Rumor had it, Apple was going to add native sleep tracking to Apple Watch. In 2019. That summer, I began work to add sleep data analysis to RECaf, a feature I had wanted since I conceived of the app. The timing seemed right. If Apple were going to be adding sleep tracking to Apple Watch as a first-party feature, I wanted to be right there, ready to take advantage of that sleep data as soon as Apple started its marketing. Scientifically, it’s pretty well established that caffeine has some…

There is a concept in user interface design called the Principle of Least Surprise, where you want to design systems in such a way that they surprise their users least. I think a similar concept applies to subscription pricing. The ideal (from a user friendliness perspective, not best business perspective) system for customer subscriptions should never surprise the customer with a charge. The customer should always be happy to see a charge appear on their credit card. In other words, their subscription payments should always be Intentional.via David Smith…

RECaf 1.6 For a while now, I’ve noticed RECaf users had a very different approach than I intended of logging an item from earlier in the day, or from the day before. The frequents list on the front panel of RECaf is great for one-tap access to your most frequent sources. But logging that way always records the current time and date. If you want to customize the date to say, this morning, my intention was for people to go through the custom logging process. (Push down the…

My driving principal while designing RECaf was to make the app “thumb-able.” That is, I wanted to be able to do as many tasks as possible with the phone in one hand, gesturing only with my thumb. This is getting harder with every new iPhone generation. Years ago, Jeff Hawkins, creator of the original Palm Pilot and then CEO of Handspring, commented on the one-hand-ability of the Treo line of smart phones. He was getting asked frequently why Handspring had adopted plastic RIM-style keyboards on its phones, rather than relying…

One common argument I hear from the Apple community against subscriptions is that most customers don’t know how to manage their subscription settings. It’s difficult, they say, to explain in a customer support interaction how a customer can cancel or alter a subscription. And because customers are confused about how to cancel or manage subscriptions, many customers may be afraid to start an auto-renewing subscription in the first place. These are fair points. I definitely agree Apple could do a better job of exposing subscription management settings in…