After a cou­ple of days and one fran­tic family-free morn­ing, Daily Promise is get­ting near com­ple­tion. Here’s what’s new since last time.

(This is post num­ber 3 in my series on the devel­op­ment of Daily Promise. The oth­ers are here: Design Sketches, Com­ing Together.)

Friends Page

Here’s the Friends page — again, almost no devi­a­tion from the orig­i­nal design sketch. The friends page pulls in the list of peo­ple that you fol­low on Twit­ter, matches it up against Daily Promise’s user list, and if any match, they’re your Daily Promise friends! They’re sim­ply dis­played in alpha­bet­i­cal order, along with a sum­mary of their per­for­mance. Invis­i­ble users (see later) don’t appear, even to their friends.

Nicer User Pages

Click­ing on one of your friends takes you through to their ‘view’ page (minus any edit­ing func­tion­al­ity). It also shows you their Twit­ter bio, and how long they’ve been using Daily Promise.

Top Users Widget

There’s now a “top users this week” wid­get on the home page, show­ing the per­for­mance of the top 5 users. This resets at mid­night on Mon­day morning.

Spam your Friends!

Twit­ter inte­gra­tion now includes boxes sug­gest­ing Tweets you might like to make after each sig­nif­i­cant activ­ity. Just as promised in the “How does it work” graphic, Daily Promise never posts to your Twit­ter account with­out you delib­er­ately click­ing a “Tweet” but­ton each and every time. Do no evil™!

Behind the Scenes

A lot of other stuff has changed in the last few days that isn’t imme­di­ately obvi­ous to users:

• Authen­ti­ca­tion fixed — users using the alter­na­tive login weren’t able to do Twit­ter things. That’s sorted.
• Account vis­i­bil­ity — your account can now be set to invis­i­ble, mean­ing it won’t appear any­where — top users, friends lists, etc. New accounts are given a prompt to set their vis­i­bil­ity before start­ing to add promises.
• Account dele­tion sim­pli­fied — you now only have one, nuclear, option for account dele­tion. It erases all traces of you hav­ing used the site. Do no evil™! :)
• Removed promises no longer shown in the his­tory table — ‘cos no-one likes to be reminded.
• Fill in data for yes­ter­day — when cre­at­ing a promise, users can opt to enter data for yes­ter­day, giv­ing them some­thing to fill in straight away.
• His­tory table scrolls — nar­row dis­plays can’t fit the whole his­tory table in, so now it scrolls (in rea­son­ably mod­ern browsers).
• Time zones imple­mented — we pull the time­zone you have set in Twit­ter, so Daily Promise will roll over to a new day at your local midnight.
• Crontas­tic! — we now update stats and things from an hourly timed cron, to avoid extra load­ing on user-requested pages.

Next Steps

This all brings me to the slightly wor­ry­ing con­clu­sion that Daily Promise is damn near fin­ished. So, where do we go from here? I’ll have a few more days of bug-fixing and imple­ment­ing fea­tures that peo­ple request, and then it’s dif­fi­cult deci­sion time:

This has been a fun project for the last week or so — does it deserve a domain and adver­tis­ing, or shall I let it qui­etly die?

Despite the lack of response to my ear­lier post, in which I floated my design con­cepts for “Daily Promise”, bore­dom won out in the end and I started cod­ing anyway.

It’s now com­ing together, and all bar the Twitter-integrated social aspects are largely com­plete. Here’s how it’s developed:

Home Page

The social side — top users, etc. — still isn’t imple­mented, but there’s a reasonable-looking home­page in there. The main body is taken up with a short descrip­tion and a big graphic explain­ing how the site works. Side-bar wid­gets pro­vide the Twit­ter login and alter­na­tive login (bypass­ing twitter.com). The site now has a proper name, Daily Promise, and with it a logo and style that is reflected throughout.

Set Up Goals (“Manage”)

The “Man­age” page has remained almost exactly faith­ful to the design. New promises can be cre­ated, old ones deac­ti­vated and deac­ti­vated ones can be acti­vated again. A Tweet box appears for the user to announce their new promise, if desired.

Daily Per­for­mance (“Enter”)

Again, there’s not a lot of dif­fer­ence here between the design and the real­ity. Each promise has a yes/no choice, and after com­plet­ing a day’s entries, Tweet boxes appear for the user to let their friends know about their suc­cesses and fail­ures. “Win­ning streaks” aren’t yet implemented.

Per­for­mance Log (“View”)

There’s no abil­ity to scroll through your his­tory yet, but the default dis­play shows 4 weeks (which scroll if nec­es­sary). Just as in the design draw­ings, the his­tory table is fol­lowed by a text sum­mary of how the user is doing.

