My friend's mom Pauline was trying to lose some baby weight, so she signed up for the proven-to-work Ideal Protein diet. She met with a dietician once per week. Her biggest complaint was having to track all of her progress by hand; why didn't the company have a smartphone app?
Enter me.
I will admit, when I sat down to work on this project, I did not know as much as I do now about code, or version control, or Git. I was also working by myself. I went to Barnes and Noble and bought a "Teach Yourself in 24 Hours" book. Once I finished the book, I looked at a copy of Pauline's written diary and sketched on paper what I thought the electronic diary would look like. I then got to work using Interface Builder.
- The app stores four weeks' worth of records: two weeks before and after the current date.
- For each day, Pauline can record what she ate for four meals, indicate which Ideal Protein food product she consumed with each meal (Pauline was a huge fan of their protein shakes), check off the Ideal Protein supplements (Fish Oils, Calcium, etc...) she consumed, indicate if and for how long she exercised, and rate her overall mood for the day.
- In preparation for her meeting with her dietician, Pauline can then e-mail a PDF with her weekly summary to the dietician.
The biggest bug I encountered had to do with the dates. As of now, unless the app has not been used recently, the app will crash because it has trouble initializing the array. I hope that by pushing this project to Github I will find some assistance with this bug. Until then, it is a portfolio piece I can talk about and be proud of!
Also worth noting, I think the code is a little bit smelly, and as such, the app is a little bit slow on a phone. But... it works.
Screenshots can be found at my portfolio page, www.itsakap.com