HabitMaster: Alpha release

HabitMaster is now live in the wild. You can see the new one-page HabitMaster project site that links to everything else you might want to see, including a running Heroku instance.

Overall, this deadline has been met with limited success. I'm calling this an alpha release because the HabitMaster achievements (in other words, the actual gamification parts!) are still unimplemented. It means HabitMaster is just a basic habit tracker right now, and still a little rough around the edges at that.

This has mostly been due to just slow progress. According to my time tracker, I averaged around 8 hours a week on ICS691 projects for most the semester. I stepped that up to averaging around 12 hours a week for the past month, but I still don't appear to have much to show for it. Yet it seems all of my implementation projects go this way: I continue to underestimate just how much code is required to do things.

I spent most of my time implementing back-end details, such as streak detection given a list of activities and a particular schedule type. I was excited to use a Python generator (basically a fancy iterator) to good effect there.

I also came up with a workable solution to handling polymorphism in database objects. Specifically, my habits link to a Schedule object, but there are two subtypes of Schedule: DaysOfWeekSchedule and IntervalSchedule. Grabbing habit.schedule would give me a row from the Schedule table, which was fairly useless. I ended up adding a cast() method to Schedule that would resolve that instance to the proper subtype for me.

Django's unittest framework was very handy. I didn't get into the UI unit tests that actually let you test requests and responses, though. I would like to explore that more. I'm still impressed with Django and its documentation.

I picked up more HTML5 tags, which has been enjoyable. I dig all the semantic tags they have now. Twitter Bootstrap and CSS design in general was a time drain, though. There was a lot of fidgeting required to get everything laid out right. I'm still a lousy graphical designer. CSS still trips me up on things that seem like they should be easy, such as define a DIV of a given relative width and then align a couple items to the left and one or two to the right within that DIV. And then have them all play nicely as the window resizes. I will say that Bootstrap helped compared to trying to do this from scratch in CSS, though.

GitHub (and to a lesser extent Heroku) has been an increasing pleasure to use. I put GitHub Pages and GitHub's wiki, issues, and milestone features to work on this project. I code alone so often that I've developed some lazy git practices, though. The main one is that my commits are based on work-session rather than issue. It doesn't affect anyone else, but it means I often commit things half-done or in a broken state. That is going to come back to haunt me if I ever have to rollback to a previous verison. I also have a lot yet to learn about merging and pulling with git. I ran into a bit of that while I was editing on Windows, Linux, and through the GitHub web interface today.

As you can probably tell, I enjoyed all the technical learning this project has afforded me.

Regarding the gamification aspects, I have this lesson to share: It takes a lot of time. Any gamification mechanics will be in addition to implementing the underlying service you want to provide. The gamification needs to be well-thought out, too. If possible, leveraging an existing framework could help cut down on that time... though it means you'll need to spend the time learning the framework and then being bound by its limitations.

The other thing that HabitMaster has clarified for me is the difference between gamification and a serious game. I see HabitMaster as an example of the former but not of the latter. To me, gamification means being inspired in your design by the fun and rewarding engagement we find in games--even when you're designing something that is clearly not a game. Because it's not a game, you can't just paste game mechanics onto your service. You need to think about the experience you're going for... which brings us to deeper concepts like mastery, autonomy, meaning, flow, engagement, reward, and the like. A serious game, on the other hand, is when you take something that is clearly a game and try to graft non-game goals or outcomes on to it.

HabitMaster will likely be dormant for a little while as I finish up some other pressing projects, but I do hope to resume development when I get some time. I'll also be starting a new teaching job in July. I wonder if I might bring some gamification to bear on course design there.

HabitMaster Progress

This past week or so I've been implementing my previously-mentioned Habit Master design.

So far, things are going slowly but smoothly. I decided to divide my design into three apps: habits, users, and rewards. I first defined the habit and schedule models, some unit tests for them, and got them setup for admin view access. I also defined a User model before I realized it would be a much better idea to reuse Django's existing auth system for that. I still have a users app as a good place to put the views and page templates associated with account creation, login, and logout. I learned more about how templates work, so I have a base page template I'm inheriting from. I've also sorted out how static files work for things like style sheets and html5shiv.js. I'll eventually get Twitter Bootstrap into that mix too, but I'm focusing on functionality first.

There have been no major obstacles or bugs so far (knock wood). It's just been slow due to the general learning curve. Though I feel like I had a comfortable conceptual overview thanks to earlier exercises this semester, I still had to skim through the tutorial again as I completed each step for this project. I've also been diving deeper into the Django documentation for things like the auth system, view decorators (a bit like Java annotations), and request object details. I think Django could have provided more built-in help with my login form, but I haven't dug into that yet. Overall, I still like Django and its documentation.

I've been reading the HTML 5 spec to pick up some of the many new tags and throw them into the mix too.

There have also been a few toolchain improvements along the way. For example, I learned that git add . doesn't remove deleted files from the repository. To handle this, I learned more about git add -u, which will update all modified and deleted files but not stage any new additions, and git add -A, which will properly stage all changes. I've also been improving my virtualbox linux environment. For example, I found that KDE's Kate editor does allow to keyboard binding customization after all: you just have to go to Settings -> Configure Shortcuts... instead of Settings -> Configure Kate... to find them.

Hopefully things continue to go well. It doesn't seem like I have much to show at this point, but it feels like I've touched all the major parts at this point--apps, settings, models, tests, views, templates, urls, static files, and deploying to Heroku--so the rest should hopefully just be fleshing out more of the same. The next two or three weeks will tell.

HabitMaster: Gamified Habit Formation

I'm starting on a new web-based gamification project. The current design is on GitHub.

This design has been evolving from its original broad concept. Some recent design additions include:

• Users can now record notes regarding each task completion, or even if they did not complete the task for a given day.
• Users can specify degrees of completion (green for "wholehearted" or yellow for "halfhearted"). However, to avoid discouraging those just starting out, this will be an advanced feature that is unlocked only once a habit has been firmly established.
• Social features have been given a bit more consideration, though they will still probably not be implemented as part of version 1.0.
• Fleshed out a number of specific details about the interface and flow between screens, including three new UI mockups.

Version 1.0 will include only the core features. I could evaluate the effectiveness of these gamification features by creating a second version with them stripped out. Specifically, this would omit the mechanics of streak tracking, leveling up a habit, badges, milestones, 1UPs, and social sharing. This would leave only the ability to enter habits, check them off each day, and review their history. I could then compare user adoption of the two systems: would users use the system longer and more frequently, have more successful habit formations, and enjoy the process more with these extra gamification features?

I'm looking forward to starting the implementation next week and learning some Django from scratch.