Wellbeing App (currently unnamed)

A freeware and open source wellbeing app.

Guiding Principles

This app is being developed, researched and released using the following guiding principles:

1. Research-informed: Wherever possible, any intervention or activity suggested by the app will be supported by academic research. An up-to-date list of academic references (APA style) will be kept within the app with a very brief description on what segment of the app it informed. A more detailed breakdown may appear on my private website, at some point.
2. Agile practises: I will try to adopt agile coding practises as I go through. This means I aim to release useful features as soon as possible and reiterate, refactor and improve based on feedback. Using the in-app feedback button to let me know how things work for you is therefore the best way to gather this information at this stage.
3. Free, Open Source: Inspired by the likes of the NOBA project, the Linux community and countless other highly successful Free, Open Source Software (FOSS) projects out there, my aim is to offer a wide-ranging wellbeing tool available for free to anyone who seeks to use this. The only exception may be future iOS versions, due to the requirement for a paid Developer account with Apple. Even then, this version will be available for a fixed cost, not based on a subscription model.
4. Potentially informing my own research: This guiding principle may develop into something cohesive or fall away completely. I am currently a student at Glasgow University, completing my Master's in Science in Psychology (online conversion). Depending on how successful I am with developing this project, I may end up designing a research project around it to inform my dissertation / thesis. This is an idea I'm toying with. If this pans out, the research project will run separate from this app, but I will seek volunteers to gather anonymous usage data from. I will not build any telemetry into this app. Ever. Any sampling and data collection will run through a separate platform (something like LimeSurvey or SurveyMonkey).

Psychological Principles and Criteria (rough draft)

Perhaps equally as important here are the psychological principles guiding decisions around what to include in this app.

1. Research-informed. Define what this means.
2. Definition of wellbeing. Not as a state or fixed endpoint. But similar to work life balance, as something we must always strive to maintain.
3. The concept of a psychologically rich life, as defined by …

Development Journals

My aim is to write a development journal (or potentially record one on YouTube now and again) whenever I have something meaningful to say. For example, questions like "Why Godot?" or "C# and GDScript? Tell us more..." are questions I will aim to answer there.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.