The new aorti
Released
aorti is for anyone who records their heart rate for days at a time, and this update is about reading that record back: finding a day, zooming into a moment and getting to the graph faster.
What I wanted from it:
- Fewer steps to the graph.
- Smooth zooming on a phone.
- One set of controls everywhere.
The Day view
Seeing a day's graph took two clicks. The Day view opened on a bar of coloured blocks with one card per recording, and "View as full-day timeline" led to a page that stacked numbers and interpretation cards above the chart. Getting to another day meant paging with the arrows or going through Month.
Now the day opens straight on the graph, one click less. The summary numbers sit on one even grid above it and the interpretation cards sit below it. The date in the title opens a calendar, so any day is one tap away.
Laptop
Phone
Zooming into the chart
Zooming into a moment was close to impossible on my phone. Dragging the strip under the chart redrew the whole chart on every move, so it stuttered and sometimes froze. On a laptop the markers list sat beside the chart and squeezed it.
A drag now paints at most once per frame. Phones get pinch and double-tap zoom, and on a laptop you can drag across the chart to zoom to that stretch. The list opens from the Markers button above the chart, which shows the count; tap a marker and the chart zooms to it.
Laptop
Phone
Month
Month kept its calendar, but the lens buttons above it were small all-caps pills. On a laptop one of them wrapped onto two lines.
They are now normal buttons that fit their words. The arrows sit at the ends of the row and stay put however long the month name is, and the month name opens a picker for the year.
Laptop
Phone
Week
Week worked as a view, one card per day with its trace. Its header was its own, though, so the arrows sat in a different place from Day, and switching views meant a dropdown in the top bar.
The header is now the same date control as Day and Month, with the arrows in the same place on all three and the dates opening a calendar. On a laptop the dropdown became plain tabs. On a phone it stays a dropdown, now full height and easy to hit.
Laptop
Phone
Trends
Trends was a fixed stack of charts with jargon under each title. There was no way to hide the ones I never read.
Each chart is now a widget. The Widgets button turns them on and off and sets each one to half or full width, and you can drag them into the order you want. The titles and the line under each one are in plain words.
Laptop
Phone
The monitor while recording
The big red Stop session button sat open near the top of the monitor, next to the posture buttons. With the phone in a pocket it was easy to hit by accident.
Now the state reads as one line: Live, the strap and the session time. Stop, posture, sharing and the log sit behind one Controls row that is closed every time the page opens. Stop still asks before it ends anything.
Laptop
Phone
Settings
The monitor's settings had their own toggle switch, their own buttons and labels in tiny capitals, so they looked and behaved differently from the viewer.
The tabs are the same. Under them, every field, checkbox and button is now the component the viewer uses, so a checkbox looks the same everywhere and stays readable when you hover or tick it.
Laptop
Phone
The stream widget
The widget is the part your viewers see, so I changed it least. Its labels used a different font from the app with units in capitals, and nothing told you how big to make the OBS source.
The labels now use the app's Work Sans, with units in lower case. The home page shows the four layouts most people want with each one's footprint, so you can size the source before you go live.
What it adds up to
The timings come from tests with the processor slowed to roughly phone speed.
- One click fewer to the graph.
- Panning a zoomed day: about 125 ms per redraw before, about 14 ms now.
- Jumping to a marker: the worst stall went from about 400 ms to about 55 ms.
- Moving the mouse over the chart no longer redraws it; the hover line is drawn on its own.
- Saved sessions show in well under a second when the viewer opens, and Drive syncs quietly after.
- One set of controls instead of each screen's own.
Try it
The sample data in these pictures is in the viewer, so you can click around without a strap. Every change is listed in the changelog.