I am excited to announce that Habits, my latest Pebble Timeline app has been released!
Habits is the evolution of 8-A-Day, designed to help you start and maintain (good) habits through the Pebble Timeline. It supports three different habit frequencies (weekly, daily, and hourly) which you can fully customize to suit your habits and schedule.
As you complete your weekly and daily habits, your success streaks will be incremented, encouraging you to continue working on your habits. Likewise, your hourly habits will provide a summary of how many times you completed the habit throughout your day. If you often miss habit notifications, you can enable extra reminders to provide a bit of extra encouragement to help you get into your habit.
The idea for Habits was originally proposed to me by Katherine and Aaron from Pebble, as a way to build on what I’d started with 8-A-Day, to allow allow you to track more than just drinking water throughout the day in the Timeline. I thought it was a great idea, so I dove headlong into it, and now, a few months later, Habits exists!
There were a lot of challenges that I had to figure out when building Habits – mainly around handling timezones and time manipulation. Luckily for me, Laravel’s Lumen made building a lot of the backend app a piece of cake, and Carbon was a real help with time manipulation – not to mention my PinPusher library made sending pins simple.
Habits has turned out better than I expected – but don’t just take my word for it:
@valorin @Pebble @PebbleUsers been using the Beta … It’s awesome seriously has helped me remember to take my meds… No joke
— Amandla Africa (@MooreAfrica) November 12, 2015
I owe a huge thank you to Katherine McAuliffe and Aaron Cannon from Pebble, for encouraging me to build Habits – and for testing it. Especially Kat, who put up with a lot of back-and-forth at the Pebble Developer Retreat as I fixed the various iOS bugs. Also to Harel on the Pebble design team, who made the awesome banner image above!
One of these days I’ll actually post those “building a Pebble app” posts I keep talking about… so stay tuned! I promise to wite them! One day… 🙂