Hi Lifetickers,

As some of you who’ve emailed us recently would know, we’ve been toiling away on a feature release we’re confident will be very pleasing. So, without further ado, welcome to the world of Journal Categories and Reporting.

In short, journal categories allow you to create custom entries in the journal that you can later report on and graph. Anything from gym visits, to books you’ve read, to distance run, cycled or driven, to weight loss to just about anything can now be tracked using the journal. You can even back date entries to capture older information you want to measure.

How does it work? Quite simple really. Create a category e.g. Savings. Define the unit e.g. $. Then enter the amount every time you make a saving. e.g. $60 this week. Here’s what a graph would look like if you continued with your Savings…

I’ve had the fortune of using the categories functionality over the last two months during testing and so far I’ve set up eight. If I’m not careful, my whole life will be categorised in Lifetick. But maybe that’s the point.

What else have we done? Well firstly, we’re keen for everyone to get a taste of the journal so we’ve opened up limited access to free users. We’ve also provided a bit more flexibility in the viewing of the journal by adding day and month views to the existing week view. Finally, we’ve added journal category entry to the iPhone version in case you can’t wait to get back to the desktop before recording your gym visit.

If you would like more information, we provide the usual help tips along the way in Lifetick. Furthermore, we’ve updated the tour on the website to give you the visual. If that’s not enough, then fire off a help request and we’ll be sure to assist. We look forward to hearing your impressions of our new journal categories and in particular will be interested to hear what types of things our users will end up categorising. 

We’ll leave it there for today. If you’ve read this far, you’re probably itching to check out the features by now. So go for it. You won’t be disappointed.

A while back we added iCalendar support to Lifetick. This allows you to display Goal and Task due dates in the calendar application of your choice (providing it supports the iCalendar format, eg: Apple’s iCal or Microsoft’s Outlook 2007).

You can also use the iCalendar feed on Google’s online calendar tool. We have received a few requests for detailed instructions so here they are…

[In Lifetick]

1. Go to “subscribe to calendar” and in the calendar window, click the Copy the Calendar URL to my Clipboard button. (This copies the url you need to your computer’s clipboard.)

[In Google Calendar]
http://google.com/calendar

2. Under Other Calendars, click Add

3. Select, Add by URL .

4. Paste the URL into the field (remember it was copied to your clipboard automatically in step 1, so either hit Control-V / Command-V or go to Edit -> Paste from the menu bar.

5. Then click Add, and your done.

Google’s Calendar tool fetches new data from Lifetick automatically at regular intervals, therefore it might not show updates instantly.