Daytum is a simple and elegant way to keep track of the mundane details of your daily life. The sort of application intentionally targeted at a niche audience, Daytum appeals to the obsessive compulsive tendencies of those who find satisfaction in tracking every meal eaten, mile run, or espresso brewed throughout their day.
Not Quite Perfect
The beauty of Daytum, and perhaps its most glaring weakness, is its ability to track and analyze virtually any kind of data one can think up. There are no restrictions, no preset categories that data must fit within, giving complete freedom to users to invent and enter information that is only relevant to them. Want to track the frequency of pit stops you make on that long road trip next week? No problem. Have a burning desire to record every karaoke party you crash throughout the coming year? Piece of cake. However, the problem this presents becomes obvious when you first start using the app; it’s not evident where to begin or what makes the application useful. Daytum falls short in answering the most simple yet vital question a user asks when opening an app for the very first time: Why should I use this?
The only other source of frustration I found while using Daytum is related to the fact that the app is definitely a 1.0 release. The current version has quite a few bugs that users will encounter when trying to edit items or categories they have previously entered. The application crashed more than a few times during my last week of use. I expect most of these problems will be ironed out in future updates, but Daytum’s developers would have done well to address them beforehand, considering their service’s propensity to attract users who focus on the details.
Plenty of Pretty
If you can look past these initial flaws and decide on a few categories of data you would like to record, then you’re in for a treat. Daytum is beautifully designed with a tastefully minimalistic color scheme and an intuitive interface that takes advantage of iOS’s multi-touch gestures. The app is primarily focused on giving you a quick and easy way to record events as they occur during your day-to-day and assign them to an appropriate category. This makes perfect sense on an iPhone or iPod touch, since these devices are likely to be accessible wherever you are morning, noon, and night. However, the payoff for all this tedious tracking is Daytum’s companion website, best viewed on a larger screen, where you can customize and view a detailed summary of your carefully recorded data. On a single webpage you can enjoy the culmination of your life’s most interesting data points, clearly and concisely displayed in the numeric beauty of elegantly vectorized charts and graphs.
The Wrap Up
In short, Daytum is an online journal of the minutiae in your life — one where your thoughts and feelings take a backseat to the cold calculated truth only numbers can convey. If you’re like me, the idea of journaling on a daily basis has always seemed daunting, so much so that I never actually succeeded at it. The Daytum app provides a simpler way to record and reflect on the idiosyncrasies of life, especially tailored for those who prefer well-designed pie charts to poetry.
