I’d like to introduce my app which I have been working on for about half a year, it’s called Baby Journal and it’s an end-to-end encrypted app for tracking your baby activities, like feeding, diaper changes and so on.
On iOS you can install it to your homescreen as a webapp, on Android you can either install it as a webapp or directly from Google Play. On both you can just run it from your browser. Neither has any advantage over the other, the content will be the same.
Links:
- baby-journal.app - the (optionally installable) webapp
- Google Play Store
- Backend source code
- App source code
Now onto the app itself!
The biggest feature is that it’s entirely end to end encrypted and I as the server operator have no access to your unencrypted data. I’m of the opinion that the privacy of your kids should not be compromised for some company to make a quick buck.
What activities can the app track?
- feeding tracking - nursing (left and right breast separately), bottle, solid foods
- diaper changes - wet, poopy or both, you can also select the color and amount
- breast pumping - left and right breast separately
- sleeping
- temperature taking
- weight
- length
- milestones - with cute descriptions!
- with ability to add custom milestones
And some cool features!
- tracker - just hit start on your activity and let the app count how long it takes
- multiple babies - if you have more than one bundle of joy, you can switch between them easily
- sharing with multiple other accounts - you can easily share your data with as many people as you want without compromising privacy
- shared tracking - if you use the app with multiple people, you can enable shared tracking - start tracking on one device, finish tracking on another
- data at a quick glance - on the main screen you can see when was your baby fed for the last time, when they had a diaper changed and so on
- various fine-tune settings - do you want to calculate the time since last feeding since the beginning of the feeding or since the end? Do you want to ignore small gaps between multiple feedings (for example 10 minutes while you switch from nursing to bottle) as one feeding session? Does water count as feeding? All configurable!
- daily summary - you can get a nice summary where you can see all the important data in a concise format
Currently the data can only be tracked in metric units, but imperial support is coming.
Note that the encrypted nature has one downside - if you don’t export your account code and lose access to the app (for example your device breaks), there’s no way to recover your account. I advise you to securely store your account code as soon as possible.
For advanced users there’s also a self-hosting option! You can run your own backend and app. Or you can just run your own backend and point the official app to it. Currently there’s not much documentation on how to do that, but if you need that, I can write something up.
Do let me know if you have any questions!
You must log in or register to comment.
This is awesome and I wish I had this 18 months ago! Another feature I used on my baby tracking app that was helpful and could be worth implementing is medicine tracking. The medicine tracking was great when little one had a fever and we needed to know when we last gave her Tylenol or if one parent did it and forgot to tell the other so we didn’t accidentally overdose. We logged the type, amount, and time. I loved seeing all the data on my little one and it was very helpful when my partner and I took shifts to know when the last diaper change or feed was.
Yep, that’s planned, as it has already been requested.
Can someone make one of these to track someone in their mid 40s?
Well, technically speaking you can use it for that.
This is cool. I use an app a lot like this but for my puppy. Logging is super helpful at the start of getting a puppy and trying to track bowel habits and training progress.
If you ever feel like it, a mode for tracking puppies is useful. I currently use “Doggy Time” by a developer that also makes a similar baby tracker.
Is there a limit to the number of babies trackable? Like say you wanted to track 100+ babies.
There’s not, though it’s untested how it would behave with 100+ babies.
how does this compare to: https://github.com/babybuddy/babybuddy (I used babybuddy for my two kids, it was great)
Note that I only did a brief evaluation of baby buddy, compared to that:
- better looking and less confusing
- snappier user interface
- fully end-to-end encrypted
I don’t know about other features, like sharing etc., but my reason to create this was that I wanted something modern looking without security compromises.
deleted by creator
I’ll whip up some docker image during the next week!
