New Name Needed Maybe?

Greetings denizens of the world wide web,

So it turns out that there is some not very well documented opensource project called Nutricode which I have no idea what it does. There is also Nutricode 2, which I assume is related though closed source(?), which is slightly less, but still fairly mysterious, mostly because there are only about two paragraphs in French which Google does a poor job at translating. I think the project is about encoding nutritional information but I have no real idea. I have no idea if my name infringes on their registered trademark(?) (what does the (R) stand for again?) and I really don't want to give up my totally awesome Star Trek reference (get it nu-tricoder, eh eh? *nudge nudge*). Thoughts, comments, new name suggestions?

(On a side note I should probably get some sleep)

Learning to Windows Phone

Hello fellow members of the internet,

So developing for Windows Phone is very nice. Laying out a GUI in Microsoft Expression Blend is really simple and easy. The only thing at this point that is slowing me down is learning the structure for making custom UI components. I'm starting to go through some tutorials. I'm seriously considering just going through every single one of the 31 days of Windows Phone 7 (http://www.jeffblankenburg.com/2010/09/30/31-days-of-windows-phone-7/) tutorials so I make sure I don't miss anything that will make life really simple for me.

I've looked at the API for different features to figure out what I can use to implement my UI. Turns out there is no built in chart library for the Windows Phone version of SilverLight, but there is an open source version that will have to do. I'm still working on getting it to work when integrated into a pivot, but hopefully I can get a working version up sometime in the next few days. On the more convenient side, Windows Phone has a built-in version of SQL for local storage, so that should make things simpler from the local side. I still need to figure out the best way for setting up the server side storage though. I don't know if Eniac will let me host a server directly from my SEAS account, otherwise I'll just have to setup a local server for testing until I get some other hosting setup.

I updated my personal phone to WP7 Mango on Thursday and couldn't be happier. I haven't looked into the APIs for the new features, but hopefully I can get access to the bar code scanner (would be sad if I can't seeing as I'd been working of the native code for it all summer). I really hope that there is support for voice input as well. The voice recognition for Windows Phone is really impressive (though I haven't really seen it used for product names) so that would be a really nice feature to incorporate for food entry rather than typing the full product name in.

User Interface Overview

Hey all,

I've begun laying out the user experience and have a layout for the first form. In total, there will be four panes: "Today's Meals", "Nutrition History", "Recipe Book", "Settings". The user will begin at the "Today's Meals". From there, the user can add food that he has eaten over the course of the day, and view the quality of his nutrition for the day show as a list of progress bars representing the percent daily value consumed of each type of nutrient. One of the later planned features for this page is to allow for recommendations for foods and recipes based upon the remaining unconsumed nutrients that the user needs. For instance if the user has only had 50% daily value of fiber, the app will recommend some type of food which is high in fiber.

Once the user has a few days worth of meal data entered, he can use the "Nutrition History" page to view a chart of his nutritional intake over time. In this way, for instance, the user will be able to see how much cholesterol he has consumed each day over a given period of time. This should help users analyze whether they're dietary options are in fact changing their nutritional intake.

The last pane (settings is pretty self explanatory) is the "Recipe Book" pane. This is where the  user can create and store any recipes that he has encountered or made while he has been tracking information. This will be a pane in which the user can make a list of food with the portion size of each, and save it as a recipe which can be easily added into a meal. The nutrition info can be easily estimated based on the nutrition of the ingredients (however, I will need to examine what the usual expectation is for losing nutrients when a food is cooked).

Nutrition Analyzer

A common problem that many people find themselves in is keeping track of what foods they are eating on a daily basis. With processed foods lining grocery store shelves, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine what exactly goes into the food that you eat.

In attempt to better analyze what goes into one’s diet, I propose a nutrition tracking app which stores all of the nutritional data about the food that one eats. In order to encourage use of the app, we must ensure that entering daily meals is simple and doesn’t require manually entering nutrition facts.

To alleviate this, I propose using techniques such as product search for packaged products, and web search for non-premade recipes in order to automatically estimate nutritional content of meals. Having this nutrition information automatically available will help users determine how different foods contribute to their diet, and how they can change which foods they eat to have a healthy diet.

Coming soon: UI layout proposal, rough timeline proposal.