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Compilation of Feedback / Suggestions - Printable Version

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Compilation of Feedback / Suggestions - jacknagy - 06-20-2019

Suggestions:
  • Some UI settings to adjust the size, transparency, etc. of the status notifications would be nice - currently mine feel quite large

  • It's entirely possible I'm missing something about how the Plan Interval notifications work, but it'd be nice to have an option to show them only when the timer is ticking down; I have one plan that I want to see remaining times for while I'm actively using a blacklisted app, but this seems to also come with notifications just during normal use as well?

  • Probably my most preferred feature would be better ways of blocking network activity in the background - there are certain cases where I don't want to even let myself have a website open in a tab running in the background. Is there some way to add all network activity from that website to a blacklist, not just the URL / Title? (I understand there is currently an option to Block Websites in Background, but this only seems to work if that website is still the active tab of the browser when the browser itself is inactive.)

  • Let users add a message to their breaks - e.g. "Get up and stretch!"

  • Have an option to force breaks at intervals dictated by active computer time somehow, not just the time overall - I probably don't need a break if I've only been sitting back down at my computer again for 3 minutes, but could use one before my next scheduled one after that if it's ages away. Could this be based on mouse/keyboard activity somehow? Idk.

  • "Grouping" of plans would be nice (like putting them into little colour-coded categories or folders), if only for organisation.

  • Grouping plans, however, might also make life more convenient for organising security - for instance, I have several plans (Block Social Media, Block Gmail, Block YouTube, Block News, etc.) that I always want to turn off while I'm attending a conference because those sites might be useful. I want it to be irksome to disable any given ONE of them, but not vastly more irksome to disable ALL of them by having to go through and disable each plan individually. I could currently do this by having them all as one plan with therefore just one password etc. required, but that interferes with my ability to give them separate scheduling, and just makes organising the blacklists etc. less tidy. So one great way to do this instead would be to be able to put those plans into a GROUP (say "Communications") that requires 500 characters to disable - which I can do the night before a conference, for instance - but once disabled, I can alter any of those plans, or at the very least they're no running but not editable. (Perhaps this can even override separate plan security, so that if I have 15 plans that I 'ordinarily' want to take 200 characters each to disable, I can still make it possible to disable all of them at once with 'just' 500 characters instead of 3,000)

  • It would be nice to have an option to rename plans even while they're active (maybe a really serious admin could disable this for meddlesome kids, but I'd hardly abuse it). I have both a small typo that's annoying the hell out of me, and a couple of plans that have expanded in scope through adding things to the blacklist & whitelist, and the title is no longer perfectly reflective.

  • Likewise, I'd really love some method of making certain GENERAL options more "secure" than others. For instance - sometimes I really like having the "Force Browsers Active When Under Mouse" option on since it makes cheating harder, but it can also annoy me during work. Maybe as my own admin, I don't want this to be so secure that I have to disable every plan (~10k characters of typing) to alter it. Can I maybe lower the security on some settings, but then require all plans disabled to then change security levels?

  • Related to that - please give us an option to change the time before a "Browser Under Mouse" becomes active! Right now it's a bit clunky in that if I hover my mouse over another window even for 2 seconds (usually by accident / leaving the mouse to one side while I type), it switches windows and interferes with whatever I was typing. If I could make this period longer, it'd still stop me scrolling through an 'inactive' window (at least without it being incredibly annoying), but let me avoid a bunch of those annoyances.

  • A stacked area chart would be awesome for showing our website / app use over the course of a week, month, etc. Imagine each of those areas as a certain website / app you're using - the chart always adds up to 100% so it shows you how your proportional use of the computer is changing over time, not just use in "total amounts". In general, more ways to display the data over various time periods would be great.

  • While looking at sites you've spent the most time on, maybe there could be an option to immediately right click > Blacklist Site > Select Plan and quickly add it to an existing plan; a bit more convenient than having to look at the URL then go back to your plans and type it out (since you can't even copy/paste it directly from the statistics tab).
Feedback:
  • Really, really helpful app - loving it and it's having a great effect on my life, so thank you! I can't wait to see it keep getting better

  • I believe FocusMe has a default plan to help you block adult content, but I seem to recall it also blocking a bunch of regular sites as well (e.g. news articles that happened to have an adult word in the title, and so on), so I stopped using it. Instead I use K9 Web Filter's pornography block to catch these sites, and it seems to both be more exhaustive in its blacklist and slightly more discriminating in its general "titles" that it catches... but I haven't been able to bypass it so far. It's free to install for at least one computer I think, so might be worth seeing if you can find out how they do it and taking some ideas. Hopefully it's something interesting and not just "they have a more detailed blacklist that they won't share".

  • Any update on when we can expect FocusMe for iOS? Smile



RE: Compilation of Feedback / Suggestions - jon - 07-02-2019

Hi Jack,

Thanks for the suggestions and feedback! We'll definitely be implementing some of these. Wink

No further news on the iOS app yet unfortunately.