Show HN: 20 Minute Workout, my first mobile app built with Phonegap and Ember.js | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: 20 Minute Workout, my first mobile app built with Phonegap and Ember.js

20minuteworkoutapp.com

74 pointswnm45 comments

I just used it to work out for 5 minutes since I'm currently 20kg. overweight.

Here's some feedback from someone who actually used your app to work out.

1. On my iPad in horizontal orientation, I had to scroll up and down to see the exercise name and the timer, it was --really-- unintuitive.

2. I want to tap the X Minutes button and have the exercises run one after the other. Having to get up and press the "Start" button for every exercise is really counterproductive.

3. The gifs are really lacking in explanations of certain exercises. Can you use actual videos instead low framerate gifs?

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Otherwise this is excellent. I'll start doing 10 minute sessions in the morning and at night. Hopefully in a month I'll have lost this weight.

this is so awesome, you have no idea how happy it makes me to hear someone is actually using this to get healthier! i would love to hear from you and how you are doing in half a year or so: if you want drop me a short line at muellerwolfram@gmail.com

I promise I will fix the scrolling issue in the meantime.

The reason why I decided against running the exercises one after the other is because it makes it possible to chose the length of the break yourself. When I do the 20 minute version for example, I almost skip the breaks altogether in the beginning, but in the end I am so exhausted that I almost need a whole minute to recover between exercises. But I guess I could make it an option.

Do you remember which exercises are lacking explanations? I really want to avoid videos, that would make the app size enormous.

Strange - I was under the impression that GIF was larger than mp4: http://blog.embed.ly/post/89265229166/what-twitter-isnt-tell...

I don't remember what exercises were hard right now sorry. But yeah, I think video is lighter than gifs in most cases. See gfycat.com for proof. :P

I will definitely ping you in 6 months, already set up the google calendar reminder with progress pics. Thanks a bunch, really. This rocks.

oh wow, you're right! i just tried it with one of my gifs [0], and it reduced the size from 537k to 147k. that is amazing. I will definitely look into this. Apparently on some android phones the gifs are not playing correctly anyways, so I need to find a solution...this might be it! thanks!

[0] http://gfycat.com/CooperativeFlusteredIchthyosaurs

You could make the videos click to play and just have image-clicks open a few Youtube videos.

Then creating a "skip break" button would probably be a better option.

> Hopefully in a month I'll have lost this weight

I think it's important to have realistic expectations here - 20kg in a month is a massive weight loss, and you're setting yourself up for failure if that's your goal. Even 5kg in a month is a lot.

A far more realistic and attainable goal is 1-2kg a month.

(Don't use The Biggest Loser as a guide to how much weight you can drop in a week!)

Yea this is really good advise! I've struggled with weight all my life and setting an extreme goal like that is an easy trap to fall into. When you have a big goal and don't make it, you keep yourself from feeling good about the slow but positive progress. I often feel bad about this and just fall back into old habits again and end up where I started or worse. Slow and steady definitely wins the race.

I recommend making this about strength and flexibility (vs weight loss). If you really want to lose weight, have lean protein for breakfast, eliminate all concentrated refined sugars, don't eat anything after 8pm, and start running 3-4x / week.

Your tagline says 'The simplest bodyweight workout app ever!' You need to change that.

Why? Everyone seems to always have the simplest of everything. I want to know why. Why is it the simplest? When you answer that, use it for your tagline.

Fair point. I used to spend a lot of time on thinking about custom workout routines, measuring my progress, adjusting my workout plan etc., until I realized, you don't really need all that if your goal is to just stay healthy. For that you only need consistency. My app is simple because all you have to do is press "start". I found it difficult to put all that into one tagline. But thanks for your feedback, I will keep thinking about it...

"Just press start" or "Only one button between you and your workout" or "One button to a better you" (okay, not that one). I'm not any good at this, but I like the idea behind your app and I understand what you're trying to say. Quaffapint puts the tagline problem well.

"Don't make me think. Just make me strong."

All yours, royalty-free.

Here's the thing, these apps are everywhere. The problem is people come up with excuses why they can't use them "I'm not near gym equipment", "I don't have time", etc.

