For any who care to check it out, I am releasing as Freeware a little utility I wrote for tracking my diet, which I have creatively named "DietTracker". It runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows and requires only that Java 5 or later be installed on your machine. The link to install is found at the end of this article, but first I'll explain what it is.
There are a million-and-one ways to track your daily calorie intake, from making a spreadsheet to the innumerable web sites that are out there for doing it. What I find to be the difficult/annoying part of tracking what you eat isn't so much taking the time every day to write it down, as it is looking up how many calories are in every given dish. Emilie cooks a delicious dinner every night, which is wonderful, but it means I can't just look on a label to know the calorie count of the meal—I have to add up a whole list of ingredients, which is quite a hassle.
There's no magic way to get around having to count up the calories once, but DietTracker's job is to ensure that you only ever have to do it once for each ingredient. After that, meals are memorised, so I can just say, "yesterday I had cereal and coffee for breakfast, a chicken sandwich for lunch, and chicken fricassé for dinner", and the program will automatically handle the ingredients and calorie counts for those meals, as long as I've entered them beforehand. So the hard work is all moved to the beginning of diet tracking (which is when motivation is highest), and afterwards the program makes things quick and easy to keep up to date.
This version 1.0 has four functions, laid out plainly enough on the main menu:
The first step is entering foods, the individual building blocks of a meal:
I didn't include any functionality to look up calorie content from within the program, (there are already plenty of resources out there to do that, so it didn't seem useful for the work it would involve). The next step is to combine foods into a meal, so that you can easily enter in what you've eaten later:
In our case, over a cycle of two or three weeks there's a pretty standard list of meals we might eat. So although it's a bit of work up front to enter in what you eat, once you've done it, it's done. Then with foods and meals defined, the day-to-day use of the program is simply a matter of putting in what you've eaten, which is pretty painless:
And last but not least, entering in what you've eaten is only useful if you can look back on it afterwards and see how you're doing:
(Those numbers are made up, but you get the idea.)
Anyway, I find this useful, and it was a worthwhile programming exercise since I haven't done a desktop app in ages. (This one still could use a bit more polish, to be honest, but I wanted to get it out there.) I have plenty of ideas for future versions, as well: the most obvious area improvement is doubtless the food and report screens, which could be expanded to include more information than just calories, (although since I only care about calories for the time being, I'm not too motivated). But I do plan to add a moving average line to the bar graph, and perhaps an "export to Excel" button to let you work with the raw data yourself. Another biggie is that there is also currently no way to remove incorrect entries (other than directly modifying the internal database, which is fine for me, but hardly doable by non-programmers). I also plan to add an internet-connected option so that your data is kept in a central repository, even if you use DietTracker on different computers (this is actually already nearly finished). And the French-language version could use some polish.
Installation
To install the application on your computer, all you need to do is click on the link here. This will directly launch the installer:
Once downloaded, you will need to authorize DietTracker to run on your computer; it will create and use a directory named "DietTracker" in your home directory.
(More information about how this type of secure web-based installation works can be found here). On any platform, you can also lauch the program directly by saving the "DietTracker.jnlp" file to your computer and double-clicking on it. If and when I get around to releasing updated versions, the program upgrades itself automatically.
Feedback on how useful the basic premise and useability of the "Enter Meal" screen would be appreciated by anyone who gives it a try; as well as suggestions for extra features. And finally (for any who missed the link hidden in the "Installation" section above),
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Qui dit langage de script de nos jours pense typiquement à Perl, Python, ou Ruby. Eventuellement, il en connaîtra d'autres, comme l'Applescript sur les ordinateurs Mac, shell, si c'est un ancien d'Unix, etc. Un alternatif qui est moins connu qu'il ne devrait l'être, c'est le Rexx. Ici je donne quelques raisons de considérer le Rexx si vous êtes à la recherche d'un langage de script, en mettant l'accent sur ses avantages par rapport aux langages plus connus.
