There won't be much (if anything) to see in this release, but behind the scenes we have started to make Tracks! ready for the future. That's right, future versions of iOS are right around the corner, and your favorite pun based life tracking app is going to be ready. Whatever it takes.

When we make a mistake we are the first to admit it. Particularly when it's the result of thinking we were particularly clever. Remember a few weeks ago when we introduced borrowed traces? Yeah, you do. That has been going pretty well, but it's a little fussy, because a trace's position in one track is not the same as another, potentially. We have an, let's say, ~elaborate~ sorting system that we use to make sure things stay in the desired order from use to use, and it mostly works the wan you would hope; but, we were inadvertently changing that precious position data from time to time. That was the mistake. To make this more insidious, it was buried deep, a simple looking piece of code that said something like thing.position = number when it should have said otherThing.position = number. No long term damage was done, but it was surely annoying. We apologize to everyone, and not just one of those corporate apologies where we don't admit we did anything wrong and subtly imply that it was your fault all along. Let's not let it happen again though, ok?

Today's version has a lot of improvements. Things you will probably almost definitely notice. Let me tell you about them: For those of you using Tracks! on multiple devices, you know we sync the data between those devices mostly automatically. It has always been a little slower than I'd like. With help from an old friend, we figured out why and now your background syncing is happening much faster and doing more when you aren't around. This includes notifications that you might or might not have turned on. For those of you tracking location, we found a place where we were making you wait for the satellites to do their thing before you moved forward. This was unnecessary and slow. We wish you could get those seconds back, but you can't. We made a bunch of changes to how data was being displayed and processed on borrowed traces. Everything was being stored correctly, but in some edge cases things were behaving oddly. No data was harmed during this change. While there, we also improved performance on large data sets by removing redundant sorting. This is just the kind of thing you need to do sometimes.

This release is like cleaning your desk before you start on a new project. It's kind of getting cluttered around here and before you get too deep into the next big thing it probably makes sense to put some stuff away. No one but you will notice or care, but you get that feeling of calm that sets you up for success. Later on you will do the really exciting work of the next big thing, but for now, you are just moving things around, putting things in their place, and throwing out that old takeout menu with Sally's lunch order on it.

It's finally here! That thing you weren't expecting or waiting for. Ok. Well one person was, but that person spends their time working on Tracks! so they don't count. For them, it's a recurring problem, and that more than anything else is what we focus on here at Tracks! HQ. Now that you are tracking and tracing across a wide range of tracks, you might be thinking... wouldn't it be great if the trace from track A could be connected to track B somehow. Its influence felt across a wide range of scenarios. If that's what you were thinking, you win the prize. Now you can "borrow" a trace and have it appear in another. It works sort of like when they told you to borrow the one when doing subtraction back in school. Except we don't think they do that anymore. Kids today, teaching other kids how to math without borrowing. Crazy times. Ok. So here is an example: Let's say you bought an expensive coffee maker during the pandemic because you thought you were some sort of coffee person, but now you are realizing that it will take years and years of daily coffee to pay for itself so you keep track of the number of coffees you have made in an effort to self soothe. No judgement! So you have a track for each time you buy a bag of coffee you track the type and how many ounces of coffee you now have. That's two traces right there. Then you have another track for each cup of coffee you make. Coffee people love numbers, so you have a couple of other traces there for things like grinder settings, weight and extraction time. Now you can 'borrow' the type trace from the new bag into your daily coffee track and it will live there happily. You can also 'borrow' the ounces remaining trace and always have up to the minute status of your remaining coffee supply. Borrowed traces can be part of your text prompt with replacements just like normal traces. Or they can live outside the prompt like an etherial void dweller. That's up to you. Also in this release: We found and fixed a bug that was causing slow or non-updates to the current weather, making it more, you know, current. We tweaked the sub title on notifications to get more info in there, so you can decide if you want to do anything about it (probably not) We improved the layout in a couple of places, and fixed some sorting issues Your .json is more robust now, which you don't care about, but we think is probably a good idea Some trace replacements in prompts were colliding, which was unfortunate. It can probably still happen, but should happen less