The “View” page also, with a few addi­tions, becomes a user’s pro­file page, which is acces­si­ble to other users.

Con­fig­u­ra­tion

Here you can set your pass­word for the alter­na­tive login, and delete your account. It’s exactly as dull as it sounds.

Friends

That’s my big job for the next few days! It doesn’t exist yet, but it’s now my top priority.

Cur­rent flavour of the month of some of the geek crowd, “Health Month”, is a social net­work of sorts on which users com­pete to achieve cer­tain health-related goals. Each month, each mem­ber sets a num­ber of goals for them­selves to achieve. Its core mechanic is health points — you start with 10, lose one every time you fail to meet a goal, and play­ers who per­form well can heal you.

I’m enjoy­ing my use of the site with three goals this month, but I’d like to step it up and set lots. Unfor­tu­nately, hav­ing more than three goals costs money. (Not that I think the site’s own­ers don’t have a right to charge, but it can be a deter­rent to users such as myself.) It also cur­rently only allows two “cus­tom” rules per month — beyond that, you have to stick with the pre-defined ones.

Another social health site is Tweet What You Eat, on which users tweet their food intake and have the site, or the com­mu­nity, cal­cu­late sta­tis­tics such as their calo­rie intake.

Over my lunch hour, I’ve come up with some sketches for a site that sits some­where between the two. It takes Health Month’s goals mechanic, opens it up and removes some of the social aspects that in my opin­ion Health Month doesn’t imple­ment all that well. It also drifts closer to Tweet What You Eat, in that rather than being its own ser­vice it pig­gy­backs of Twit­ter for its social side.

At the moment this is just a fun con­cept I’m toy­ing with — I don’t really have the time to make it at the moment, I doubt the space between Health Month and Tweet What You Eat is wide enough to make a new site pop­u­lar, and I feel a lit­tle guilty about thank­ing Health Month for the enjoy­ment I’ve had by becom­ing its competitor.

In the notes below it’s dubbed healthi.ly, though as that domain is parked, it’s come to be known as “Daily Promise” instead.

Home Page

The home page would largely be a “log in / reg­is­ter” affair, pos­si­bly also show­cas­ing suc­cess­ful and pop­u­lar users in a side-bar (not shown). Big ban­ner text explains the rough con­cept, with a “read more” link to a full “About” page. On the reg­is­tra­tion side, we make it clear exactly what Daily Promise does and doesn’t do with access to your Twit­ter account.

Set Up Goals

The main setup page is where you set your goals. Users can set any (rea­son­able) num­ber of goals, they can drop and res­ur­rect old ones, and add new ones, at any time. Per­for­mance against all the goals is tracked and vis­i­ble on this page. Adding new goals and drop­ping old ones can be tweeted, but as with every tweet oppor­tu­nity, the user is pre­sented with an @Anywhere box that they can freely edit and can choose not to tweet as eas­ily as they can choose to tweet. The tweet links to the list of goals on their profile.

Daily Per­for­mance

Once goals are set, the user logs in each day (and can fill in past gaps) with whether or not they have met each goal. Each day’s entry presents some brief sta­tis­tics, and you get more stats on the week after fill­ing in Sunday’s per­for­mance. Very good or very bad per­for­mance sug­gests a Tweet that a user might like to make. The tweet links to their per­for­mance log on their profile.

Per­for­mance Log

This is a user’s main screen. It dis­plays a chart of passes and fails for the last month or so as green (pass), red (fail) or grey (goal not active) squares. Below the chart, more detailed stats are pre­sented, as well as an encour­ag­ing text sum­mary of how the user is doing.

Set­tings

Most of the core set­tings such as user­name, dis­play name, avatar and bio are han­dled by Twit­ter. Daily Promise’s set­tings prob­a­bly boil down to pri­vacy (stop me being search­able, delete my account, etc.) and remov­ing annoy­ances (always tweet on con­di­tion x, never tweet on con­di­tion y, etc. — all of which have an “ask me” set­ting by default).

Friends

The user’s “fol­low­ing” list from Twit­ter is used to gen­er­ate their list of Daily Promise friends. Avatars, user­names and Daily Promise per­for­mance sum­maries are dis­played here. Click­ing through to a user’s pro­file shows the “per­for­mance log” page, topped with name / avatar / bio / etc.

So, and inter­est­ing idea, or an appalling one? Would you use this? Should I get off my arse and code? Should I have fin­ished the last six things I started before pro­to­typ­ing some­thing new? Your thoughts are, as always, appreciated.