Dash an hourly habit tracker, one day wide

A wall of boxes for the things you do a little of, often.

Dash is a habit tracker built for exercise snacking — press-ups every hour instead of an hour in the gym — and for the iPad next to your keyboard that shows you the day. It turned out that a row of boxes with a tap in each is a good way to keep at almost anything: water, screen breaks, physio, pills, five a day, and settling once and for all whether anyone has fed the cat.

Dash on an iPad in landscape: six grids stacked, each a row of boxes from the first hour of the day to the last, with a seven-day strip beside each — iPad, landscape, on a stand by the desk. Six grids, one day, first hour to last. A box flashing, a tap, a pick — that's the whole interaction.

An exercise-snacking app for iPhone and iPad, with a real Mac app and an Apple Watch app. Hourly habits, one tap each. Pay once — no subscription.

Where it came from

It started as a sheet of paper on the desk.

Exercise snacking is the idea — not ours — that a few minutes of movement every hour does you more good than one block of it a day, and is far easier to keep up. It suits anyone whose day is spent tied to a desk, which is where we started: ten press-ups between meetings beats a gym you never get to. The obvious way to keep count is a grid — hours across the top, a tick in each box — and that's what was on the desk.

Paper has three problems. You can't see it from the kitchen. It doesn't nag you at three o'clock when the last box was at eleven. And just when you need to fill it in, the cat is sat on it.

So Dash is that grid, kept on the devices you already carry. A box is one hour. A tap fills it. The tally, the run and the week beside it take care of themselves. It's called Dash in the salt sense. Every box is a dash of something — exercise, water, a walk — a little, often, rather than a lot, once.

How it worksOne box, one tap.Grids by the hour or by the count; ticks or amounts; goals with a floor, a ceiling or a range; runs; nags that stop when you're done. ExamplesNot limited to exercise.Water, screen breaks, physio, fruit and veg, calories in a range, the cat — twelve grids as they look on the wall. Sharing & dataYour data stays yours.It stays on the device until you say otherwise. Your other devices get a grid through your own iCloud account. Share individual grids with other people — they see that grid, and nothing else of yours. DevicesPocket, stand, desk and wrist.iPhone in your pocket, iPad on a stand next to the keyboard, a real Mac app, an Apple Watch app that syncs on its own.

Free to start, then pay once

Two grids for nothing. Unlimited grids, all your devices and sharing for about the price of a coffee.

The free version

Two grids on any device you install it on — iPhone, iPad, Mac — with every feature: goals, nags, trends, export.

Each device's grids stay local, though: they aren't linked to each other and they can't be shared. Your Watch shows your iPhone's grids either way — it gets them from the phone directly.

One-time cost

Pay once: as many grids as you like, your grids kept in step across all your devices (and on your Watch), and sharing with other people.

No subscription. It costs about the same as a coffee-shop latte, once; the App Store shows the exact figure for your country.

No ads

None. No tracking, and no "upgrade" banners across the wall.

The free version is the app, not a demo of it.

In summary

What Dash is, in a paragraph.

Dash is an exercise snacking app for iOS. It's an hourly habit tracker for iPad and Mac, with an Apple Watch app, and a micro-habit tracker with no subscription — one purchase, all four devices. If you work from home at a desk, it's a desk habit tracker: the setup we've ended up with is the iPad on a stand next to the keyboard, showing the whole day, and the Watch doing the nagging. The wall is the thing you glance at; the tap on the wrist is the thing you can't ignore; and the box gets filled from whichever is closer.