Dayta: The One Week App

Developer Sahil Lavingia built a high-quality iPhone app in only one week, and blogged about it on the One Week App blog. The resulting application is called Dayta.

Dayta is designed to help you log any sort of data set that you wish to track over time. How many miles do you drive between refilling your gas tank? How much money did you spend on iPhone apps last month? Is your World of WarCraft guild improving its raid success ratio? You can create a Dayta log for anything.

You can recall data points by date, or view them on a graph. The charts Dayta generates are simple, and much like Google Analytics in style.

Inputting data is one area that confuses new users frequently. The default input field is a number that you can increase or decrease by tapping a simple plus or minus icons. The figure is committed to the log by pressing the number itself. But what if you need to enter a larger number, like 216, or something with a decimal point? It took me a little bit too long to have the “duh” moment… If you swipe your finger from right to left, across the input area, it will slide to show a text input with a numerical keypad.

Your various logs are displayed on a Dashboard screen, complete with sparklines next to each log’s name. They can be sorted into folders, too, so things don’t get too cluttered, as would likely happen for stat addicts.

Dayta is a great, and well-designed, application. It’s well worth the $0.99 cost.

Dayta icon and screenshots copyright Sahil Lavingia.