From My Diary

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

I’m Ill

Poster reading Careless Sneezing! Use a hankie for health’s
sake. Keep food safe It’s Tuesday. Saturday morning, I woke up with fever and chills that have persisted. I felt better today, but by early afternoon was running a fever again. This is getting old real fast.

I took a home test, so at least I know it’s not COVID-19 again.

Household Management

This is the first week all the kids are out of school. I’ve tried to mostly leave them to their own devices. Kids, like anyone, need time to unwind and recenter themselves.

That said, with everyone being home, my wife and I have some alterations to the chore list that we’ll spring on them soon. With this in mind, I spent several hours the other day trying various organizational apps intended for families. My main interest was chore management specifically, but if I got scheduling and food planning capabilities as well, that was fine with me too. Unfortunately, I didn’t really like anything I tried—well, there was one, but I’ll talk about it in a minute. The main things I didn’t like about the others:

  • I think it’s—misleading, let’s say—to suggest that your app can handle chores if you can’t a) assign a recurrence period, b) assign the chore to someone specific, and c) change who that task is assigned to the next time in a programmatic way. This is literally the sort of automation computers excel at, and for me, is the whole point of using an app to begin with. I don’t need an app that’s effectively a fancy pencil to make out a manual list. I already have a text editor.1
  • I don’t like the assumption they make that assumes that every person doing chores will be interacting with the app logged in from their own device, so functionality depends on who happens to be logged in. (We have plenty of computing devices around the house, but not everybody has their own, nor are they always available—purposely—and anyway, no, I’m not giving my younger kids a smartphone anyway.)
  • This is somewhat less important than the other two, but frankly, I just didn’t like any of the user interfaces. I found them cluttered, and in some cases downright ugly.

Screenshot of Family Tasks app, showing example tasks 2 The exception was one called Family Tasks. Unlike some of the other offerings, it’s only a webapp, and it only does tasks. I really like it! (There were a few quirks, like it wasn’t possible to create a chore that I don’t care who does it; but that was easily worked around by creating an “Anyone” person.) Most especially, it fit perfectly in with what I’d hoped to be able to do, namely slap Windows 10 on an old laptop with a touchscreen and use Edge’s kiosk mode to fullscreen only that site. This lets my younger kids in particular be able to mark things off by themselves. It looked like exactly what I was looking for.

And then I needed to reset my password. I tried twice, and never got a reset email. Then I started poking around on the site and noticed that all of corporate blog posts and press coverage peter out in 2019/2020. And I discover that it’s essentially a pet project from a guy in France for his own kids. There’s nothing wrong with that—good on him!—but all put together doesn’t really give me confidence as something I want to put effort into getting my kids to use, only for it maybe to go away in six more months (I’m not saying it will; I’m just saying I don’t know). I’ve reached out to the company via the website’s contact form, and I’d love to be wrong. But until then, I can’t recommend it, or any similar app.

Image “Careless Sneezing Use A Hankie For Health’s Sake Keep Food Safe” by Railways Studios. Originally issued by the New Zealand Department of Health in the 1950s, and made available by Archives New Zealand under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Footnotes:

1

In fact, my first thought was to solve this problem with Emacs and Org Mode, but I decided to try the normie thing first.

2

This is the example screenshot from the website.