A Fit Geek

Where have I been? where to begin… I have been working very long and hard on the new version of the FitFoodDiary. We are coming close to over the 1000 download milestone and I am getting very excited! I have learned a ton in the past few weeks from going live with my first App. One thing I have learned and am kind of disappointed in is the fact that users are not using the app consistently, there seems to be a drop off and I have reason to believe it is pure lack of will to commit to a new eating plan. Or the fact that people get discouraged once they realize what their eating and how difficult it is going to be to loose the weight. Believe me I know it is hard that is why I created some steps to follow to make it a bit easier on yourself. Tracking what you eat has been proven to shed the pounds.

What’s to come? and why I left certain functions out that other “Tracker apps” leave in

I have been receiving a ton of feedback about the FitFoodDiary, and I would like to touch on a few points that have came up recently.

I purposely left an Estimated Calorie goal calculator  OUT of the app. Why?

Because, using a formula is to general… your calorie goal should be more specific to you the individual. What I am trying to say is, the formula may work and will give you a good starting point. But I believe that expecting someone that has been eating poorly for the past 5 years to just switch from having 3000 calories a day to say the 1800 calories a day that the formula will give you can be a bit discouraging. My suggested approach to finding your calorie goal is simple and can be reached by following some simple steps:

• Day 1. Weigh yourself write it down, Track the calories you consume for a normal day of eating.
• Day 2. Consume 100 less calories you consumed on day 1
• Day 3. Consume 100 less calories you consumed on day 2
• Day 4-7. Consume same amount of calories that you consumed on day 3
• Day 8. Weigh yourself, if you are happy with your results… Say you lost 2+ pounds then keep using the same calorie goal as you did on days 3-7 for the following week if not then lower your calorie goal by another 100 for every day of the next consecutive week.
• Week 2->n. Weigh yourself every week, Follow the same rule but try to keep in mind how you are feeling. If you feel to tired, drowsy and fatigued all the time it could be a sign you are not consuming enough! Raise that calorie goal.

This approach is a lot more “realistic” in today’s world. You have to teach yourself how to eat good, but we can’t expect you to do that overnight it just doesn’t make any sense and is why many FAD diets do not succeed.

The next few topics I would like to discuss are features that are in the works… or finished but waiting to be released with other goodies.

New styling! I did some research on how to theme your sencha touch app and come across some awesome videos. It did require me to install Ruby and the Compass Gem which I was not to familiar/comfortable with. But I believe I have the hang of it now, and the new theme is ready for release!

Graphing, the graph is in the works as well. Sencha also has some awesome touch graph libraries that I am looking forward to diving into. If you have not noticed in V1.1 we started tracking your progress and giving you a little ConGratz! when you successfully lost weight, this in turn has given us the opportunity to use that data to populate the graph!

Bar-code scanner… If 1 more person tells me I should have a bar-code scanner in my app…grr this has been a frustrating implantation for me. It looks like w3 has only recently enabled HTML5 web apps access to the camera device and there is not really any documentation/working examples available to learn from. So I am tacking this on, it turns out that Android 3.0′s browser should be able to handle this. As far as ios… well you may just be sol for now.

I would also like to mention some “Hot Fixes”, We fixed an issue where certain devices would attempt to make a call when clicking on a food item in the food list. This was occurring because certain phones try to call numbers that are in certain formats. Also fixed an issue where food text labels would not wrap properly in the food search list.