New Auth, Legacy Data, New Options
I'm a father and husband, a software developer, a computer geek, a board game collector, and a heart transplant recipient living in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin.
Well, it’s been just shy of a week since the launch of the new version of TrendWeight. Early feedback was mostly positive and many small bugs were squashed in the first few days.
There were also a couple larger improvements that just went live that are worth explaining.
As always, if you run into any issues, don’t hesitate to reach out to erv@ewal.net
New Authentication Provider
The previous authentication system was from Supabase. It mostly worked. Except for two problems:
People kept getting kicked out and forced to log in again. This was driving me personally crazy.
A small number of people couldn’t log in at all for some unknown reason
It turns out that maybe Supabase’s authenticaiton system is just not quite mature yet. So I replaced it. TrendWeight now uses Clerk which has a better reputation and a more traditional approach. This should be mostly transparent to those that used the system in the first week (although you will have to log in one more time per device). The new system will let you stay logged in as long as you visit the site once every 90 days or so.
Legacy Data
It turns out that a few users had a lot of historical data in the old site that doesn’t actually live in Withings/Fitbit anymore for whatever reason. So while the new site did re-download all their weight data from Withings/Fitbit, they were seeing less than they were used to. The good news is that the old site’s database still exists.
There is now a feature for those that had accounts at the old site that will pull over whatever data existed there and that data will be merged with what Withings and/or Fitbit have going forward. If for whatever reason, you decide you don’t want that old data in your charts, you can disable the legacy data in your settings.
Start Date Improvements
The final addition is an improvement to Start Dates. The new onboarding UI didn’t prompt people to pick a start date and most people probably never bothered to visit the Settings and so weren’t aware of it. So now, new accounts get asked up front if they want to pick a start date (users of the old site had their previous Start Date copied over automatically).
Additionally, the new site behaves a bit differently than the old site in a way that wasn’t what everyone wanted. The old site only showed you data from your Start Date onward. However the new site gets everything that Withings and/or Fitbit have for you. That’s often useful, but in some circumstances it you may want to focus only on weight data from your Start Date forward, so there is a new setting that lets you hide data from before your start date, which will make the weight chart behave like the old site did:
