is connecting to the Internet from my Mac, but outside of using Little Snitch’s network monitor I’ve not been quite sure how to do that. Today I was introduced to lsof, a Terminal command to list open files. After reading the manual (man lsof) I found this syntax to work very well for me:

lsof -a -i -c Dropbox

The “-a” ANDs the next two options—without it, the following options would be ORed. “-i” restricts the output to Internet “files” and “-c” filters the output to apps those beginning with name. (I’m oversimplifying the explanation for this use case.)

The real utility in using this command is when you couple it with watch. You may need to install the watch command; once you’ve got it, use this syntax to have your Terminal window update periodically:

watch -n 0.5 lsof -a -i -c Dropbox

The “-n” tells watch how often to update; in the example above, it’s every half second. To cancel, tap ctl-C.

Daylite Content Moved 30 Jun 2013 8:43 PM (12 years ago)

Following my certification as a Daylite Partner, I have moved all of the content on this site related to Daylite to a new site. If you’ve been subscribing to this site’s feed or newsletter solely to keep up with my posts and articles about Daylite, let me encourage you to subscribe instead at the new site—I’ll be posting new Daylite content there only.

Thanks for reading.