I’ve been reinvigorated to finally do some updates to Daily Fast after, like, 2 years. This is mainly thanks to the great reviews and emails I’ve been receiving. If you’re reading this, thanks for taking the time

Now, my recent update was basically just re-building the app for iOS 16 and cleaning up the code a bit, but the one major change was in the Summary View. In the old app, this was meant to be a screen where you can see your fasting history and track how you’re doing.

There are some problems with this Summary View:

You can only see the last week, nothing before that
You can’t make any changes to your fasting history, like, if you forget to adjust your fast one day
WTF do those bars at the bottom mean? I mean, seriously. Is the blue bar your eating windows or your fasting windows? I assume it’s your fasting windows because at the top “Fasted Days” is colored blue but honestly I am not sure, I’d have to look at the code to find out. I can imagine how confusing this would be to a user.

So, I created a new Summary View that’s based on a calendar, allowing you to view your Eating Window history for as far back as you want. This system also allows you to edit and adjust any of your past Eating Windows.

Why “Eating Windows” instead of “Fasts”? I started with adding Fasts to the calendar but this actually gets really tricky because almost every Fast spans multiple days, even if you just eating today from 3pm to 7pm, the time outside of this counts as a fast, so your fasting period would start yesterday after your last meal, then start again at 7pm today and go until you wake up the next day?? So having a single eating window on one day almost counts as 3 days of fasting information… How to show this on the calendar was a huge pain, especially if I look to the future where I want to fully support extended fasts.

In this case, Eating Windows just makes a lot of sense.

Roadmap

So what’s next? I’m pretty motivated right now, I just hope I find free time to continue working on the app. Here’s what’s on my To Do list based on requests from users:

Ability to adjust the duration of your current eating window

Right now you can change your current eating window start time with a couple of button taps but what if you want to change the length of your eating window? You can’t! I’ll probably add this in the next update.

Ability to change app or app icon colors

This one was a recent request and it makes sense. In my latest update I actually removed Light/Dark mode support and just forced Dark Mode, because I wanted to primarily focus on making it look great in Dark mode. Now that this is in place, I only really use 2 colors in the app, maybe 3 if you count the gray fasting progress. Allowing users to customize this would go a long way, especially for people who may be color blind. Changing the App Icon would be the same deal, it allows people who really care about color coding their home screens to fiddle with this.

Support for iOS widgets outside of the app

This one is a big request. People always ask for an apple watch complication or a home page widget for their iPhone that just has a timer on it. In iOS 16 they introduced new Lock Screen complications that look really useful. It’s time to expand the app!

Support for extended fasting (over 24 hours)

Daily Fast is more or less hardcoded to only support Intermittent Fasting where you have a set eating window each day. If you want to skip your eating window or fast for several days, you’ll need to track that in a separate app. I’ve actually drawn up many designs for this and this is not as straight forward as you think it is. I feel like I’m close to cracking this nut but will likely be the last thing I do.

Anyways, as usual, if anyone has any feature/improvement recommendations I’d love to add them to my list. Please send me a message in the Support area of my site.