Notices

Ok, got the weightjinni data imported finally (thanks Framstag!) and I've now been able to play with it. Being a coder (well, more a scripter and UI architect than a true coder) I've been through the program a bit and I've got some great suggestions to improve this program a lot and really make it useful. Author, please take these with grace as I'm simply offering ideas to help make this program top notch. And I'm doing it from the stance of being an experienced UI architect too, so I'm definitely interested heavily in the feature rich KISS type interface. Ok, here's my suggestions.

1. Remove the two column main interface on the main tab and have four basic buttons there. Meal/Food input, search, estimate, and edit.

2. The meal/food input on the main screen would be for entering data on meals. Just plug in your food item, and it'll automatically search for the food of choice and list what's available in the database. If you don't find what you're after, have the ability to add your own entry to match your meal item. Also differentiate between snacks and full meals.

3. The search feature would be there to allow you to search for a food item and pull up all nutritional data on it, including serving size, calories, fat, protein, etc.

4. Estimate would allow you to enter a proposed meal or meal plan, and estimate how much it would be against your total daily allowed in each category. You could also use this to plan the entire day's meals too. Kinda like tinkering with dials on a radio till you find what you're after.

5. Edit would be there simply to allow you to edit pretty much anything from meal entries to individual nutritional info on each food item.

6. Remove any and all forms of soft scrolling. I see that on the left column of the main interface. That's a CPU hog and really serves no valid purpose.

7. Lengthen the allowable food names. The character length limit you have now creates problems. A 256 or 512 character name limit would be more practical than the current 60 character limit. If you go away from the two column design to a windowbox design, the longer names will work just fine. (I can do an rough image of the proposed UI to demonstrate what I had in mind)

8. Enlarge the tabs and buttons so that the entire program can be thumb driven.

9. Consider adding a web based community database of food that people can go to and enter data, and make it wiki style so that it can also be community moderated. Then when a person wants to, they can just update their local database with the most current information from the wiki with no more need to manually import your food lists.

10. As the inverse of the above, have it so that any data you add locally can be uploaded to the wiki to share. So say for example, someone goes into bob's supermarket and sees a box of Nabisco crackers, they could add all the nutritional data on the box, including portion sizes, save it, then upload it to the internet wiki later on.

11. Allow the full range of FDA nutritional information to be entered into the database. IE, fat, calories, salt, etc. Each is as important as calories, so they should all be represented.

12. Allow a person to set their total allowed calories per meal and per day (this may already be there, but if it is, it's not directly obvious) and then create red and yellow flags to notify someone when they're getting too close to the limit, when they're over, or when they're under. This is good for dieters on limited diets, or anyone really.

13. Ditto with protein and water as those are important too, assuming of course someone wants to track those too, which I think they should. Maybe even use this feature to track intake of all other important items such as fat and so on.

14. Have the ability to differentiate between plant and animal proteins. I say this because they recommend a 50/50 mix of plant and animal proteins. It would be very easy to designate these on whole food items like celery, beef, etc. Mixed food items like tacos, or hamburgers would need to be able to do both.

15. I like the whole "time entered" thing with the different foods, but I think that should be integrated into the meals feature so that they can all be counted together rather than individually since you're more likely to be eating foods as meals and snack groups rather than as individual items throughout the day.

I've got a bunch more, but that's my initial list. I think if you do at least half of these, or all of them, weightjinni could be the best program around for the N810. Also, if anyone else wants to add to this list of suggested UI and feature improvements, please go right ahead. You're also welcome to torpedo my ideas, because I don't necessarily claim to be the god of UI design, even if I am pretty good with it. ^_^;;

Weightjinni looked great to me but the font is way to small.
Perhaps the best way to improve the program would be to donate $$$

Since I'm hearing a deafening silence in regards to these improvements, would anybody like me to do some UI mockups to demonstrate some of the functionality I suggest?

gemniii42: I'd donate money, but I'm flat broke. T_T So instead I'll donate my skills as a UI designer.

Sorry but I read your proposals today. Please in future contact me directly or at least send me the link to a ITT discussion so I can activly participate. I'm not monitoring ITT activly simply because of lack of time ( but this is the second time I think I should do nevertheless :-/).

As far as I remember I have reworked the UI after your proposal (without known it) using bigger fonts. Please contact me privatly per mail regarding proposals that are still valid after this change (likely most of them :-)). I would like to discuss them in further detail to see what is possible in shorter timeframes (I like to work 1-2 weeks maximum per application and then switch to other applications) which would suggest a number of more incremental changes.

Thanks...Tim!

I just downloaded an update for weightjinni last week. I didnt realize all of my previous information would be destroyed in the process so I lost about 3-4 weeks of tracking my weight.

Now when I tap a menu they open for a micro second and then closes. If I hold the tap, they open but as soon as I move the stylus the menu stays open but sometimes flickers and acts generally weird.

Also, when I try to enter a new food. (at least I think thats what I'm doing, theres no indication of that). I click on the text box on the first tab. The on-screen keyboard comes up and I type something in. But when I close the on-screen keyboard, the text disappears and the keyboard pops back up. Theres no way to escape other than by crashing the program.

I'd just like a nice program that can chart my weight a few days a week.

From which old version to which new version did you update? Which version of libillumination0 (package name) do you have?

I'm really sorry about that. That should not happen and is in no way itended. I have no explanation why this should happen. The update was only a very minor one and gave no reason why existing file should be deleted by the update or old files should not be read anymore. I can only urge you in future to make a regular backup of ~/.weightjinni.xml manually or use the integrated backup /restore functionallity (note that export/import only exports/imports the food table not your personal data). If you have done any non-standard thing during update (deleted old packages and the installed again, installed from file etc...) please tell me. I will nevertheless try to reproduce the problem by generating a new version and updating again...A big "sorry" for your inconvinience.

Which menues? The popup menues on the tables or the "main menu" menues? I did some changes to the main menu stuff (improved theming) but do not see any regressions on my N810. The menues are still not sticky, you must press the stylus and move to the menu entry while still pression. This needs improvement and stickyness is on my list but older version behave similar (very old versions had always visible menues which were not theming conform and they supported stickyness). Did you update from a rather old version?

The text box above the table on the first tba is for searching not for entering new food (this bahviour did not change for a long time, how were you able to enter any food this way?). To enter food you need to use the popup menu on the food table. Tab and hold the stylus without moving on the table for a few seconds and a popup will apear. Still press the stylus and move it above "Add entry..." and then release. You should get a popup dialog.

I know there are stil some visual glithes to the application and handling of adding/changing data is not perfect. I know how to improve this on larger screens but keeping the application usable (everything can be seen on the screen) and still keep or even add functionality is difficult. I'm *very* interested in any suggestions to improve useablility - while still supporting same or even reduced click count for the major usecase "Adding food", "adding food usage" and "adding weight"!

WeightJinni should be that. Please give it a change and give me a change to improve.

In response to your bug report I will add a label and a "Clear" button to the search bar. I will also try to add some buttons to add, edit, delete and use food - if there is enough space - to duplicate the functionality on the hard to use and hard to find popup menues. I will also fix the redrawing bug for the diagram if changing scale (old content does not get deleted).

Thanks for your response!