Deep Ocean to Deep Space

Recently a friend mentioned that he would like to have an app to make it easy to log dizzy spells so he could share them with his doctor and then he could tweak his medications. Sure, I’ll bet I can create an app for that. Both my friend and I use Evernote and I remember seeing a post on one the Evernote forums about how to do that with IFTTT.  If This Then That. You say it “ift”.  They say. I have my doubts anyone will understand. So I played around with it for a bit yesterday and it is ridiculously easy to use and they “channel” 100’s of products.   I first tried a recipe that appends text to a note in Evernote, an easy way to track random thoughts, click on it, type your text and click the button.  The date and time are appended. And there is another one that creates a new note in a database.  Then I found another that uses the GPS to append a map of your current location to the note. This one was set up to need only a click and it is done. I could see someone doing field work using this to capture locations they have spotted something of interest. It could be altered to allow you to enter text if you want, but maybe all you want is a button push. And should be able to also grab a photo as well.

It also channels Google Drive so I tried one to record start and stop times and then calculates the elapsed time. Good if you want to track time spent on projects. And an IF recipe that copies sleep information from my Fitbit to a spreadsheet. I am still trying to figure out what some of the columns are but most of the are obvious.

This has a lot of potential for home automation, smart homes.  It can channel smart controllers like Nest and others so you can set up buttons on your phone, saving you having to open apps.

For my friends app I modeled it tracking snacks eaten.  One of them just put an entry into an Evernote doc with date and time with just a touch to the button.  Another one opens an editor and allows you to enter text. Next challenge is is to see if there is a way you can set up a pick list for that.