Future Work

As far as the client is concerned, I wrote Balance for my own personal use, and I am now able to record the things about my life that I want to record--I am quite happy with the way it performs. Therefore I don't too many plans to enhance it, per se. However, if you try it for yourself and make modifications that increase its utility, I would love to hear about it.  Here are my immediate action items (should be available mid-May):

• Enhance the summary view so that it is possible to view day/week/month summaries with several different visualization options.
• Write a conduit that saves the contents of the Balance database to a text file on your PC.  This will make it possible to write more sophisticated visualization and analysis tools to examine personal information.
• Structure the code better, comment it, and release it as open-source.

That said, I think the concept of personal metrics is a fascinating area for further exploration. Ideally, Balance would be completely unobtrusive and would measure many other things in life aside from just time. How have I been spending my money? How many calories have I been consuming/burning? And so on. I think that when people are able to visualize these types of metrics for themselves that it will be a great aid to leading healthier, happier, more productive lives with less stress.

Home - FAQ - User Manual - Download & Install - Future Work - Feedback