Comments on: FoodPad Calorie Tracker

FoodPad Calorie Tracker

JDHarper — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:28:37 -0800

After a lot of learning, I've written and published my first iPhone app. FoodPad makes it as easy as possible to keep track of what you eat.

Any foods that you enter are remembered in an autocomplete list for later meals. There's also a handy recipe calculator that helps you find out how many calories there are in your favorite meals.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with how it came out, and I hope that others find it as useful as I have.

By: grumblebee

grumblebee — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 11:12:23 -0800

I would grab it if it came with a database of foods and calorie counts.

By: bwerdmuller

bwerdmuller — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 05:24:34 -0800

I second this: if it came with an initial db, I'd use it every day.

By: JDHarper

JDHarper — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:26:45 -0800

I was thinking about this. My problem with an initial database is that you're stuck with either making it not contain enough or making it contain way, way too much.

One of the biggest complaints other calorie counting apps get is that their databases don't contain obvious things like 2% milk or that they're focused on data from fast food companies. On the other hand, if you look up "ground beef" on NutritionData.com, you'll find 34 different entries based on how the meat was cooked and the percentage of fat--it's unwieldy and hard to find just what you want.

So my compromise was to leave out the initial database entirely and let the user build a database of things that *they* eat. After a couple of weeks, you'll have most of the foods that you eat in the database. It's not a perfect solution, but it's the best idea I could think of.

I am open to suggestions though.