Alpha Review Feedback

I've gotten some feedback based on my Alpha Review presentation last week, and thought I would take some time to address and respond to some of the comments.

The biggest concern was that I wasn't very far into implementing my project, and was still stuck in the concept phase. I agree somewhat, I don't have nearly as much implemented as I had wanted. I had a lot of trouble finding the right database, and then getting it to integrate into the app. I'll go into a little more detail about what my final choices for databases will be in my next post. I found that coupled with a very busy early semester schedule, learning both Windows Phone development and database management at the same time was taxing on how much actual results I could put out. At this point, I think I am just getting past that initial hump, and so it should be full steam ahead as things should start falling into place.

Many people had requested that I include UPC barcode support into the app for inputting food items. In theory this is a great idea. I'm not entirely certain that this will actually improve ease of input given the current set of data I have right now. The main issue is that there is no good (free) database that links UPC codes to nutritional information. Essentially the solution at the moment will have to be looking up the product in an additional database, then using the product name to search for nutritional information. I will go into more detail about the approach I plan to take in my next post.

There is also the issue, that API support for the native Windows Phone barcode scanner still has yet to be released, so I will need to use some other library to read the bardcodes. I found two libraries, one is an old .NET barcode scanner, and the other is a recent C# port of the ZebraXing barcode scanner (which is used in the Android barcode app).

Other Notable Comments/Suggestions:

What is the target audience, and what is the competition?

I think its hard to really define my target as anything other than: people who want to track their diets using their phone. Most of the app competition, which I believe I briefly outline in one of my early posts, either only track calorie counts or just give analysis of individual foods without taking into account the rest of the days food intake. How my app will differ is that it will track ALL nutritional information. I hope to break the preconceived notion that calories are all that matters. The problem in the past seems to have been that there is just way too many nutrients to keep track of and so people fall back to just calories because it is one easy to understand number. However, we've come well past the point where technology can easily organize all of our nutritional intake for us. Instead of having to add up every nutrient yourself, you will get all of the counts automatically and hopefully get a better understanding of how your diet actually works. I will have another post  this weekend showcasing the planned UI which should better demonstrate how I will make it easier to follow all of the nutrients without being overwhelmed.

Perform OCR on the nutrition facts label

This was actually one of my early feature ideas, so I agree that it would be good to have (especially after seeing the poor showing for free access food product databases). However, since nutrition facts labels might not be laid out in the exact same pattern on every package, the parsing of the label risks being very complicated. While this is a great potential feature, I can foresee this as being something that could easily be a semester's worth of work on its own to get it to work reliably.

Create a webapp to view your information away from your phone.

This would be great to have. Eventually I will need to migrate the majority of the database to a server. However, setting this all up will likely take time that I would rather spend on other features given my limited amount of time. I'll try to slate this into my planning for next semester though.

I will be making a few extra posts this weekend. I think I have been a little hand wavy in my past posts, so I'll try to take out this weekend to demonstrate my goals in a more concrete fashion.