HabitRPG: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

In my ever-continuing quest to keep myself on track, I've been experimenting with HabitRPG, a website that promises to help you build good habits and track your tasks by treating your life like a roleplaying game. Earn gold and experience points (EXP)! Level up! Lose health because you hit snooze on your alarm clock for the fifteenth time! And so on.

Welcome to the world of task lists.

I've been using HabitRPG for nearly a month now, and here's what I know:

The Good

The system works. The basic premise of HabitRPG does a great job of modifying your behavior. Good habits give you EXP, so if you add "Take the stairs" as a habit, you'll damn well take the stairs, because if you don't take the stairs you're going to lose hit points and your little sprite man might die. Daily tasks act the same way, except on a timer. You can also tweak your version of a "day" to start and stop at, say, 3 a.m. to cover staying up past midnight on a spontaneous writing jag. To-dos, tasks with no time limit, will gradually become worth more EXP as they age, which counter-intuitively manages to train you to complete overdue tasks when you get a chance. And once you've done enough tasks, you can treat yourself to a simple reward for a small (or large) amount of gold.

You know why World of Warcraft is so addictive? HabitRPG knows, and it's using that power for good.

It looks good. The user interface is clean, simplistic, and does the job in a pixelated style. Your character is roughly customizable to fit a variety of appearances, and you can upgrade him to wear cooler gear and hang out with pets as you progress. There are ads on the page, but they're as unobtrusive as possible and can be dismissed if you donate to the development team.

It's free. As noted, you can donate to the developer, but it's not required. Enjoy the full features of the site for absolutely no money.

It's social. If you feel up to that sort of thing, you can form a Habit Adventuring Party (patent pending) or spend some time chatting with other HabitRPG folk in the tavern. Another plus: while you can log in with Facebook, HabitRPG won't spam your wall for no reason.

The Bad

The system is easy to cheat. If you play by the rules, you'll find yourself making new habits, but it's very easy to avoid any consequences. Check off your dailies! Ignore your bad habits! Basically if you can't stick to the honor system, this website is useless.

Tasks are tricky to organize. You've got habits, dailies and to-dos, which is fine, but the to-dos can be hard to organize, especially if you build up too many to fit on one screen. It's not great to find out you were supposed to bathe the dog two weeks ago, but the task ended up five screens down on the list. Some sort of folder system (perhaps based on the recently-introduced tags) would help make it easier to keep tasks organized.

The Ugly

The user interface ranges from unstable to broken. I'm not sure what code base HabitRPG uses, but the GUI is tricky at best. Simply marking a task complete might require refreshing the page three times, and moving a task entry can send it flying across the screen for no reason. These aren't things that should be happening in a modern user interface, even one that's still technically in development. I'm hoping the planned mobile apps for HabitRPG will be an improvement, but they need to get these things fixed regardless.

Overall, HabitRPG has some kinks that need to be worked out, especially in the user interface, but it's still a worthy tool to help you increase your productivity. Especially if you like EXP.

Writer's Review: Dropbox vs Google Drive

If you're anything like me, you worry about backing up your writing. All sorts of things can burn you: hard drive failures, lost notebooks, actual fires, the dog ate my manuscript... anything, really.

Cloud storage is getting to be the backup solution of choice for a lot of people. Put your stuff on the Internet and you can download it anywhere! Never worry about losing your work because it's living on a gajillion servers!

I've been using Dropbox for months to backup my work. It's simple: You have a folder on your computer. You put your writing into it. If you're connected to the Internet, your work gets uploaded. Done. As long as you don't have more than 2 gigabytes of files to upload, you don't even have to pay for anything.

Then this week Google released Google Drive, which is Dropbox by Google. It works on the same principle (see folder: drop files in), but it integrates with Google Docs and comes with a whopping 5 gigabytes of storage, free. So if you're a writer, is there a good reason to switch?

Storage

It's hard to argue with 5 gigs of free storage compared to Dropbox's 2. Granted, it's very easy to get a lot of additional Dropbox storage, free, especially if you have a smartphone. And if you're just using these programs for writing, well, it's fairly hard to fill up 2 gigs of space with only text files and Word documents.

With that said, Google Drive unquestionably has more storage, cheaper, right out of the gate. And if you do get to the point where you need to pay for additional storage, Google sells it for about half the price Dropbox does.

Advantage: Google Drive

Syncing

Dropbox and Google Drive sync files in fairly different ways. The basic idea is the same - file changes are uploaded to your cloud storage from one computer, then downloaded from the cloud to any other computers you've got the program installed on. But Dropbox has a feature called LAN sync, which lets you sync files across Dropbox-equipped computers on your personal LAN (i.e. your home wireless network) without reaching out to the Internet. This means you get much faster syncing if you have multiple computers at home. Google Drive doesn't do this at all: everything has to upload to and download from Google directly.

