I thought HN was supposed to be a place with real people and real interactions. Instead all of OP's replies to every comments seems like a reply from a customer service rep. Can we stop entire marketing departments from taking over HN?
Show HN: An all-in-one app designed for deep work and to build atomic habits
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Re: Show HN: An all-in-one app designed for deep work and to build atomic habits
#72I thought HN was supposed to be a place with real people and real interactions. Instead all of OP's replies to every comments seems like a reply from a customer service rep. Can we stop entire marketing departments from taking over HN?
@adithyassekhar - I am glad you think there in an entire marketing team behind this. I really wish I had that. Based on some of my replies, I can see why you would think that. But no, for a tiny little startup like mine, it has just been me responding. Since I was in a rush earlier didn't want to come off as rude to some of the replies so I was experimenting with letting ChatGPT help me with some replies. Although it spit out replies quickly for the 2 liners I gave it and the replies did look professional, I didn't realize at that time how they came across. Like one of the HN users in this post pointed out, it came across overly verbose with lots of marketing jargon and PR speak. Anyways, lesson learned here for me is AI tools can help you a lot but if you are not careful, they can use the wrong tone etc without knowing the full context and can cause a real headache.
As for replying to all the questions/comments, just trying to be courteous and responding to people who took the time to write something.
Re: Show HN: An all-in-one app designed for deep work and to build atomic habits
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kudos on the app. It looks and feels great. May I suggest to add a ‘long press’ on the theme to lock it?
Thank you!! Is the problem that it's too easy to tap Theme, and it's annoying to then cycle through all?
Yes, exactly. And there is no indication of wether it actually cycles through or is generating at random. So I wasn’t even sure I could get it back. It’s small stuff though.
Re: Show HN: An all-in-one app designed for deep work and to build atomic habits
#74I love the concept! Modern interrupt-driven workflows are horrible if you want to get real work done, designing for focus time is a great idea. How is it with privacy, PII, and sensitive data? Is all processing done locally, or is data uploaded into the cloud?
Hi Zenkat, thanks for your interest in Floutwork! We take privacy seriously and have a detailed privacy policy that outlines our commitment to protecting our users' information. You can find it here: https://www.floutwork.com/privacy-policy . If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out – we're always happy to provide more information and ensure that our users are comfortable with our pra…
I didn't get to check this out yesterday so a bit late to respond. While it is a very interesting product, the privacy policy is a little concerning. You mention collecting cookies and say they are commonly used as anonymous unique identifiers. However, they are also commonly used to store your login session, and would mean you can use them to impersonate the user too. Which is no good. Definitely don't want any third party collecting them. Especially with hooks in to a lot of personal stuff.
The tool looks awesome, but why do you need anything on your end? Opt-in telemetry might be reasonable, to see what domains (not full URLs) people are using it for. But what exactly is done server side? If I could use it 100% locally, or self hosted, I would be all over this. I would still be willing to support development, in some way, but really don't want third party servers involved. Have you looked at the way Obsidian handles pricing? I wonder if something similar could be viable.
Re: Show HN: An all-in-one app designed for deep work and to build atomic habits
#75I have mild to moderate ADHD, and in the long run, I haven’t found any tools that try and “get in my way” to block distraction to be that helpful. No tool can save me from myself, and they usually end up interfering with my “productivity” in the process. For example, with this tool, what happens when I need to use a browser extension, or look up something from a random website, or research something on HN or Reddit?…
Hey ryanwaggoner, I do agree that this app is not meant to completely isolate you from everything and prevent all distractions, including distraction from smart phones. The one thing it does really well though is to help you setup goals and track all your tasks and reminders with ease. It also shows you your web apps in a single window with way less cluttered tabs. If you want to research or open any website, you can…
I find ad blocking to be an important part of focus. Any support for extensions in the browser part? It would be nice to be able to add in uBlock Origin, and probably a password manager extension rather than using your vault.
Re: Show HN: An all-in-one app designed for deep work and to build atomic habits
#76Apologies if this is uncouth, but if anyone wants the opposite of this product, check out Pixelist on the App Store: it’s a 100% free and private, extremely minimalist habit tracker. I’m terrible at marketing (my Show HN had zero response) but it’s had a growing organic user base that seems to love it.
Very couth. Opened the comments only to see referrals to minimal alternatives.
Everything what my ADD brain needs. Nothing my ADD brain doesn’t need. And perfect alignment with libre ideals! May I suggest that you make a tiny update, just so that the App Store can tout your impeccable privacy policy!
Re: Show HN: An all-in-one app designed for deep work and to build atomic habits
#77Nice concept. I especially like the three bars to fill.
I assume you use this yourself. When you have to do computer work outside of Flout, does it bother you that it’s not tracked? Manually adding data in a way that isn’t annoying and doesn’t feel like cheating is challenging; I remember old companies like RescueTime agonizing over it.
Re: Show HN: An all-in-one app designed for deep work and to build atomic habits
#78Nice concept. I especially like the three bars to fill. I assume you use this yourself. When you have to do computer work outside of Flout, does it bother you that it’s not tracked? Manually adding data in a way that isn’t annoying and doesn’t feel like cheating is challenging; I remember old companies like RescueTime agonizing over it.
Hey 1123581321 - Yes, the 3 bars to fill definitely keeps me motivated especially if I am so close to completing them. To be honest, I actually brought all the apps I need to use within Floutwork because there is always a web version for even the desktop apps. So I even have Slack, Teams, Outlook and other office apps within Floutwork just so I don't have to switch around between multiple desktop apps. That's been working well for me. Even desktop apps like Slack and Teams are pretty much just rendering their web versions within their desktop clients so I don't feel like I lose any functionality.
Re: Show HN: An all-in-one app designed for deep work and to build atomic habits
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey ryanwaggoner, I do agree that this app is not meant to completely isolate you from everything and prevent all distractions, including distraction from smart phones. The one thing it does really well though is to help you setup goals and track all your tasks and reminders with ease. It also shows you your web apps in a single window with way less cluttered tabs. If you want to research or open any website, you can…
I find ad blocking to be an important part of focus. Any support for extensions in the browser part? It would be nice to be able to add in uBlock Origin, and probably a password manager extension rather than using your vault.
@Bendon292 - I agree with you on ad blocking being an important part of focus. At least personally, I didn't find myself getting too distracted by ads because most web apps we use for work don't rely on an ad model. But I do get distracted if I need to research something or go to something like forbes.com to read an article etc. I am planning to add support for Chrome extensions soon. uBlock Origin seems like an excellent candidate to roll out as part of the initial extension support.
Re: Show HN: An all-in-one app designed for deep work and to build atomic habits
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi Zenkat, thanks for your interest in Floutwork! We take privacy seriously and have a detailed privacy policy that outlines our commitment to protecting our users' information. You can find it here: https://www.floutwork.com/privacy-policy . If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out – we're always happy to provide more information and ensure that our users are comfortable with our pra…
I didn't get to check this out yesterday so a bit late to respond. While it is a very interesting product, the privacy policy is a little concerning. You mention collecting cookies and say they are commonly used as anonymous unique identifiers. However, they are also commonly used to store your login session, and would mean you can use them to impersonate the user too. Which is no good. Definitely don't want any thir…
@Bendon292 - I have thought about some privacy options including a "fully private" option where all data is stored locally and can be synced to any of your favorite cloud providers (or our servers) if need be. This is similar to what guys like obsidian seem to be doing as well. I will be down to exploring this further. If you are interested in developing it with me, let's chat. Just shoot an email to hello@floutwork.com and we can take it from there.