Air

This may sound petty but for someone who studies design interface Fitday drives me batty. Some searches bring up some stuff and leaves out others, it times out after 10 minutes, etc...

The hardest part is finding what you need to enter. I had a turkey wrap that I made. Wrap, mustard, mustard greens, turkey, low fat cheese. No wraps listed though is a fairly common food to pick up. Honey baked turkey from the deli. What the heck to I put in for the slices? Turkey Ham? Turkey Breast? 4 oz of ground turkey is wildly different then 4 oz of turkey breast which is wildly different than 4 oz of turkey ham. No idea but there are 15 different ways of eating the tail of the turkey. I'm not sure but I'm guessing more people have some cold cuts from a deli than eat turkey tail for lunch.

The low fat cheese - to make the numbers add up to the package I have to put like 4 ounces of cheese even though I only had a slice (I can't accept that one ounce was 24 but .75 oz was 34 calories - huh?). Don't get me started on reduced fat vs low fat vs lowfat - good luck searching! I also made a fruit salad that I snack off of or freeze and make shakes from. Multiple entries for canned with sugar, with mayonnaise (wtf?! do people put mayonnaise on fruit? Ugh) but nothing for just fruit with no processing without going through and adding 1/4 of an apple, 1/4 pear, one slice of a cantolope, one square inch of pineapple and 15 blueberries. Yes, I know I can add custom foods. I have a bunch, in fact it started erasing some of them when I added new ones. Very useful.

Truthfully, the time out annoys me the most. Because after I figure out which food it was that I do need to enter I took too long.

So, I've sent them a few emails and never got a response back. Does the desktop version do a better job with different foods or am I still going to be frustrated but now out $20 and have a pretty interface? Do both the desktop and web interface pull the food data from the same source?

Thanks!

PS I DO like the way it tabs nutrition and caloric intake over a period of time. I know that they tout that as being a big upgrade but if I can't get accurate food into the database then all the analysis in the world won't help.

BeckyW

I do pretty well with the online version - though I agree that it's sometimes impossible to find the common food you're looking for, because there are so many bizarre foods listed alongside it.

Have you used the Custom Foods feature? I've added most of the foods that I have on a weekly basis - turkey, extra lean ground beef, 2% cheese, etc - and things that I always make the same way, using the same ingredients. After using Fitday for a few months now, probably 80% of what I eat is either on the "recent" tab or the "custom" tab, and the rest is fairly easy to find.

I wouldn't want to go to the downloaded version, simply because I don't always use the same computer to enter foods.

bautieri

Have you tried using an alternate web browser? I run into lots of problems supporting users with IE 7. IE 6 worked much better in my opinion but that's neither here nor there. Personally Firefox and Opera work best for me. If you use Windows, is it all up to date? Other than that, check and make sure you have the latest Flash and Java builds. I didn't make an account with fitday so I'm unsure what (if anything) drives the site.

Air

The problem is that whenever you deviate it becomes a project to figure out what to put in, which leads to skipping a few days, which leads to not really caring what's in there, and so the downward spiral starts On top of that we have quite a diverse cuisine in NY so if I happened to eat out once in a while I can't even begin to figure out what to put in there especially if the base ingredients vary significantly.

These are all backend database issues with poor unique identifiers and inconsistent data (by oz, slice, low fat vs lowfat vs reduced fat, etc...), not front end issues (I'm a web developer by trade). That's why I'm curious if the desktop version pulls the same data or if it's been cleaned up a bit. [And no, I haven't used IE for years.]

Nightcap

The best interface I've yet found is LifeForm, from Fitnesoft. It hails from Windows 3.1 days, but is flexible (it handles unit conversion better than any current calorie/exercise tracker), easily modifiable, and solid. Pete Peterson got a crew together to write it after his WordPerfect career ended, and while it's still being sold, it's really not supported. Shame, because a Web 2.0 version would be easy.

BeckyW

Oops.... *goes back to elementary school reading class*

Air

Hehe - yeah, I know no one reads more than the first two lines anyway. It did make me feel better though

bautieri

I almost want to call bologna but your statement intrigues me. I seldom blow the dust off the IE icon, but every now and then I have no choice but to use it. This mainly occurs with the Pennsylvania state civil service and various other federal government sites. Do you use a non Windows PC? We're under contract to use Windows based PC's on Dell Computers (double yikes).