It's finally here! That thing you weren't expecting or waiting for. Ok. Well one person was, but that person spends their time working on Tracks! so they don't count. For them, it's a recurring problem, and that more than anything else is what we focus on here at Tracks! HQ. Now that you are tracking and tracing across a wide range of tracks, you might be thinking... wouldn't it be great if the trace from track A could be connected to track B somehow. Its influence felt across a wide range of scenarios. If that's what you were thinking, you win the prize. Now you can "borrow" a trace and have it appear in another. It works sort of like when they told you to borrow the one when doing subtraction back in school. Except we don't think they do that anymore. Kids today, teaching other kids how to math without borrowing. Crazy times. Ok. So here is an example: Let's say you bought an expensive coffee maker during the pandemic because you thought you were some sort of coffee person, but now you are realizing that it will take years and years of daily coffee to pay for itself so you keep track of the number of coffees you have made in an effort to self soothe. No judgement! So you have a track for each time you buy a bag of coffee you track the type and how many ounces of coffee you now have. That's two traces right there. Then you have another track for each cup of coffee you make. Coffee people love numbers, so you have a couple of other traces there for things like grinder settings, weight and extraction time. Now you can 'borrow' the type trace from the new bag into your daily coffee track and it will live there happily. You can also 'borrow' the ounces remaining trace and always have up to the minute status of your remaining coffee supply. Borrowed traces can be part of your text prompt with replacements just like normal traces. Or they can live outside the prompt like an etherial void dweller. That's up to you. Also in this release: We found and fixed a bug that was causing slow or non-updates to the current weather, making it more, you know, current. We tweaked the sub title on notifications to get more info in there, so you can decide if you want to do anything about it (probably not) We improved the layout in a couple of places, and fixed some sorting issues Your .json is more robust now, which you don't care about, but we think is probably a good idea Some trace replacements in prompts were colliding, which was unfortunate. It can probably still happen, but should happen less

Some subtle changes this week. It's spring and flowers are blooming. That is apropos of nothing. Except that Tracks! is heavily focused on identifying growth trends in seedlings. As for the rest of us? There is a new 'clear' text button for traces where you were expected to type something in. Like magic. Also we have tweaked the text in the notifications to make it a little clearer which track is planned for now. Even more exciting, we fixed a warning that we have been getting for a few weeks, this warning was going to be promoted to an Error in Swift 6. Swift 6 isn't coming until next school year, so this is basically like skipping a grade. Sixth year skill in year 5!

Some minor clean up work today. Turns out that we were rounding numbers in predictions in two different ways. Both ways were legitimate, but some predictions could result in answers that weren't quite matching up between the text and number value. The divergence has been summarily removed. Also, new counters, particularly ones with quite a few days between tracks, were not correctly handling their replenishment estimate. You probably didn't even know we would tell you when you needed to buy toilet paper, which you can do now unlike 4 years ago, if you correctly track your toilet paper usage. (Ask us how.) Now we are making extra sure we have a correct date estimate before we do the conversion to something like `4 years from now`, by which time I hope we can forget what 2020 actually was like.

This version... what's new... Basically nothing. There is a bug fix. That's cool. Got too clever by 1/2 on an attempt to prevent you from being annoyed by spurious notifications, ended up that some notifications you should have received weren't even being created. Those horrible days are behind us now. Apple also has introduced a set of privacy and data use info, sort of a score card/product label. They are there to help you make smart choices about where your data is going. We don't use any of your data for marketing purposes, or even have access to any of it, but the new system is going to be required sometime in May, so here we are, getting ahead of the game. Forewarned is forearmed. Make good choices people!

This release is a small step toward a larger goal. That larger goal: Using the patterns you establish for your tracks to predict what you might need next. Basically, each thing you trace can be used to predict the future. Right now... We would say it's better than a coin flip, worse than one of those fancy AI neural nets, but it takes a couple of steps to get something like this right, and we might as well take the first one now. Down deep in the settings for your Track, there is a new option. `Try and predict trace values when adding` Don't worry, we will give that a cool 'in theme' name sometime later. Turn this on, and when you add a new track, we will try and predict what trace selections you would make based on your previous efforts. Future work in this area, beyond coming up with that cool name we mentioned above, will be around incrementally better 'predictions' for each type of trace. It should just get better and better; just like you.

A few clean up items for the early adopters of notifications: 1) When you snooze, it should be based on now, not some arbitrary time in the past 2) When you delete a track, it should definitely not notify you about it. That's just rude. You probably didn't notice these things, but we did, frankly we couldn't sleep thinking about it just being out there, ruining lives. So now that's done.

