Monica: Personal CRM. Remember everything about your friends, family and etc.

Amicu is basically SwiftUI on top of a local SQLite db. It supports tracking the last contact date, catchup reminders, birthday reminders, Siri, Shortcuts (for semi automatic workflows), and widgets. Save the main comm app per contact (WhatsApp, Telegram, FB, etc.) for batch messages like a birthday event invite.

Feedback is welcome.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id1481868897

Marking someone in touch means you interacted with this person somehow for example you met or called. This sets the last contact date to today. This is used for reminders to catchup after some time and sorting the contact list to see which contacts you met recently and where it's been some time.

Setting in touch and adding contacts uses a similar UI, which can be confusing in the beginning. I need to improve this. Thanks!

You can also contact me at kai@amicu.app, if you've more questions or feedback.

I am not really into self-hosting and homelabs, in the sense that I never got too deep into the proper architecture of it all and the "right" way of doing things. I find that when I'm creating tooling (or setting up tooling, for that matter) for myself, the only thing that matters is speed of setup and ease of use. Hosted is fine for many things if it's decoupled in a sensible way from your public identity or does not actually reveal anything that interesting about you, IMHO, but I assume that would be an unpopular opinion.

A corollary from this "proposition" is that I leave the world of software often. For things that I have yet to find proper software for, but are indeed great needs that I have in my day to day life, I find my ways.

Going back to your question, I'll admit the other two tools are a bit underwhelming.

I'm a religious nail biter, and the only thing that ever made me stop was jotting in a pad every time I want to bite. I usually keep a small pad (as in a mini-notebook) in my backpack and draw hashtags and lines in it when I'm seeing the habit return. I'm now going through something a bit difficult personally, and while I'm constantly biting right now I know that when it will really bother me I can pull up the pad and stop biting again. It's stupid, I know, but again - it works for me. I got the idea from a book, btw (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Habit).

The other one is the Hacker's Diet Online (https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/online/hdo.html) - it's a weight watching tool by the guy who built AutoCad. I lost ±24 pounds after reading his book (https://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/) and have been tracking my weight ever since (±2 years).

One recurring thing in my stack, as you noticed, is tracking. I am an AVID tracker of many things, and generally speaking advise anyone who is in a loop over something to do the same.

It simply... works.

If anyone wants to talk personal tracking, it's not hard to find me on the internets (TomGranot in most places except here). I have a plethora of ideas & opinions on the subject.

I would 100% use that over the desktop app if it was stable.

Re automated / scripted vs. manual - manual all the way. I keep on mentioning to folks this study I read years ago about teachers who had a student tracking system in their school.

The key point from the study was that the teachers who found the system useful are not the ones who got the most detailed or relevant reports, but the ones who actually INTERACTED with the tracking process. Some sort of "obligation" feeling or something drove them to look at the data and then utilize the learnings from it, IIRC.

If anyone remembers such a study I'd be happy to get a link to it.

Or what if we don't remember due to valuing things more than people? The app becomes an illusory replacement of genuine interaction.