Pardon the threadjack, but have you found one go to browser for certain websites where only IE seems to work?

shog

The paid version is marginally better. From a UI and database design it is still really poor. I QA software for a living and this app would not have seen the light of day if it had come out of any shop I ever worked for. My big gripes with the desktop version is the search engine is weak and does some really odd matches, the UI is really mouse centric, it's hard to use the keyboard with it. You pick up some features to allow you to change the display and customize some fields. However you can't remove anything that already exists in the in the UI dropdowns nor can you delete things from the DB. You do pick up the ability to group foods together into a custom food so you can define Turkey Wrap and it will populate for you. What I still do is enter the foods I eat on a regular basis into the "Custom Foods" and I find it makes easier to work with. Reporting is a little better but lacks some key features to allow you to print a range of days from the food log (I work with a nutritionist so every week, it's click print, click print), same thing for exercise log. The exercise log values are grossly off in a lot of places and again no way to fix them but to enter custom activities. Oh cut and paste can really give you some strange results and drag and drop can be even more exciting. All that said I still use it everyday because I haven't seen anything better. I have found with the paid version they do listen to what you have to say. I am hoping for a version 2.

BTW For wraps search for tortillia - Also assume any fast food wrap is fairly high calorie and contains lard :-( . Wraps can be good food you just have to watch what's in the tortilla and how the meat is prepared.


Shog

Air

Thanks shog - now that's an answer!

One more question for ye - does it sync with the online version or once you go to the desktop you're stuck there?

[I bought the wrap myself so I knew what the values were. Whole wheat, 110 calories, 10 grams of protein and 7g of fiber.]

Halthane

Some of that data problem, the low fat vs. lowfat vs. reduced fat vs. no fat is probably at least a little bit due to the fact that the government agencies that regulate these things can't really agree on what these terms mean either.

But I feel your pain, I used fit day for a while but switched to spark people for a while, because fit-day was so clunky. I use trainingpeaks.com for excercise logging now (the free version) and when I get stuck on plateaus I go back to spark people to track calories for a while to make sure that i'm not eating to many calories.

Wogster

The problem for some of these things is that the terms low fat, lowfat, reduced fat are not always legally defined, so company A with a product that is 95% fat and reduces that to 50% fat could call it reduced fat, company B with the same initial product reduces the fat to 94.999999% also calls that reduced fat, yet the calories are going to be wildly different.

The other issue, is a database one, you need unified units. I have seen sliced ham where the slice was under 1/32" thick, and another where it was nearly 1/2" thick. The number of calories is going to be vastly different, but still gets logged the same. Weight is probably the best unit to unify on, people can either guestimate or get a scale and weigh everything, if they want to be accurate. The problem with many foods is that an ounce is a fairly large unit, and can't be divided well, it's easier in metric where you can use grams or even milligrams.

Wogster

Hmmm, I nicknamed IE Internet Exploder years ago, it's one of those products where they keep adding new features, but never seem to get around to dealing with the real problem, reliability. However I have that problem with most Microsoft products, they should just work, and work reliably. When I had Linux on one computer, it ran for a year before a power failure meant a reload, I have yet to have a Windows computer that doesn't need daily restarts.

My bike does need an occasional reboot, but that's a different kind of boot, and once I put 2000 miles on the boots I expect to need to replace them

v1k1ng1001

It seems like as long as the website does not require active X controls, then you should be able to use any browser you want, correct?

shog

No sync with the online version (I had to go look).

My wish list for fitday would be

1. 100% editable food database (including delete) - I will never eat chicken feet (73 cals a foot)
2. Clean up the UI - Just make it work within the usability guidelines for screen readers for the vision impaired would be a huge step and would take care of a lot of the issues
3. Better Printing Options - print ranges would be great
4. Get cut and paste working
5. Related to 2 - Make all pages/options work consistently.

All that said it's probably about average quality for a software application. It just needs serious polishing

Shog