Lotti

Lotti helps you track habits, behavior, any data about yourself, in complete privacy.

Read more on Substack.

New in 06/2023: Lotti can now transcribe audio recordings in 99 languages using whisper.cpp.

How to use Lotti

Check out the MANUAL. The images in there are updated automatically in CI using Fluttium.

Core beliefs / the WHY

Lotti is a tool for self-improvement centered around these core beliefs:

1. Long-term outcomes in life can be improved by following good routines and establishing good habits, such as healthy sleep, mindfulness and improved self-awareness, healthy eating, enough physical activity and the like. Technology is essential when trying to establish and monitor good habits. Paper-based checklists are undesirable.
2. Habits need to be monitored long-term. The 21-day habit theory, stating that it takes three weeks to form a new habit and then subsequently sticking with it automatically is questionable at best, and the only way to ensure that habits identified as important are actually followed is to monitor them.
3. Any comprehensive attempt at tracking and monitoring the aforementioned areas of life will result in collecting far more data than anyone should be willing to share with anyone else.

Lotti is a tool for improving life via establishing good habits and monitoring their outcome. All collected data stays on your devices. Encrypted and entirely private synchronisation between your devices can be set up (instructions will follow).

Lotti currently supports recording the following data types:

• Habits, which can be defined and tracked. Habit tracking then involves recording daily completions, which can be successes, failures, and also skipping the completion in case a habit could not be completed due to external circumstances.
• Health-related data which can be imported automatically, such as steps, weight, sleep, blood pressure, resting heart rate, and whatever else can be recorded in Apple Health (or the Android equivalent).
• Custom data types, such as the intake of water, food, alcohol, coffee, but also exercises such as pull-ups, you name (and define) it.
• Text journal entries.
• Tasks, with different statuses to track their lifecycle: open, groomed, in progress, blocked, on hold, done, rejected.
• Audio recordings, as spoken journal entries, and also audio notes, for example when working on a task and documenting progress and doing a quick brain dump that can be useful when picking up a task again later.
• Time, as in recording time spent on a tasks, and also a related story.
• Tags for better organization and discoverability of journal entries.
• Stories, a special tag type that is useful for reporting time spent on tasks related to their respective stories.
• People, a special tag type with no additional functionality yet, only a different tag color.

Planned improvements:

• Experiment/Intervention lifecycle. The app is already useful for monitoring experiments or interventions but those themselves currently remain implicit. For example, an experiment could be taking Vitamin D and see how that affects health parameters, or have a hypothesis what will happen, and then prove or disprove that, where a dashboard help monitor all relevant parameters. In future versions, the lifecycle of interventions shall be made explicit, by defining them in the first place, and then reviewing and refining them.
• Better Reporting how time is spent.
• Upfront planning of time budgets.

Please check out HISTORY.md for all the information on the project's history and back-story. You can find the previous version (written in Clojure and ClojureScript) in this repo: meins.

Principles

• Lotti is private and does not share any information with anyone - see the Privacy Policy.
• Lotti is open-source and everyone is encouraged to contribute, be it via contributing to code, providing feedback, testing, identifying bugs, etc.
• Lotti strives to be as inclusive as possible and any request for improved accessibility will be addressed.
• Lotti is supposed to become a friendly and welcoming community of people who are interested in data, improving their lives, and not or only very selectively sharing their data in the process. Please head over to Discussions and say Hi.
• Localization. Lotti is multilingual and should be available in as many different languages as possible. English is the primary language, and there are French, German, and Romanian translations. Those need some update love, as the are many new UI labels that didn't exist when translations were last looked at. Please help, and also create issues and PRs for languages you would like to see. Thanks!

Beta testing

Lotti is currently available for beta testing for these platforms:

• iOS and macOS versions are available via a Public Beta on TestFlight. Development is primarily done on macOS and both the iOS and macOS versions are in constant use by the author. You can expect Lotti to work on these two platforms.
• The Android app is available as both aab and apk files on GitHub Releases. Both appeared to be working fine in some limited testing on both an Android phone and an Android tablet.
• Windows there's an installer named lotti.msix in GitHub Releases. That's not signed though. There's also a (currently hidden) release on the Microsoft Store which appears to be working fine on Windows. However, some issues in the Microsoft Partner Center need to be resolved before making Lotti available on the Microsoft Store.
• Linux: the simplest way to release would be on the Snap Store, with automatic updates, but that's blocked by this issue. There's a file named linux.x64.tar.gz GitHub Releases that contains the app. From limited testing, the app works fine on Linux, but is missing an app icon (could be a nice small PR).

The goal is to get Lotti out on all app stores in 2023.

Blog posts

• Introducing Lotti or how I learned to love Flutter and Buildkite
• How I switched to Flutter and lost 10 kilos

Getting Started

1. Install Flutter, see instructions.
2. Clone repository and go to ./lotti
3. Run flutter pub get
4. Run make watch or make build_runner for code generation
5. Open in your favorite IDE, e.g. Android Studio
6. Run, either from the IDE or using e.g. flutter run -d macos

Platform-specific setup

Mac

Tested on macOS 13.3: no additional steps necessary. You only need to have Xcode installed.

Linux

Tested on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS inside a virtual machine on VMWare Fusion In addition to the common steps above, install missing dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get install libsecret-1-dev libjsoncpp-dev libjsoncpp1 libsecret-1-0 sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev
$ flutter packages get
$ make build_runner

In case the network in the virtual machine is not connecting after resuming: $ sudo dhclient ens33

Windows

If your system is set up to run the Flutter counter example app, you should be good to go.

Continuous Integration

This project uses Buildkite on macOS for releasing to TestFlight on iOS and macOS, and GitHub Actions for publishing to GitHub Releases for all other platforms.

Contributions

Contributions to this project are very welcome. How can you help?

1. Please check under issues if there is anything specific that needs helping hands, or features to be discussed or implemented.
2. Improve the test coverage (currently at around 71%). Any additional tests are welcome, including code changes to make the code easier to test.
3. Create issues for feedback and ideas.
4. Help translate into more languages, and improve the existing translations.

Thanks!