Equilibrium Enterprises, Inc

As one reviewer put it “Wow, Equilibrium has been hard at work. Thanks!”

Indeed EEI has listened carefully to user feedback and incorporated a long list of improvements into The Habit Factor® v.1.5. On top of that, we’re so confident the app will help you reach your goals we’re giving away a FREE, Lite version (limited edition) for you to test without risk!

The FAN mail for The Habit Factor® is incredible and it is amazing to see the user-base around the world growing so quickly! We continue to receive many great feature requests (see below). Please keep the reviews and feedback coming! Here are just a sampling of the reviews, email feedback

Martyn B. said, “I have had Habit Factor for over a week now and appreciate it’s simplicity… Well done with the update. Some good improvements… the app is much more useful now that it only shows the Habits for the day.”

Jim M. said, ” Also, I’d like to say great job on these apps. I use Habit factor to track specific daily habits. I update Virtues weekly the goals are more subjective. I added the Eat That Frog application for a brief list of really ugly to-dos.<- The bright green icon is a real benefit because I can’t avoid seeing the reminder.” - Jim

Jerimy C. said, “First of all, this is a great app. It is the first and last app I check daily.” He then went on to make some recommendations. Again, please keep the recommendations coming!

Here’s an example of us listening to you, from Kednerlin D. “Great application. Very helpful, but there is one very annoying quirk keeping this from being permanent on my ipod. In the Track view, you can only view one Habit at a time. Secondly all my habits are shown in the Track screen regardless of the day I chose to perform this habit.”
BTW:  BOTH OF THESE RECOMMENDATIONS ARE NOW INCORPORATED INTO VERSION 1.5.

The following is a list of updates and improvements:
MAJOR USER REQUESTS
✔ Tracking via a Daily List View
✔ Ability to email Habit and Goal Charts
✔ Charts to include custom date periods and Percent per Habit
✔ Charts to include summary percent of selected Habits
✔ Settings: Badge to Reflect only Active habits on Target Days
✔ Option to track on target day active habits
✔ Associations: Many to Many, Goals to Habits and habits to Goals

OTHER SIGNIFICANT ENHANCEMENTS
✔ Goals: Option to Share via Twitter
✔ Goals: Ability to register Goals as “complete”
✔Goals: Tracking Form View Enhanced

These are on top of the existing feature set:
✔ SEE version 1.5 Enhancements below!!!
✔ Simple, elegant and clean user interface  (designed for the iPhone not web like many habit apps)
✔ Establish custom habits and/or goals
✔ Motivate! Upon setup or each habit or goal, you get to write WHY you wish to develop the habit or goal
✔ ***ALIGN! Use the powerful and unique Habit Alignment Technology™ (HAT) align your habits with goals and vice-versa to achieve goals more quickly
✔ Custom Tracking Periods; a day, week, month or custom
✔ ***Selected specific days of the week for each new habit
✔ ***Color code your habits with key wellness categories; Mind, Body, Spirit and Social
✔ Track your positive habits daily
✔ Log daily notes relating to each habit
✔ Monitor daily progress via Track Screen with % achieved status
✔ Activate only goals and habits when ready for tracking
✔ Sort and Prioritize your Habits and Goals
✔ Graph habit or goal data by with customized periods
✔ Inspirational and powerful habit related quotes
✔ Too many features to list here!

“If you eat a frog first thing in the morning,
the rest of your day will be wonderful.” -Mark Twain

Created in conjunction with international best-selling, personal development guru and author Brian Tracy, Eat That Frog! for the iPhone is a simple, easy, fun way to prod yourself to complete your most onerous, dreaded—and necessary—task first thing, getting it over with and out of the way.

The Truth About Frogs
Mark Twain once said that if the first thing you do each morning is eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that it’s probably the worst thing you’ll have to do all day long.

Your “frog” is your biggest, most important task. It’s the one you are most likely to procrastinate on, even dread. Yet, it is also the one task that can have the greatest positive impact on your life and create positive results immediately.

With that in mind, Eat That Frog! the iPhone app has been specifically designed and developed to ensure that your biggest priorities are handled with the urgency and focus required to make you most effective in your business and personal life. Each day, you’ll be impressed with the momentum and pride created from tackling your most difficult tasks, and at the end of each week and month, you’ll be amazed to see just how many “Frogs” you’ve eaten!

Why Use Eat That Frog?
It’s the ability to focus on priorities and manage time effectively that separates the high achievers from the mediocre.  To that end, Eat That Frog! helps you to quickly establish and track your most important and impactful tasks throughout the each day. As each task is completed you gain momentum and it’s that energy that carries you to new levels of effectiveness.

