TracksLife
TracksLife is the new web-based reminder system from Adam ‘WebJillion’ Howell – and as I had a spare ten minutes and sign-up was free, I thought I’d take a look and see whether it would be a useful addition to my GTD arsenal.
First impressions
Aside from the killer logo, to be honest my first impression was that it was 37signals with a teal background. In terms of look-and-feel, functionality, interface design and responsiveness, it reminded me of nothing more than Ta-da Lists, not that this is a bad thing by any means – I use Ta-da lists on a daily basis – but I know I’m not the only person who would like to see some more overt ‘design’ creeping into this kind of web-app.
That said, it is a very intuitive and easy-to-use application; I created an account and set up my ‘Track’ within a couple of minutes (tracking my progress with keeping fit and healthy – how many days I bike to work each week, and drinking no alcohol until Christmas), but after I had done that there was not much more to see. Like Ta-da lists, TracksLife is essentially a one-trick pony – but a very nice one to use at that.
The one niggly problem with it was the lack of user feedback; I had selected that one of my columns was for numbers, but I promptly forgot when I came to fill in the first entry. I happily typed in “Three”, hit the ‘Add’ button and… nothing happened. The row wasn’t added, but neither did I get a nice message to tell me what I had done wrong.
Either some sort of “you screwed up” message should be added, or numeric fields should only accept numeric input (pretty easy to achieve with Javascript) – no error messages is decidedly Web 1.0… ;)
Real-world applications
I think that perhaps my experience would be different if I had something more ‘countable’ to track; Adam’s site used to feature information on number of push-ups done each day, and I can see that having a central place to keep a running total of that sort of thing might be nice, instead of putting it into a spreadsheet or a textfile each night – which of course leads to the observation that TracksLife is missing a whole range of mathematical analysis tools to enable users to really track their lives.
The ability to Sum or average columns; splitting and summarising by week, month or date range; interactive graphs; combining columns for an overall view – all these features would make for a much more interactive (and fun!) application. As it is, I think the regular RSS pings to remind you to update your track are a really great idea, and perhaps something I could use to replace recurring tasks in Outlook, but otherwise I don’t see myself using TracksLife with nearly the frequency that I do other apps.
The thorny question of cost
TracksLife is free for one Track, but apart from that it costs.
- $3.99/month for 10 Tracks
- $5.99/month for 30 Tracks
- 10.99/month for 100 Tracks
It’s certainly not expensive by any means, but people will still balk at even the lowest cost (cf. Mint), particularly for a pretty small feature set – bear in mind that even at the lowest price, TracksLife is more expensive than Mint, assuming you use it for more than seven months.
Compare those prices with something like Backpack, which has a 5-page free option, and is only $9 per month for 100 pages and 200MB of disk space – and that’s for a multi-featured, multi-user application with file-sharing capabilities that can be used in a-million-and-one different scenarios; not a description that you can apply to TracksLife just yet.
Summary
TracksLife is an interesting idea with a lot of potential, and hopefully Adam can follow through on the 37signals-style with some of their rapid-deployment added extras, as – if not – I don’t think there will be too many that will find it justifies $50-150 per year to simply keep track of whether they remembered to brush their teeth or not. ;)
Update: Although I’d requested an email reminder every Friday at 5pm, no email materialised yesterday evening – there’s not much use in a reminder-based app if it doesn’t send out the reminders! I guess it could have been mislaid by the internet in general though, so I’ll see if any reminders turn up next week.
Adam has written up some notes on the first week of TracksLife, and it sounds as if he’s well on the way to fixing a lot of the launch niggles already – good stuff.
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Comments
- Matthew Pennell
- 1797 days ago
- Hi Adam, thanks for your reply – I look forward to seeing all the added extras in the future!
(PS: I know a lot of stuff isn’t working – all will come right in the Reboot!) - #2
A few answers:
1) Re:feedback—Working on that “lack of feedback” at this very moment. It’s only not working with numbers and it’ll be fixed as soon as possible because it’s definitely the biggest outright bug as of now.
2) Re:features—TracksLife will most certainly have “rapid-deployment added extras”—many of which you noticed lacking in this very post.
As you know web apps are by definition unfinished products, and TracksLife is in no way a “build it and done” kind of thing. There’s a very long list and it’s already being whittled down.
3) Re:price—Hopefully as extras are added the price will seem a little more justified to you.
Thanks again, glad it was self-explanatory to setup and use and I can assure you it won’t be a one trick pony!
**BTW, live preview doesn’t seem to be working and the form tabindexes are off as well