Tagline suggestion "Rock hard core in 20 minutes. All you need is a smartphone, a mat, and a chair. It's free!"

Subtext - "Stop paying for costly $100/month gym memberships or expensive fitness equipment. Get the body you want, when you want, and in the comfort of your own house. Upgrade to a Pro account and unlock 3x times the exercises."

Subtext 2 (the upsell) - "Pro memberships are 2x more likely to see the results they want. Upgrade now (click)"

viel Glück!

those are awesome suggestions! i especially like the subtext, comparing to gym membership costs makes so much sense! danke!

May I suggest a new feature that I don't see in the fitness apps i've checked out. I listen to a lot of athletes on podcasts (JRE) and they always talk about proper form and its importance for taking care of your body. In things like yoga you could be damaging to your joints, spine, or muscles. Maybe have "exercise tips" or "learn how" section/videos. I know some exercises are intuitive and may not need this. Just throwing ideas.

This is so important. It's incredible the difference it makes to the difficulty of the exercise let alone the damage you prevent to your body.

What would be awesome to take this idea a step further and create a Kinect app (or perhaps some other related/similar tech) which could determine if you are executing the correct form and make suggestions about how to correct yourself. This could also be used to monitor your progress in getting more flexible (e.g. in yoga).

EDIT: Obviously, not applicable to this app, but the idea stands nevertheless

also, if you are serious about it, i suggest filming yourself a couple of times and observe your own movement. While filming the exercises I spotted a lot of weird movements that I did and never noticed before.

hi there hn, I build this app because I loved the concept of the 7 minute workout [0], but quickly got bored by the static routine. I showed it to a couple of friends. They all seem to like it, but I would love some more feedback!

Also, I'm happy to answer questions about the tools i used, if you have any.

[0] http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/the-scientific-7-mi...

1. Congrats on your first app!

2. The [lack of] font styling in the Instructions is a minor issue, but little things add up. Also copywriting-wise, probably best to avoid first-person eg "I suggest..."

3. Feature request: history of workouts! Day, duration, and (ideally) the specific exercises. These should be plotted to show progress. Check out "100 pushups" for a great example. Seeing that chart climb steeply up and to the right is a big motivator.

4. Feature request: display list of the whole array of potential workout elements (grouped by type). Allow for "favorites" or perhaps ratings so only higher-rated ones show up in the mix, and/or an exclude feature to block particulars that aren't right for me. A simpler way to get this would be a "skip" button to simply select another one from the same type/group.

5. Suggestion wrt making $: you might do better to just have the one free app with upgrade, vs selling Pro for $2.99 (steep)? Any of the features above could be catalysts for upgrading. App Store Search optimization is arcane (to me anyway) but I don't think having 2 versions is as user-friendly. Hopefully others here w more experience on generating revenue w iOS apps will weigh in.

Anyway it's a solid start, good luck taking it to the next level! :)

PS Forgot to mention social integration. Strava sucks for their API rug-pulling maneuver, but they get the social aspect right w easy "kudos" for friends and posting to FB/twitter. Peer pressure is a strong motivating factor for workouts, and the more engaged your users are the better you'll do. Cheers.

what exactly are they doing that sucks? I was thinking about giving 'badges' that you can earn for various things like working out 7 days in a row, completing your 100s workout, etc. which people could share on FB/twitter. is strava doing something similar or what are they doing for peer pressure?

edit: as for your feature requests: they are noted, watch out for the next version :) thank you for your feedback!

I guess he was talking about http://engineering.strava.com/strava-api-update/ which was a while ago.

Yes, thanks pranehsp. (Strava retired their API w little notice, and only granted access to its replacement to a handful. Many got left out in the cold. Not very developer-friendly. Made me mad.)

I noticed there's a lite and pro version of the app. You might want to combine these into one app for a couple reasons off the top of my head:

- easier maintenance and sanity for you as a developer/creator

- leverages lite users to just for example pay an in-app purchase to upgrade (vs having to discover the paid/pro version)

Congratulations with your first app. I've tried the Android version and it worked as advertised : it's simple to use although it can use a little polish design-wise. Others have already made some great suggestions, here's what I would like to see.

