After eleven months, TrackLab has reached 1.0.0. The whole app has been redesigned, and it finally explains itself — there’s a user guide inside, in English and Russian. I also ran my first real experiment on myself: a month of daily stretching, 33 cm → 26 cm, which taught me as much about what’s wrong with TrackLab as about my hamstrings. Below: what’s in the release, what that experiment exposed, and what comes next.
What’s new
Two things dominate this release.
Redesign. The whole app went through it — dashboard, lists, forms, navigation. Version 0.x looked like what it was: something built feature by feature, each screen solving its own problem in its own way. 1.0.0 looks like one app.
Documentation. TrackLab now explains itself. There’s a user guide inside the app (Settings → Help → User Guide), in English and Russian, covering activities, entities and experiments. New installs get a welcome message pointing at it. This was the honest gap in 0.x: experiments are the most interesting part of the app and also the hardest to start using — you create an action, then a metric, then rules, and only then does an experiment make sense. That’s a lot to work out on your own.
Also in this release:
- Rules can have an end date
- Metrics and items can be referenced by multiple entities
- Various fixes throughout
What I learned running my own experiment
I used TrackLab on myself. The experiment was stretching, 5–10 minutes a day, two exercises:
- Lying hamstring stretch — 3×20–30 seconds each leg
- Wall hip hinge drill — 2×10–15 reps
The metric was the gap between my fingertips and the floor: stand up straight, feet together, bend forward without bending the knees, measure how much distance is left. One number, measured the same way every time, no equipment. Not a perfect measure of flexibility, but a completely unambiguous one — which matters more when you’re the one recording it.
It worked. 33 cm → 26 cm in a month.
What’s more useful is what went wrong with the tracking. Twice I did the exercises for three or four days without logging anything, then sat down and entered it all at once. Not because I forgot the app existed — because logging was more work than it needed to be.
Two specific frictions:
Every entry wanted a start and end time. For stretching, the time of day is irrelevant. I did it, that’s the whole fact. Being asked when, every single time, for information I don’t care about, is a small cost paid on every entry — and small costs paid every time are the ones that end habits.
Logging several days meant repeating myself. Four days of stretching is one fact — “I stretched from July 17th to the 20th” — but it took four identical entries to record it.
So: TrackLab should let an action be logged without a time when the time doesn’t matter, and should let one entry cover a period instead of a day. Both are on the list.
What’s next
The site is getting rebuilt. This blog and everything else is moving off WordPress onto something I actually enjoy working in, and it’ll become the home for all my future projects — including a proper page for TrackLab and a web version you can try without installing anything.
After that, 2.0. I won’t promise details yet, but the direction: a visual picture of your own progress over time, optional online storage, sharing experiments with other people, and analysis that tells you something you didn’t already know about your own data. The app stays offline-first and free of accounts — anything online will be optional and stay that way.
One request
If you’ve used TrackLab, I’d like to hear from you — what you tracked, what annoyed you, what you expected to find and didn’t. Even one line is useful. Bug reports especially.
I’ve been building this mostly in the dark, and it would be good to know someone’s out there.