KKiserApps

The USDA has updated their food database due to some bad calculations. I’ll be working on making the updates in the app, and will double check my formulas for all of the cost calculations to make sure they are correct.

Interesting point I never knew, is that weight watchers also uses this database as their underlying food database.

When I released the iPad version, I forgot to update the help file. Here’s the new version of help for the iPad, please suggest improvements.

Using the application

The Main Screen shows a daily summary for the current day:

• How much of your budget is remaining
• How much of your budget is used
• How much of you weekly bonus is remaining
• How many exercise boosting values you have
• How many glasses of water you have drank
• Your current entries for the day
• Latest Blog Postings
• A graph of your food consumption per day for the current week

The Remaining and Bonus Remaining buttons turn yellow
when you have used up 80% of the allotment, and turn red when you have reach 90%.

Recording meals, exercise and water

To record a new meal or exercise, simply hit the Used button for food or Acitivity button for exercise on the Summary screen. An entry screen will appear. On the entry screen, record the date and time or time period, the food
eaten or exercise performed and number of servings or how long you
performed the exercise. The cost or boost will be calulated for you.
You may change this value if you need to.

You can alternatively record a ‘Quick Entry’ for food. This allows you to simply fill in the name of what you ate, and the cost. If you track by points or points+ you will also be presented with a calculator. Simply fill in the information and hit Calculate. You only need to fill this information in if you want the points calculated for you, otherwise they can remain empty.

To record how much water you have drinken. select a glass of water. Touch a checkboxed water glass to undo a water recording.

When choosing a food or exercise, you may use the extensive built in
database or you may create your own entries.

Favorites

You can mark a food or activity as a favorite and have it appear on ‘Your’ list of items. You can do this from the management
screens or by touching the blue disclosure button when choosing an item. Once on the information screen for the item, you can tap the Star next to the item name to mark it as a favorite.

The Main Menu

The Main Menu is accessed by touching the menu button in the upper left hand corner while in portrait mode, or rotate the iPad to landscape mode to have it appear.

The Main Menu provides access to:

1. The list of meals you’ve eaten on any given day or week

   You may add new entries from this screen. The date and time/time period for new
   entries will be the same as the last entry for that date.

2. The list of exercise you’ve performed on any given day or week

   You may add new entries from this screen. The date and time for new
   entries will be the same as the last entry for that date.

3. You’re water history
4. You’re weight history
5. Charts and graphs

   Each chart type has an individual information page describing what it
   is.

6. Access to blog postings
7. If you track by values or values plus, there is a quick calulator
8. Settings (the gear icon at the very bottom of the Main Menu) – allows for the management of user diet settings, generic application settings, food list,
   activity list, time periods, a daily budget calculater, blog updates, Facebook integraiton, this help file, and credits. 

Configuration

There are two sets of configuration, User Diet Settings and general Settings.

User Diet Settings

• Name – your user name. All Configuration values are keyed to your name
• Daily Budget – how much you have determined you can consume per day
• Weekly Bonus – if you exceed your budget in any given day, the excess is subtracted from here
• Starting Weight – how much did you weigh when you started using the app or when you started your diet
• First Weight In – on what date did you record your starting weight
• Goal Weight – what weight are you trying to get to
• Start Day of Week – On which day of the week to you start you budget. This is usually the day of or the day after you would weigh yourself. It
  also determines when your weekly bonus is reset.
• Budget Cost by – what are you tracking: Calories, Values, Carbs, etc
• Count Activity Points – do you want your daily budget boosted by any exercise you may do

General Settings

• Use decimals – Displays Budget Used, Budget Remaining, and foods with to decimal places as opposed to rounding.
• Budget on App Icon – a value of ‘on’ will display your reamining daily budget on the App icon. This is only supported on iOS 4.0 and above. At midnight, the app icon should reset to your daily budget. If it does not it is because iOS has too many scheduled notifications and the app’s request was ignored.
• Use lbs not kgs? – Use the imperial or metric system for measuring weight. A ‘on’ value means imperial.
• Use kilojoules? – If you are counting by calories, do you want the calories values converted to kilojoules. A ‘on’ value means convert to kilojoules.
• Display ‘Yours’ first? – when choosing a food item or activity item from the list, which displays by default. A value of ‘on’ means your user entered items, and those items marked as favorites display first, otherwise all items are displayed.
• Log entries by hour – do you want to enter the date and time of entries, or more convienent time periods, Breakfast, Lunch, etc. An on value means date and time.
• Sound effects – a value of ‘on’ means play sounds for those iOS versions that support it, iOS 4.0 and above.
• Activity by Hour – a value of ‘on’ means that you count your activity duration in hours or fractions of hours, otherwise you would enter in the number of minutes you spent on the activity
• Add activity to bonus – Adds your Activity boost to your weekly bonus as opposed to your daily budget.
• Display Activity Indicator – this was to fix a bug in iOS where the spinning activity indicator would sometimes not go away. A value of ‘on’ means display it

Just wanted to know if you have found any issues. So far there appears to be an errant decimal point on the keyboard in landscape mode when entering in numbers. I noticed that on the My Water screen, the color of the screen is the iPhone version and not the iPad version.
Also someone left a bad review in iTunes (I hate bad reviews), but the person mentioned about a screen which doesn’t go away until you rotate the iPad. If this has happened to you, let me know which screen it is, so I can fix.
I plan to put out a small fix it release to address these issues and also make entering values on the Configuration screen consistent with the rest of the app.
I’ve also had a lot of great suggestions in the past week, but will have a separate release for those.

From CNN comes this article on 10 superfoods to help you lose weight.

Several users of the ipad version have asked for a tutorial for using the App. I’ll spend some time this weekend writing one, as the iPad version is very different looking than the iPhone version. I’ll post the tutorial here so you should see it and be able to access it from the main screen.

In addition, I just realized that the help is geared to the iPhone. So in the next release I’ll have updated help just for the iPad.

Now that the iPad version is done and in the approval process, it seems logical that the next bog feature is syncing between your iPhone/iPod Touch and the iPad. Apple’s new iCloud syncing makes the feature easier to do, but it only works on changed information. So the question I need to answer is how to have your initial data, e.g., Food Entries, Weigh Ins, etc initially copied to a new device?

Hopefully it won’t be hard to do!

From CNN comes this great article.

I have discovered, since the last timezone change last week, that going back and looking at entries in the previous timezone doesn’t work. I have a fix!

Why can’t timezones be banned? It would make programmers lives easier!

Not as easy as I thought, but it is moving along. Here’s a screen shot of the main screen, let me know if you like it or not.

I just went on to the United States Department of Agriculture website, where the food database comes from, and it appears they did not calculate some values correctly. I’ll get the updates and in the next release, update the impacted entries.