Daily Fast: Finally... A Home Widget!

Daily Fast update 2.6 now comes with a Home Widget.

I have to say, this was probably the most requested item over the last little while. I never put too much thought into it because I don’t use Home Widgets very often myself but once I got around to building this, honestly, this is clearly the best version of the app. I even remove the app itself from my home view and simply use the widget to interact with the app now.

The only downside is that these cannot be animated outside of Apple’s out of box layouts so there’s no way for me to have the blue fill slowly decrease over time like it does in the app. That’s ok, the timer is what matters.

New Color for “Fasting” Windows

To help with the widget design, I also added a new orange “Fasting” window color since the old one was the same color as Day Off (gray). I can see how that could be confusing at first glance.

Here’s what they look like now:

Fast Until Tomorrow…

To address a weird scenario, I added a new “Window” type to the app:

So “Fast until tomorrow” is a window that falls in this range:

  1. You completed today’s eating window

  2. You have a day off tomorrow

If you didn’t have a day off tomorrow, I would just have a timer until your next eating window. However, this gets kind of wonky when you have a day off tomorrow… then the timer will be until the “next” eating window… But what if you have several days off scheduled? Here is where the app ends up with a ridiculous timer, like, 112 hours or something.

Originally I tried to fix this by setting their “Fasting” timer to midnight but that was kind of wonky as well… should I alert the user that they can start eating at midnight?

What the user really wants is to not eat until they wake up the next morning. I have no idea what the user’s waking schedule is so I just used the existing 112 hour timer under the hood but modified the messaging during this window to be “Fast until tomorrow”. At midnight, the messaging changes to “Day off” but no alert is sent out. This seemed to be a good compromise in the end.

Hopefully people find this extra messaging a bit more useful than the crazy timers the app was showing before.