How To Use
Create as many Frogs as you like, but you can only ACTIVATE AND TRACK ONE FROG AT A TIME.  This is key. Track your daily Frog and add required steps to keep you on target. Establish an estimated completion date for each Frog, and write down why you must complete a particular task. You can even track each Frog over multiple days, if necessary. The app includes the ability to chart completion percentages and status, and you can even e-mail the chart data.
The Eat That Frog! app has an easy-to-understand and clean user interface, including animation and sound (select up to four unique Frog “ribbits!), that helps to both motivate and entertain the user.

Eat That Frog!  is available now at the App Store (http://bit.ly/ETFrog) for only $1.99, introductory price. Coming soon:  Eat That Frog! for Android and BlackBerry devices.

“This app is awesome. It’s basically Applied Behavior Analysis for self-management in your pocket. that means it uses experimentally derived principles of behavior (whether the developers knew/intended this or not) to effect behavior change.”

Review By:  8280 Titled “ABA” - about The Habit Factor® for iPhone

Regardless of the desired goal/objective you must daily track your progress. Old news for sure, but I bring this up because it’s worth reiterating to make sure users of The Habit Factor® fully understand the premise behind the Tracking capability within the app. On occasion, I’ve heard comments like, “why do i have to track my habit- it should just be my habit for my entire life.”

Before I answer that, let me outline the main purpose of the app, The Habit Factor®. ONE: To foster and develop habits you DO NOT currently have via TRACKING so they NO LONGER NEED TO BE TRACKED. Hence, The Habit Factor®. TWO: To help you achieve goals through the development of habits which support those goals. There are others, but those are the two essential benefits we hope users derive from this app. To help people foster better behaviors that become automatic (habits) AND to help them achieve goals by establishing supportive behaviors.

So, to answer the person’s question “Why would I want to track “family time” as a habit when, “I want this habit my whole life.” The answer is;  you TRACK it to ensure you are meeting your ideals in terms of time commitment to the habit. You TRACK it to see how well you are doing against those targets/ideals. If you are easily hitting your targets, chances are it’s already a HABIT and doesn’t need to be tracked or, you may want to increase your target frequency to challenge yourself to commit even more time to the behavior. In either case, it is only through TRACKING that you are able to ASSESS then PROGRESS.

More to come… until next time.

-mg

The early success of The Habit Factor® for iPhone has been extraordinary. The emails and comments from users keep coming. This comment just came in today; Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 10:40 AM from Steven L.

Thank you for creating this wonderful application. It gives me satisfaction to check off daily items that brings me closer to my goals.  It is becoming an indispensable part of my life.

“An indispensable part of my life.” Wow! Fantastic! That does not suck.

Steven went on to make a feature request for the app re: a weekly overview.

So, the point of this post is to simply say THANK YOU and ask YOU to keep the emails and features requests coming. We are listening to all comments and reviews. (Side note: I wish Apple would incorporate a feature where developers/publishers could respond to user reviews within iTunes).

Anyhow, thanks once again and our developers ask you to please keep in mind this is still only just the beginning. This is only version 1.xx of the app. We just unveiled The Habit Factor® mid June. So, you can expect it will be your feedback that will help this best-selling app to mature and fuel our developers creativity.

Having said that, it makes sense now to tell your friends to score the app while its on sale as the new version/upgrade will be free for those who’ve already purchased the app.

Until next time,

-mg

Harmony is the secret of all effectiveness.
~ Orison Swett Marden

Born to be wild. Live to outgrow it.

~Lao Tzu

Bucket List PRO   Ver. 1.0 (Born for adventure on 8.3.09)

Well, from inception to iTunes, Bucket List PRO has been it’s own great life experience. A real adventure.

After upload to Apple for approval, we waited a few weeks then received a “rejected” status due to a strange API issue that even confused our developers. Once that was sorted, we waited another few weeks. Then, finally, the app went “LIVE” but, wait… that’d be too easy. It didn’t actually go live-live!? Yes, as luck would have it, iTunes was having issues and what typically takes 4 hrs once you get the “Live” status turned into 30 hrs plus before our bouncing baby, B.List PRO showed her face in iTunes.

Ben (see Virtues app) would be proud. How patient we have been.

So there you have it folks, Bucket List PRO. While all of our Apps have been very fun to conceive, design, build, use and test. The real joy comes from user feedback. Yes! After all this time  - we’re eagerly anticipating your feedback.

NOTE:
There is an immediate issue out of the gate with the twitter link which is designed to update/share your progress with your B.List item. At the same time the update shares a hyperlink meant to direct readers back to the app to check it out. The link currently does not work. This affects us not really the user. The user updates work to Twitter nicely.

