Over the last little while, I’ve been tinkering away at a simple app as part of my recovery process. You see, before dealing with burnout and depression, I used to do calorie tracking to make sure my weight remained somewhat stable.
Unfortunately, the App Store is rife with calorie tracking apps that require yearly payments, and the exact features that I was looking for were not really available in a simple app. Instead, I had the option to pay for apps that deliver lots of useful functionality that I don’t personally need.
So, I decided I wanted to build my own to avoid these bloated, subscription apps. The app I came up with is Calodin.
What’s this app?
To be frank, Calodin is a very simple app… and I decided it was a good project at this time for that very reason. I mostly built it for myself, but I figured I’d share it here, anyway. Here’s the most important screen in the entire app, the Today screen:
From here, you can manually log calories, or select a food entry from your list of favorite foods. It’s a simple and convenient way to log your daily calorie intake. And of course, you get to see where you’re at related to your goal.
Of course, the app also keeps track of historical data, so you can jump to any date and see what your calorie consumption was on that day.
It was a deliberate choice not to include the goal on this screen, in order to avoid needing to track goals over time, and in order to lower the pressure related to meeting targets in the long run.
You should only be focusing on whether you’re doing a good job today and tomorrow, not yesterday.
The app also syncs data with the Health app if you let it, which is what I use to track a lot of health metrics.
I also have a small update in the works that adds support for widgets, which is helpful for that at-a-glance check on your homescreen for extra accountability.
Why did I make this?
I haven’t been as mobile as I was prior to dealing with burnout… In the beginning I could only rest on the sofa for the majority of the day.
So in the end, calorie tracking has ended up being super important if I want to remain at a healthy weight.
I also needed to save some money because I need to be more frugal since I no longer receive my usual salary. Thankfully, we have a good social security system here in Belgium so it’s not like I’m suddenly broke. But still!
So, building my own app ended up being the “free” option. And if I built it anyway, I figured I might as well share it with the world. So here it is.
How am I doing?
Working on this is the first time I’ve really done programming work in a few months. I still can’t imagine doing programming work for more than an hour per day. But hey, things are improving.
I hope to eventually do a larger write-up on the project and perhaps open source the code, but for now, this is it. I hope to have more good news in a couple of weeks, but for now I’m still stuck at home, with lots of required rest.
(I’ve also been dealing with the flu and various other mild illnesses at the same time, which has been terribly annoying. But hey, I don’t want to complain too much on this blog. Things are slowly improving, and that’s the most important thing.)