Fitness being built

What you ate and what you did, counted properly. A paid app that takes your money once, rather than a free one that takes something else.

What it will do

• Log food by scanning the barcode or searching a real nutrient database, instead of typing numbers off the back of a packet.
• Photograph a plate and the form fills itself in - as a first draft to correct, not as a measurement. A photograph cannot see the oil something was fried in or tell a small chicken breast from a large one, and we would rather say that than be quietly wrong by a third the way this whole category is.
• Calories, and the protein, carbohydrate and fat underneath them, because eighteen hundred a day tells you nothing about whether it was chicken or biscuits.
• Exercise logged against the same day as the food, so there is one honest number rather than two you have to reconcile in your head.
• Weight drawn as a line over months rather than a figure this morning. A single reading is noise; the shape of it is the information.
• The meals you actually eat every week saved once and repeated with one press, because the reason people stop logging food is the typing.
• Your own history offered before the search box, so a usual breakfast takes a second rather than a hunt through a list of strangers entries.
• Everything exportable, always. A year of your own measurements should never be trapped inside somebody else application.

Why it is built this way

Two things make this different from what you are probably using now. The first is that it is not an advertising business. The apps in this category are free because you are the product, the database keeps moving behind a bigger subscription, and the record you have kept for years is the thing that holds you there. This is paid, and that is the whole arrangement. The second is that we treat food, weight and exercise as health information even though it is only dinner and a walk, because several states already do and one of them lets people sue over it directly. So it is never sold, never shared, there is no advertising or analytics anywhere near these screens, and deleting it deletes it - the same permanent removal the firearms record gets, using the same machinery. A photograph you send for analysis has its location and timestamp stripped off first, is used for that one answer, and is thrown away unless you asked us to keep it - exactly what already happens to a bank statement in Money. And it joins up with the rest: the person who has a birthday in Home is the same person here, not a second copy of them.

Where it has got to

Not written yet. It exists as a row in this application and as the description above, and nothing more. It is listed so the shape of the whole line is visible rather than hinted at.