Ostinato

Support

Ostinato writes the shape of your working day and then gets out of the way.

Getting started

1. Set your window — when you start and when you stop.
2. Say what kind of work today is: long-form, fragmented, or mixed. This sets how long the blocks can be; it is not a category of app, it is a fact about your day.
3. Optionally allow the calendar. Ostinato reads only the times you are busy. It never reads titles, guests, notes or locations, and it works fine without the permission.
4. Tap Write the day.

During the day

The day appears as one vertical strip, with each block's height proportional to its real length. Tap a block to mark where you are. When a block ends, one tap: went well · was weak · didn't happen.

That single tap is the only thing Ostinato measures. It is not a score and nothing is shown to anyone.

Your curve

Those taps build your own decline curve, on the device. Until there are about ten of them, the day is written from stated limits rather than from you — and Ostinato says so instead of pretending.

Frequently asked

Why can't I just set 25/5?

You can set the window and the kind of work. Block lengths come from the rules and from your curve, because a 50-minute deep block at 16:00 is not the 50-minute block you had at 09:00 — and a number you typed in the morning cannot know that.

Why is there no streak?

A streak raises the cost of stopping. Abandoning a day that is going badly is sometimes the right decision, and a product that punishes you for it is not on your side.

Does anything leave my device?

No. There is no account, no server and no network code in the app at all — this is checked by a build gate that fails the release if network frameworks appear anywhere in the app targets.

What does the one-time purchase unlock?

Unlimited partitions a day, and export. Your curve is free — charging you to look at your own data would be a strange thing to do.

Contact

Write to brkekahraman@icloud.com. Please include your iOS version and what you expected to happen.