Hey everyone, about a year and a half ago, I posted some information about a personal tracking app that I was hoping to find beta testers for. Although I can’t seem to find the original post, I’m happy to announce that the first version of Quantime is now available on the Apple app store for iOS 7+.
It’s an agnostic, quick-to-use personal tracker that I’m hoping will fill in some of the cracks in the personal tracking space (and to alleviate the need for Google forms), and will soon develop into much more.
I’ve written a blog post outlining my motivations for the app here: http://bit.ly/1eKYQ17
Looks nice. The API would only let apps installed on the same device work access the data, correct?
It’s true that most services either don’t have APIs, or in some cases require a partnership agreement for access to the API. But Fitbit and Jawbone are two services that happen to have open APIs.
The current version has no sync—all the data is located on your device—so in its current state, there’s no sync at all. I’m currently working on user registration for data sync, and the API will come along with that. The data aggregation from outside devices will therefore happen on our servers first, and then afterwards be synced to your phone. This will allow you to access your data on any device you have Quantime installed—and hopefully on the web and on Android in the future.
I know that a lot of devices do have open APIs, I was just speaking from my experience trying to integrate Fitbit with Quantime—I had to special request granular data, and I was only allowed it after I explained how I was going to use it. I just find that frustrating and think that if you create the data, you should have access to it—not in an abridged, summarized form, but the full extent of your logged information.
Most of the open APIs I hope to integrate myself, or with the help of the open source community. The call to action was more—as you mentioned—for those who either don’t have API access or that require jumping through hoops to get access to your data.
By the way, thanks for the follow on Twitter. I’ve been following Zenobase for a while—you’ve got some great stuff on the back-end, and your data visualization and analysis is wonderful, it’s just the tracking didn’t exactly seem optimal—and I think that’s a big barrier to entry. I’d love to talk more about your experiences, maybe we can do something together in the future.
Zenobase is still missing a general-purpose mobile data entry app. There is an API that app builders can use to let their users save data to a Zenobase account for visualizing and for correlating with data from other sources like Fitbit, see e.g. this app.
If you are going to set up your own server and provide a Web API for Quantime, I might be interested in supporting that in Zenobase as another data source.