Letting these "minor" version numbers go to our head are we? First we had like a lot of 1.0.x versions, then only one 1.1.1 version, and already onto 1.2.0? Wow. What's going on? Big things. Not "major" version things, but big for us. Features. Features you haven't asked for, but might like nonetheless. Back a few months ago we told you: “Always looking to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing." - Yoda, Star Wars -- I’m taking that as a feature request for some sort of reminder or notification. You can already plan things, so we should probably let you annoy yourself with notifications. Welp, we did it. Now when you have a track that is not done, and the planned time comes and goes, we will send you a notification. You can use this notification to take action. Or you can just ignore it, snooze it, or whatever you want. Word on the street is that we are all losing our minds because we have too many notifications, so by default this is off, and we won't bother you. However, if you want you can turn it on from the settings menu. It's down under the heading "Don't yell at me!" which seemed right and is the name of a restaurant I'd like to go to some day, just for the name. We want to reassure you that we aren't doing any of those fancy cloud based notifications here or sending any of your data anywhere. This is purely local to your phone or tablet. Your secrets are safe. Additionally we have added something else that seems like it would be cool. Under the ... menu you can now one tap filter done/not done and see all those tracks that you might have forgotten.

It has been a minute. This should definitely not be viewed as us sinking into any kind of rut or rut shaped psychological state, but rather a fortification of our resolve to bring you the best tracking related improvements to the best pun based life tracking software out there. It's not going to seem like much, but it was kind of tricky. We would like to say that it lays the ground work for our next big innovation, but it would be more accurate to say that it fixes up some improperly structured groundwork from our last big innovation. Definitely not "bug fixes and changes to improve customer experience". We know that the 20 of you who read these come for the features, so what's in it for you? Now, after long effort of tracking your tracks with traces, you can, while investigating your tracks, dig into the info and get specific details for a particular date range. So for example if you had been tracking your miles walked as an accumulator, and also been tracking when you started using a new pair of shoes, you could use that information to find out that you got 1,731 miles on a single pair of shoes before they got kind of run down and worn out. You wouldn't know if that was good or bad, but you would know something. All without breaking a sweat, to find out, not to walk 1,700 miles. You know what we mean.

Wow! How time flies. We are moving the middle digit in our semantic versioning, which many will say is a minor thing, but it is a lot more than a patch. That's a joke, iykyk. While you think about it, it is pretty recursive. Stop it. What's new in this minor update? Lots! It isn't two weeks worth of work, but sometimes you get busy. You would know if that was happening if you were a regular Tracks! user. Some of us have tracked 223 things since the last release. We have run the dishwasher 4 times, and Tracks! is telling me that we will probably run it again after dinner today. Not sure about that, right on the edge. We use a lot of spoons. More spoons than anything else. Will investigate and report back. What have we been up to when not running the dishwasher? Well Big things for people who are into making and using tracks. Now you can unleash the full power of your creative vision with help. It's not that fancy AI help that you are seeing everywhere, but it's better than nothing. We have actual words you can read that explain all the aspects of making a new track, adding and editing traces, and even some special friends we want to introduce you to. If you were one of the 100% of people who found that confusing... Well, now it's much easier. Just hit the help me button and get, you know, helped. Thanks for sticking with us, and we will let you know how that dishwasher thing plays out.

Here at Future Core we are always looking forward. Tomorrow is closer than you think. This isn't some strange techno optimism thing, just the hard practical reality that the days just keep coming and you might like to know about them. This new release of Tracks! is all about tomorrow. Specifically you can be more assured than ever that tomorrow will be there for you, and that it will be the same tomorrow that everyone else is participating in, particularly when you are using Tracks! on multiple devices. May all your tomorrows both exist and be unique.