1. Skipping an exercise (eg for people with a health problem) 2. A little description of the exercise, what muscles are activated and so on 3. Auto-count. One of the app permissions is for camera/microphone. Wouldn't it be nice if the front facing camera could be used for automatically counting how many reps you actually did? 4. Choosing between a countdown and number of repetitions

Good luck with your app, may many follow!

I'm looking into phonegap stuff myself... were you a mobile app developer before using it? Or only javascript/html/etc?

If only js/html/etc, was the transition to phonegap for web apps pretty simple for you?

Thanks!

I played around with phonegap before, trying to make use of the native camera through the phonegap api, but never finished it. I found it cumberstone/slow to debug, but everthing else, is just like developing webapps. This time, it really was developing a web app. I used chrome (and chrome developer tools, with the ember debug plugin) to develop the app until it was completely done. Using the phonegap cli to build out an ios, android and firefox version took just a couple of hours, and the phonegap documentation is very helpful. So overall I would say, if you are not using phonegap's native api, and all you need is a wrapper for your html/js app, go for it, it is super simple...

Really appreciate the quick response, and good luck on this endeavor.. as someone who's passionate about fitness I can appreciate what you're trying to do.

Sounds interesting. Could you maybe post a couple of resources that you found useful and would recommend going through? Thx!

For ember I feel like the official guides[0] are a good place to start. I found that a lot of other guides or blog posts where heavily out of date, since ember has changed quite a lot in the last couple of months. There are two other guides that I skipped over, which seemed to be pretty good [1][2].

For phonegap I always just used the official docs[3] and stackoverflow for times when i was stuck. There is one thing i can highly recommend though: Install the webview-debug plugin[4] for phonegap. With that you can make use of the awesome remote debugging functionality on android.[5]

And one more resource I can highly recommend is brunch.io[6]! It is a tool to help you structure your html/js app, it bundles all your files together, compresses them and spits out 3 files in the end: index.html, app.js and vendor.js. And that's the 3 files you put into your phonegap folder. You can even setup brunch.io to automatically push those files into your phonegap folder everytime you change something. This is not ember specific either. There are nice sceletons to get you started with backbone, spine, angular, etc..

[0] http://emberjs.com/guides/ [1] http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/11/07/an-in-depth-intro... [2] http://ember.vicramon.com/ [3] http://docs.phonegap.com/en/3.5.0/index.html [4] https://github.com/jrstarke/webview-debug [5] https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/remote-debugging [6] http://brunch.io/

Thanks a ton, brunch looks awesome!

The app has a nice clean design and the website provides a good overview of the features and pro differentiators. For android, you may want to include in the description why you need access to the camera/mic, etc. Nice work!

thanks! yeah the permission thing really bugs me. The app plays a sound, so you can hear when an exercise is over, and apparently the phonegap plugin I use needs those permissions... At least I couldn't figure out how to remove them. But I will add a comment in the description. Thanks for your feedback!

Why does the Android app need access to my photos, camera, and mic?

I'm intrerested in that as well. And why would it want to know whether the call is active and what number is it connected to?

the app plays a sound after the exercise is over. i am using a phonegap plugin to play that sound. I think the plugin is automatically adding permissions for what it thinks it needs. i couldn't figure out how to remove them, but I will look into this some more!

Very nice! Incredibly simple to get started with, and like you said, if all you care about is staying healthy the important thing is consistency and reducing options makes it much easier to be consistent. I guess it doesn't really look "native" at all but for something this simple I don't think it matters.

Nice work! I've been wanting something exactly like this, now I don't have to build it.

If you keep working on it, I'd love to see an option to pick curated routines for targeting specific muscle groups/activities.

Typo on first page under "Sane": "The workout is the right amount of challenging to keep you in shape, without being too though to stay motivated."

Nice work. One minor suggestion:

A light content status bar seems like it would look better. Or change the status bar style based on the colour of the navigation bar.

I would give your .box class a height of 300px, and your .container a bottom margin of 70, to keep the text from overflowing.

  .stores a { text-decoration: none; /* keep spaces from appearing as part of the link */ }

What?

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