Hacker News Reader

Comment by wkirby | Hacker News Reader

A few thoughts:

- Very slick onboarding experience, especially compared to other calorie counters. Big plus here.

- There doesn't appear to be a way to add food outside of the current "meal." I'm sitting here at lunch time, but wanted to add what I had for breakfast --- instead I've just eaten a very large lunch.

- The current database of foods seems pretty slim. No entry for my African Peanut Soup, for example, which is available in both LoseIt and MyFitnessPal.

- How will you deal with things like sandwiches, where many of the ingredients may be totally hidden from view? Guess "sandwich" and let me pick what's on it from a sensible list of sandwich ingredients? Same goes for soups, or stews, or anything that can be visually similar with a wide range of possible ingredients.

Over all a good start, and some much-needed innovation in the calorie-counting app space.

View on HN

> Very slick onboarding experience, especially compared to other calorie counters. Big plus here.

Glad to hear that you liked it

> There doesn't appear to be a way to add food outside of the current "meal." I'm sitting here at lunch time, but wanted to add what I had for breakfast --- instead I've just eaten a very large lunch.

Yeah we had a bunch of people asking for that the past few days. We should have that fixed in the next release.

> The current database of foods seems pretty slim. No entry for my African Peanut Soup, for example, which is available in both LoseIt and MyFitnessPal.

All of our data comes from the USDA right now. We’re going to add barcode scanning soon and that will include another 70K items. After that we plan on making it easier for users to add new things by OCRing the nutrition labels and computing the nutrition values from ingredients/recipes.

> How will you deal with things like sandwiches, where many of the ingredients may be totally hidden from view? Guess "sandwich" and let me pick what's on it from a sensible list of sandwich ingredients? Same goes for soups, or stews, or anything that can be visually similar with a wide range of possible ingredients.

For more complex items we have these “builders” that let you quickly adjust and add common ingredients to things like sandwiches, salads and soups. As we get more data we’ll use ingredient correlations and predictions to make the suggested additions more accurate.

The app also learns to recognize your past meals so you quickly copy the information for meals that you eat often.

I tried out an old photo from December, and it noticed that the date was not today. I was asked if I wanted to add it for that date. I was also able to change the time on the edit meal screen. I think this should be on the input screen - similar to Google Fit. When I am entering an exercise, the time defaults to now, but I can select another time just as easily.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com