For me, it has served a similar purpose to the dashboard in a car or plane. This latest design also slightly reflects that visually.

When you're driving a car, you're not staring at the speedometer, or constantly checking the gas meter, but they're still useful tools. Especially when things start to go wrong. If you're almost out of gas or in the redline, then it becomes much more useful.

The other thing to note is that this isn't finished. The new structure — splitting things up by brain, heart, core, fitness, travel — is something we designed to grow into. There are tons of new data points we want to add, which will hopefully improve the actionability. Maybe you already have a sense of how much you've walked today and the step counter may not seem that exciting, but that same logic doesn't apply for things like Vitamin D or Glucose, where having good visibility and software is much more valuable.

Each of the various sections has already had pretty significant effects on me as we've been building this. They are mostly very svbtle changes, like trying to walk more every day instead of taking Ubers after seeing how low my steps were, or realizing how much time during the day I was spending on Twitter after seeing that in the graph, or seeing how much weight I had gained in just a couple weeks and switching to ordering food from Sprig instead of Caviar. Seeing the map of where I went last month has led me to venture out of SOMA more and mix up my routine, which also improves some of the other sections. Theoretically I could've realized and done all those things without seeing any of the data, but it is unlikely.

Some things like heart rate I haven't really done anything about, but it is cool to just see it automatically come in every day. The lowest and resting heart rates are quite variable and seem to be much lower around days when I exercise properly, so that would be a fun thing to try to optimize for and some people have used it that way. My blood pressure also seems to be high, which I haven't really done anything about lately, but having that alert constantly there keeps it on my todo list.

One of my university professors always said: "No metrics, no movement."

The opportunity to add value is by intersecting the metrics. As a software engineer who likes to work in cafes, I'd like to know at which cafe I have the highest commit frequency. As a coffee drinker, I'd like to know at which cafe my resting heart rate is the highest (strongest cup!)

Agreed. This is the problem with pretty much all "health trackers": how actionable are the data and visualization? Yes, you need to measure stuff to improve it, but still, a step counter is like a website hit counter and has little actionable value in and of itself.

I agree that the quantified self movement needs to do more work on tying data to motivation. In many cases, it's too easy to just look at the data but not act on it.

That being said, I do think that having the data is a prerequisite for improving. The times where I've tracked my food intake, I've inevitably eaten healthier, partially but just knowing how much i'm actually eating.

> If anything, folks I've seen using Fitbit/FuelBand could use a bit more exercise and a better diet. People tracking their sleep activity tend to stay late and have poor sleeping habits (for example).

I strongly suspect that's correlation, not causation. Of course the people who need to lose weight are the ones more likely to buy a Fitbit.

I think it's really interesting to see the divide between visualisations and "actionable insights" in the discussion here. I'm definitely more about the latter, which has been my focus when building Exist[1] — which you could say is an uglier AprilZero/Gyroscope. AprilZero looks like a magical movie interface (and I feel like Anand has said he was inspired by this sort of thing before). In contrast it's definitely obvious I'm not a designer! So while Exist aggregates a lot of the same sort of services, it's much more about trying to make it work for you — we track rolling averages for all your data points, find simple insights each day (best/worst steps for x days) and automatically correlate everything against everything else to find interesting relations. Correlation != causation, of course, but seeing things like "Your weight is higher after you check into Little Greek Souvlaki" (a genuine result of mine) feels sort of like magic to me, even though with some thought I probably could've figured that out on my own.

Where we still have a way to go is tracking things at a smaller than day-level granularity — I really want to find relations between things that happen around the same time, like checking in to a specific place vs productivity levels, but that level of smarts is still a fair way off I think. Plus the "actionable" part of "actionable insights" is a whole can of worms in terms of computers telling people what to do.

All the same, exciting times.

[1] https://exist.io

There is the old ops saying of "whatever gets measured, gets managed" and from my experience that is still very true. I'm not saying it's the best idea to "manage" all aspects of our lives but if you want to stay healthy and have a hard time implementing new beneficial habits, comprehensive monitoring might make the difference.

I've always hated running (last one on the tracks in high school, always) often trying but failing to pick up the habit later on during my 20s but only since the first mobile running apps came about I've been running regularly and enjoying it (I still remember my first "runner's high" I had in 2011!). That said I'm one of those old-school arcade gamers who enjoy hi-score hunting so gamification was a huge driver for me personally, people are different - do whatever "floats your boat" :)

There is just one problem I have with the whole "quantified self" (as well as IoT btw) movement which is the fact that the internet is quasi broken, you don't want to "get managed" by any third party - be it your government, insurance company or anyone secretly observing you really.

Things we therefore should be focusing on: down-to-earth complex systems design, cryptography, operating system security, etc.

In general we need to be mindful of the cultural as well as technical details of the systems we've inherited and by knowing and understanding - essentially our history - we should strive for building on top of those systems, making them more secure while still staying true to their original idealistic designs (this still includes probably many more rewrites than we care to face at this time).

