I haven’t blogged in a while. I have still been doing cool things at work but my free time has been taken up with something else..

I made in iOS application. It’s called Sownata.

It’s been around for a while but I haven’t really promoted it until now because I wanted to be sure that it was good enough. There is still room for improvement (and I have lots of great ideas of how it can grow) but I think now is the time to find out if it’s worth the time and effort that’s gone into it.

There’s a website (www.sownata.com) with information for the broader audience but if you’re reading this blog then I think I can give a better overview than Sownata is a structured digital diary that keeps track of the little things so that you can see the bigger picture.

I loved my first job. It was a great company (www.metapraxis.com) full of great people. I will always be grateful for my time there as a graduate. When I think about my work-related strengths it is often easy to draw a line back to what I learnt as a young developer at Metapraxis.

I think that, even with all the advances in technology over the last 20 years, there is still a lot of scope to leverage the effective visualisation of data to make the world a better place, particularly outside the world of business.

One of the things I learned back then was to ask tangible questions that could be answered with tangible data to yield real insights. These insights often yield new questions (and so on) until you are thinking on a whole other level. In my opinion, that’s when you start winning at stuff…

That’s what Sownata is for, it’s BI but for people. It’s giving you access to a perspective that some people (including you) might not want you to see but that can be used to help reach your goals.

The biggest challenge has been to make the cost of data collection as low as possible. It is easier in 2020 to get access to your data than it was in 2010 but for many popular services it’s still not particularly easy.

Sownata as it stands today can understand data from Google (YouTube), Facebook and Netflix (although you have to do some of the work). I made it as easy as I could to add data manually (including support for Siri). It is my hope that I have done enough to prove the concept.

If you have an Apple device, please give it a go. Any and all feedback will be gratefully received.

If you like it, please share it with anyone in your network that you think will be interested. I have a feeling that I am about to discover that making the application is the easy part…

If you’re still reading this.. Thank You!