Stay tuned for more Equilibrium fun!

-mg

Develop the mind of equilibrium.
You will always be getting praise and blame,
but do not let either affect the poise of the mind:
follow the calmness, the absence of pride.
~Sutta Nipata

While I ought to be spending this quality time thanking YOU and talking about the thousands of downloads and satisfied users — I find myself slightly concerned about and focused upon the handful of one-star ratings.

Consider that out of, let’s say, 4,000+ downloads there are 30 or 50 users who really don’t like the app. Fair enough; frankly, just due to the general laws of probability, i’d expect the number to be much higher. However, the challenge to date is that these people haven’t left any feedback? No comments to identify what they don’t like. Yes, that can make you and your developers a little nutty in a hurry. So we are seeing these ‘ratings’ yet don’t know if it’s the memory issue, an app issue or a user issue.

I actually mention the later (user issue) because the few emails that have come to our attention at support@equilibrium-ent.com have suggested that these people have not read the About Menu and are not using the app correctly. While The Habit Factor® isn’t rocket science, it does require a basic understanding. [NOTE: new comment at top in iTunes Store].  It takes all of 4 minutes to read the About Menu (within the app) and answers seemingly all usability questions and concerns that have come up to date.

This About Menu exists to SAVE YOU TIME and makes the app far more usable and powerful.

The other ‘funny’ thing is when you do receive a written review and the person asks for a feature that is specifically NOT incorporated and the reason is defined within the About Menu. I won’t go into specifics here but someone wrote a review saying they’d give the app five stars if it did something the app will never do and never intends to do — for good reason. Again, for your sake and our sanity, please read the about menu.

Final Comment:
I recognize it’s only $1.99 App (On Sale Now $.99 - i’ll post about that later) and many people won’t take the time to read an About Menu. However, if they bought the app with the intent to make some improvement in their life; achieve a big goal or modify their character (via habits) you’d think they’d care enough to read some instructions and background info?

We’ve actually discussed making this App much pricier - like $14.99+. There is little doubt sales would fall dramatically (due to the habit for buying cheap apps) but, the people who bought THF at such a ‘premium’ price would undoubtedly take the time to learn more about the app and its best practices.

Perhaps, someday we’ll go there. Right now we’re all learning and the app is still quite young. To the many of you who have offered quality feedback you’ll be happy to know where rolling up many of those recommendations into the next release. I’ll post on that later as well!

keep the emails coming!

-mg

Big thanks to Apple for finally releasing version 1.2!

Notice that with 1.0 there were a select few, (vocal) and understandably unhappy customers who experienced a rare memory issue (note one star reviews!). The recent release corrects those issues AND (based upon several user requests) modifies the badge to decrease based upon the number of Habits completed throughout the day. The 1.0 version of the badge simply revealed ALL active habits whether completed or not. Keep the feedback coming!

Enjoy!

-mg

We must be the change we wish to see in the world.

~Gandhi

THANK YOU!

It’s official — people actually do want to achieve goals and improve their habits (character)… who knew?

Thanks to YOU the Habit Factor® ver. 1.0 has experienced some remarkable early success!! In fact, on a couple occasions, The Habit Factor® ranked as high as #10 (left). But, tragically and shortly thereafter, it has faded out of the top 20. Largely due to a memory issue related to the recent release of OS 3.0.

The good news is Version 1.2 is about to be released and those issues are corrected. Additionally, there is an update to the Habits “Badge” we’re excited to share.

So, thanks again for purchasing recommending and most importantly using The Habit Factor®. Change begins with YOU!

If I didn’t run across this early this morning I wouldn’t believe it. Straight out of Wikipedia under habit psychology…

Habits in the Service of Goals

Goals guide habits most fundamentally by providing the initial outcome-oriented impetus for response repetition. In this sense, habits often are a vestige of past goal pursuit.

How funny is that? “In this sense, habits often are the vestige of past goal pursuit.”

This is precisely what The Habit Factor® app aims to shed light on, only applying the inverse process! If habits are the vestige of a past goal pursuit then they MUST BE A PREREQUISITE to achieve any goal. Simply put, behavioral reverse-engineering at its finest.

If you want to achieve ANY goal, you must first consciously craft the most important, relevant and supporting habits required to attain your goals. By identifying, defining and then daily tracking those habits you create alignment allowing for faster and easier realization of any goal.

Thought that was worth sharing.

Thanks to everyone for the kind comments and great app feedback! We love to hear the success stories so keep up the great work and email us anytime at sales@equilibrium-ent.com

all the best

-mg