Another issue comes with resolving conflicts, where you try to save two different copies of the same file to the cloud. Say you edit a document on one computer while you're offline, then edit that same document on a different computer while you're online. When you connect that first computer to the Internet, the two files will be different, and you'll need to resolve the conflicts to make sure you've got the right version of the file saved.

Dropbox handles this by renaming the conflicted file, identifying it as conflicted and adding the name of the problem computer to the filename. This makes it very easy to figure out what happened, and to clear up the conflict.

Google Drive, on the other hand, just uploads both files and saves them in the cloud with the same filename ( but different timestamps). The duplicate files get downloaded to all computers as copies, renamed using whatever native scheme the operating system uses (i.e. test.txt and test (1).txt). The problem with this is that you can easily end up losing track of which file is which. Here's an example:

- I create a file test.txt on my laptop while I'm offline. It says "Hello".

- I then create the same test.txt file, with different text in it, on my desktop while it's offline. It says "World".

- I connect both systems to the Internet and sync with Google Drive.

- I check my laptop. There's a file called test.txt that contains "Hello", and a file called test (1).txt that contains "World".

- I check my desktop. There's a file called test.txt that contains "World", and a file called test (1).txt that contains "Hello".

- This happens:

You can see how that could be a problem.

Advantage: Dropbox

Versioning

Both Google Drive and Dropbox have file versioning features. Basically if you edit a file, you can retrieve the previous version from your cloud storage for a fixed period of time.

Google Drive seems to keep your revisions pretty much forever, which is extremely handy. Dropbox can do the same thing, but only if you use a paid storage plan. If you only use the free storage, you only keep your revisions for 30 days. On the other hand, Google Drive only keeps revisions for files that you haven't deleted. If you delete a file and empty your trash, it's gone forever. Dropbox will let you reclaim your deleted files, but only for the times noted above.

Advantage: Google Drive - but only the free version

Writing Tools

I use Scrivener for most of my manuscripts these days, so it's important that my cloud backup system can cope with Scrivener's file format (really a bunch of folders containing text files and RTFs) well. On the surface, both Google Drive and Dropbox don't have any problem handling it. It's all files, after all.

Google Drive does have big one gotcha, however, which is that it wants to convert any RTF files you upload into Google Docs format, and store them like that. This is a huge no-no if you want Scrivener to keep working. A Google Doc is not an RTF, and you can't edit it like one, even if you have Google Docs offline set up. Fortunately it's very easy to disable this "feature". Dropbox doesn't have an equivalent cloud file format, so it's a non-issue.

There's also the syncing issue I mentioned above. A conflicted Scrivener file is a pain in the ass no matter what program you're using, but Google Drive has the potential to be a much bigger pain in the ass than Dropbox.

On the other hand, Google Drive does let you edit your files directly in the cloud using the well-developed Google Docs interface. If you're don't want to pay for Scrivener or Microsoft Office, this is a very good rich text editor (not as good as LibreOffice, mind, which is free). Also, Google Docs don't count towards your storage limits. Again, Dropbox has nothing comparable to this.

Advantage: Tie - it really depends on how you want to work

Collaboration

I haven't collaborated on my writing online, so I really can't speak to this from personal experience. However, Google Drive lets you collaborate on a per-file basis, where Dropbox limits you to collaborating by sharing entire folders with other people. This makes Google Drive easily a much more collaboration-friendly solution, giving you a greater amount of granularity in how you share files with much less hassle than Dropbox.

Advantage: Google Drive

Summary

Overall I'd say that either solution is very useful as a backup solution, if nothing else. Which one you choose is largely going to depend on how you like to work.

Google Drive gives you more space than Dropbox for less money. It has a robust collaborative editing system, and gives you the ability to create and edit files directly on the cloud. For somebody who wants to store a lot of files, or wants to work in a team environment frequently, Google Drive takes the crown.

On the other hand, Dropbox beats the pants off of Google Drive when it comes to syncing, both in speed and conflict resolution. It's also a bit nicer about recovering files you deleted, if only for 30 days, and Dropbox's storage space limitations can be overcome (and exceed Google Drive's limits by 11 gigabytes, if you work at it) without too much trouble. If you don't collaborate, and you work across multiple computers in your own house, Dropbox is the preferable solution.

I will probably end up sticking with Dropbox for now, if only because I'm already familiar with the program, and I value the syncing benefits Dropbox has over Google Drive's collaboration tools. If Google Drive improves over time, I might well consider switching later.

P.S. If you want to give Dropbox a try, please use this link to sign up. I could use the extra space.