I don't make my data available to the public like this, but I've gotten a lot of value out of having detailed data to look at from my day.

For instance, I use RescueTime to measure my productivity, Misfit to count my steps and measure the amount of movement I have throughout the night while sleeping, Spotify + last.fm scrobbling to capture my music listening habits, and a simple csv stored in Dropbox to track my caffeine intake (0 calorie energy drinks and coffee, mostly) and another to track medication intake and yet another to track water intake (in 8 oz increments) and one more to track alcohol consumption (usually measured in glasses of wine or 12 oz bottles of beer, but sometimes shots :P ). I used to track my mood periodically throughout the day, but this was of pretty limited usefulness, so I stopped.

What can I learn from this?

- One energy drink increases my productivity by about 20% as measured by RescueTime over the span of around 3.5 hours. - Working from a coworking space rather than my home office increases my productivity by approximately 25%. - If I consume any caffeine after 3:30pm or so, or more than one glass of one or more than two beers after 9pm, my quality of sleep suffers (evidenced by greater movement throughout the night and not feeling as rested the following morning). - If I walk more than 10,000 steps in a day, I generally sleep better (~10% less movement). - If I drink less than five 8oz cups of water throughout the day, my productivity and mood are lessened. - If I drink greater than ten 8oz cups of water throughout the night, I'm much more likely to wake at around 3am to go to the bathroom, which causes general grogginess through the first half of the following day. - Listening to music with lyrics before ~1pm decreases my productivity by around 15% (instrumental/atmospheric rock before 1pm with BPM greater than 100 increases my productivity by about 5%).

These may seem like inconsequential things, but I'd have never realized those things about myself without the data to back it up (or at least, it would have taken a long while and a good memory).

More importantly, let's say you're trying to lose weight. Without some way of quantifying your current state, it's impossible to know that you're making progress. That's why we have bathroom scales. Does it not then follow that if you're trying to increase the amount of activity you get throughout your day or be more productive or really anything, you need to be able to measure it?

I second this. I absolutely love the visuals, this style is pretty much what I dreamed of eventually building for myself if I ever had some spare time. But I'm also concerned with the fact that it's optimized for looks, not for utility, and I want to make a general observation about the current Quantified Self / fitness trends.

What I've noticed about them is that products are optimized to look pretty, not to be useful. Those two things are related, but it matters which you optimize for. Depending on which one you care about, you make different choices about e.g. visualization tools you use. To pick on AprilZero, since it's the topic of this thread, what I see on the site are:

- Charts without scales (or with very impoverished ones) - you can't read too many interesting things from them, whether about time or value of measured parameters. There's data loss.

- Gauge charts, which are cousins of a pie chart, i.e. the thing you use when you care about how nice something looks, as opposed to actually making it useful for learning something from the data.

- The weight chart that seems to be doing exactly the opposite of what it should; splines look pretty, but what you want to aim for is a rolling average, which acts as a low-pass filter, eliminating noise from measurements and revealing your weight trend. See how the line leads the data points? It should be lagging behind them. For an example of what I mean, see [0].

- Just data, lack of any attempt to infer a course of action based on it.

Again, the visual are absolutely stunning and I applaud the work. But now that we've figured out how to make data pretty, we need to focus on how to make it useful. For that, we need to start doing the hard work - understanding what choices we do have and how the data can tell us which decisions to make.

For instance, I could track my weight and things I eat, and draw pretty lines of macronutrients over time, etc. but what I really want to have is something that'll dynamically rebalance my diet to keep them at optimal levels. I want the software to tell me to eat X or Y for breakfast. And if I feel like eating something entirely different, to have it readjust on the fly. I ate too much fat today, so the suggestions for tomorrow will have less fat. An iterated version of this program could plan stuff in advance and generate me a shopping list, etc. You can probably imagine more possible improvements.

But note how in the example above, it turned out that I need exactly zero charts. The input I provide is measurements, but the output I care about is right decisions. Sure, I may like (or need, for something else) to look at the measurement data presented in a nice, visual form. Until my imaginary software is good enough, I might actually need to. But you can see how the focus shifts from just having a line chart to having a representation that will be useful to make decisions.

TL;DR: charts and dashboards are means to an end, not end in itself.

[0] - http://imgur.com/YcXK5af - it's a screenshot of a graph I made for myself when I went on diet a few years back; the blue line connects the actual samples, the green one is a rolling average with 7-sample window. Note how the green line lags behind the blue and how it filters out noise. Incidentally, this is exactly why the common advice given to people is to weigh yourself once a week, and not daily - because it's simpler to tell them that than to teach them about rolling averages and low-pass filters.

Why does it need to be actionable? Are metrics and stats in games actionable? No, but they are interesting nevertheless.