F: It is awfully dark out. C: Not for night time. F: Is it night time? C: How would I know, I'm just some View? A Text view if you want to be specific, and I think that you do. All I'm saying is that if it were night time, it wouldn't be unusually dark. F: How can you not know if it's night time? C: You don't seem to know, so why would you expect me to know? I would know if you told me. F: So if I told you it was night time, you would know if it was dark out? C: If you told me it was night time, I would know that it was night time, and that it might be dark out. That's not quite the same thing. F: So I would need to be really specific? C: Yes. F: Ok. So I'm telling you, it's night time, and it's really dark out. C: No objection. F: It would be nice if people could still see things. C: So now you don't just want me to know, you want me to do something about it? F: Well, I was thinking that if I told you that it was night, and also quite dark, you would, maybe take appropriate actions. C: Oh, good idea, did you have something in mind? F: I was hoping maybe you could make it to the people could see what they needed to see even at night time or even when it was just dark out but not night time. I already told everyone else around here, and they are all doing this. C: I suppose I could do that, but you also told me specifically to do a whole bunch of other things that you didn't tell them to do. You were really specific. F: That's true. But I thought you would, you know put it all together on your own. C: That's not really my thing. I basically ignored everyone else, because you were so specific. I feel you you have a lot of expectations. F: No, no, no... I just want you to do this one thing, and know that it's night time, or at least that it's too dark. C: That's not quite one thing you know. F: I feel like I keep having to repeat myself. C: Oh, you definitely don't want to do that. F: Agreed. C: Agreed. F: So now you will do the right thing when it's dark out? C: Can any of us really know what the right thing is? Is it even related to being dark out? F: I give up. C: No objection. Also, the date picker is sized better on iPad. Will do the other popovers eventually, but that's another story.

Managing an app in the app store is complicated. You have these people who are telling you things. Let's call them "users." These _users_ often have opinions, and if I've learned anything from Aaron Sorkin movies it's that the users opinions are what matters. So let's say we have one user, let's call him Bob*; and Bob says that he really hates the '%' you were using to represent that a certain bit of text was a traced data point. If you have already been using Tracks! you know all about this. Or more likely you don't because it's not actually explained anywhere, though we all know we should do that with a super cool animated walkthrough. Anyway, so called Bob is pretty upset, and even mentions it in a strongly worded email. Feedback, as they say, is a gift. So anyway, we snapped into action over here at Tracks! HQ, and added in what might be considered a partial solution. Now, and forever on, your Traces are highlighted in many of the places you would see them. But then, because no good deed goes unpunished, you thought of another user. Or not so much a user, but a hoped for user. This theoretical user we could call bRyan*, he is very cool and very sophisticated, with strong opinions on use of color and fonts. bRyan* would say... "stop using comic sans and also something something kerning." This would be quite distracting, but not without merit. Particularly if you ever hope to show Tracks! to bRyan* without embarrassment. So what's an app developer to do? Luckily for you, we already have a fantastic settings screen, where you can express yourself and make many decisions that have less impact on your life than one would hope. So for this release we added not one, but two new settings, allowing us to make Bob* and bRyan* happy, or at least (and honestly this is what we are shooting for) not unhappy. Bob* gets his choice of visual indicator for traces, he just has to turn it on, and bRyan* gets his choice of styles and can avoid whatever horrible design decisions were made in support of Bob's* desires. * These are probably not real people, or real people's names. It's just an example.

Hey! Have you been rating things? Well we have great news for you. Now your ratings are even more meaningful, assuming you believe that meaning is earned by the appearance of data in graph or chart form. Now rating data appears in not one, not two, but three or four, graphically appealing ways depending on how you count graphs. Two of them are right next to each other, but if you scroll just right you can see them independently. That counts right? Additionally we have fixed a couple of minor bugs and implemented our first iOS version 17 only feature. Exclusively for you folks who update their phones when they are supposed to.

Some spooky updates. Not for Halloween, that's 10 months from now. Instead we are bringing the spooky and ethereal nature of caching to Tracks! Technically, it was already there, but sometimes, in very rare circumstances, the wrong numbers could get stuck in there. Now, you have total control of your numbers, just in case.

Fixed a bug. Maybe two. These are small things but it is, as they say, about the journey. Most importantly these bugs are fixed and will 100% not interfere with your happy tracking. They are so gone it's hard to believe they were ever there at all.

We were it seems inadvertently misleading the French, claiming that we had a french language version when in fact we had only localized 4% of our text. That is not right. The below will make it clear we don't know french yet. Nous avons apparemment involontairement trompé les Français en prétendant avoir une version en français alors que nous n'avions localisé que 4 % de notre texte. Ce n'est pas correct. Nous sommes désolés pour la confusion. Not much else yet mainly we were trying to get Tracks! into your hands. We did make creating a new track a slightly easier process, but you won't notice it.