Say 10 people all die on the same day, all showing the same unusual markings/indicators, well maybe if they were using this tool the authrorities could get and correlate the data to discover all of them drank a specific coffee that's new on the market which triggers a reaction only when heart rates are highly elevated within a small time frame afterwards and exposed to lots of sunlight - far fetched I know, but only when you have an abundance of such data can you hope to discover such circumstances.

Of course privacy concerns will always be there, but I for one am ok with judicious use of data to further such advancements.

As a Pole living in San Francisco I don't even know if I should be proud or ashamed, but you're totally right :)

This will be my new go to sentence to describe hip/trendy things.

Talking about site itself, design looks stunning and impressive - lots of work in it. But as tool itself, I do not see much value in it.

I have scales at home to measure my weight, and sports watch to track exercises. Also whole tracking is way too detail. I can see my health trends in no less than a week, but usually in a time scale of months.

Also this tracking sucks my time, attention, etc., and it probably won't tell anything if I have some scary illness growing inside me until I can tell it myself, without any tracking.

Finally, most of devices used have accuracy problems, if you want to track your heart rate in detail you must use a chest band, not a wrist one.

All in all it's just a very very cool toy. It needs too much attention from user. Too many devices to manage/charge/connect/wear, etc.

I love the 'Hollywood' look as well, and a recent hobby of mine has been to recreate some of my favorite ones for the web. It has been a great learning experience.

Tron Legacy: http://www.robscanlon.com/encom-boardroom/

Guardians of the Galaxy: http://www.robscanlon.com/about/

Wargames: http://www.robscanlon.com/github-wargames/

It's interesting how certain techniques seem to come up over and over again... like they almost always use complex intro/exit animations for every element and additive blending over dark backdrops.

When v1 got posted (about a year ago?) one of Anand's (the creator) roommates chimed in on HN, saying that they had watched Iron Man together and that Anand had been taking notes on the UI/UX the whole time which he incorporated into his design. I imagine you'd be able to find more movie inspiration in the design if you look closely.

Here's some more info on the creation: https://blog.gyrosco.pe/the-making-of-april-zero-877612ca3d2...

I have been thinking about this too. I agree that time is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to measuring efficiency. Do you think measuring how many to do list items someone completes would be a better metric?

I'm pretty sure it was this. April Zero has hit the front page of HN before.

Thanks! This is actually already available, and a demo of our new Gyroscope Pro offering, which is $7 a month and includes things like this new theme, custom domain name support (which is how I have it going to aprilzero.com), our healthkit iPhone app to power it, etc. Check it out at https://gyrosco.pe/

We want to build this as something that anyone can just go and sign up for and start using. I would love to get more athletes using this. We recently released a running app powered by the Gyroscope data — (see gyro.run) — and it's been really exciting to see people use it to share marathons, training, etc. We still don't have a good solution for things like gym training, which are hard to passively track, but that's something we're definitely thinking about.

Haven't signed up, but https://gyrosco.pe/features/helix/ indicates there's a "Pro" version.

Based on my quick poking around, there doesn't seem to be any special framework. It just looks like jQuery and manual DOM manipulation for the most part, with the code organized around a typical OO design.

iPhones for the past few years have actually been tracking steps and other data in the background & storing it in Healthkit. You won't be able to get heart rate, but a lot of our views can be powered with just software.

Our new healthkit app (gyrosco.pe/app, currently in beta) loads steps from the iPhone, and we also integrate with other apps like Moves which also run on the phone.

The idea is you can get started within just a few minutes and not need to buy anything. We can also backfill the last year of data so you don't start with an empty site. Then you can start to add hardware to get more data you care about, like a wifi scale or heart rate monitor.

There are many other apps that also write to healthkit, like sleep tracking apps Sleep++ / Sleep Cycle, which will then show up.

Well, it's clearly not aimed at privacy-oriented people.

But, you imply that's a tiny minority -- I take exception to that viewpoint. Many 'non-tech' types I talk to have a strong aversion to the idea of this sort of information going out broadly because they rightly believe they don't understand the ins and outs. So, the target market may grow quite a lot with a clear and understandable privacy story.

Well, in my case, I deleted my facebook a few years ago, so you actually did lose me, not just as part of some public stand.

I think it's interesting you're publishing your data, and I'm glad you're happy with what you're publishing -- it totally makes sense. User-defined privacy is an awesome thing.

It remains my proposal that you consider actually cutting off your own access to customer data unless they decide to publish it, essentially extending that ability you have while in control of the system to your customers. I think you can see from some of the comments in this chain that people aren't so trusting as you feel you deserve.

And, of course, if someday you or the company needs the revenue, then it might be nice to have already, when not under duress, made a not easily-revocable decision about the ways you'll choose to monetize user data. Or, obviously, it might hamstring your plans.

> We've already gotten a few dozen upgrades today, which is really exciting and lets me confidently say things like "we will never sell your data".

This wording makes it seem like that data sale starts as soon as your revenue stops making you happy

Your software interests me and I would like to try it. However, I am not a Facebook user and don't plan on being one. For me, it's a pity that it is tied to Facebook.