Many of my friends use calorie trackers like Lose it! or MyFitnessPal. And I’ve heard many complaints about them locking basic functionality behind a subscription. The straw that broke the camel’s back was not allowing barcode scanning without a sub. I’ve been looking for a meaty, pun intended, side project to pick up and decided to try to do some good while saving some people money!
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Built using Tauri in order to use Angular for the GUI and get mobile platform support.
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Data is stored on-device using SQLite.
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Initially I’m only targeting Android, I’d love to target iOS too but I don’t own any Apple devices to dev+test on.
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I’d say it’s a “late alpha” as of right now. It has most but not all functionality, but has only been tested by me so there are likely small bugs that need to be found.
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My wife really likes manatees, hence the name.
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I’ve commissioned an artist for a logo so that should be coming by February.
Would love to hear people’s thoughts! Currently you’d have to build the app yourself, though I do have an item on my to-do list to generate signed APKs via a github action. Mostly I’m just looking to start spreading the word now and hopefully get some good feature requests or bug reports. If you’ve read this far, thanks for your time!
Edit: I figured out how to generate signed APKs via GitHub so I have a v0.2.0 Pre-Release up. It’s already led me to finding out there are some bugs on Samsung phones that don’t happen on my Pixel so please submit any issues you encounter! Thank you!
I’ve never used a calorie tracker. But since it’s FOSS, I’ll try it. I’m an aspiring software dev and I’d like to help out. What is the best way to communicate with you?
Edit: I see that the app is available as released on the github. No need to build it.
Please think about localization and various labeling standards and such. I live in Japan and bought a subscription to Chronometer when MyFitnessPal decided to enshitify. I was submitting labels with barcodes and information in their appropriate boxes (protein, carbs, etc.) but they rejected it because the image (required picture) had non-English text. Apparently there is (or at least was) a manual review process and they rejected everything not in English. Further, it took either weeks or months (I forget now) for the first response to my submitted data to come so I kept putting all this time into something utterly useless. They lost me as a customer as well.
That’s really sad to hear. I also switched to Chronometer but live in the US so didn’t run into that issue. Have you found a counter that supports Japanese as well as English?
I’m down, using a cracked fitness pal to count calories right now. How will you build the food database? Can we crowdsource? Just ideas for now, get the basic app running and I’d love to help further.
Any thoughts on getting this into f-droid?
The food database is initially loaded with info from the USDA! That covers generic stuff like eggs or milk. Anything new is either added manually or sourced from the Open Food Facts database which is already crowdsourced.
I’m prioritizing Google Play but after that’s settled I’m open to f-droid as well. Most of the people I know that’ll benefit from this app the most wouldn’t know how to even install f-droid.
Just looking at the github here are my immediate ideas:
- Be able to favorite specific meal combinations (i.e. you eat the same breakfast all the time) for recording
- The meal display uses kcals as the subline, it would be useful if this could be set to protein, or carbs for people trying to hit different non calorie targets.
- Ability to set alerts/reminders if falling behind a target (like 60g of protein every 4 hours, etc)
- allow for food diary photos, i.e. take a snapshot now and fill it in later, or just so a buddy can see what you ate.
- Since so much data is already being tracked, allow for weighins, ketones, gluecose measurements to be tracked as well, or integrate with the android health-connect api
- allow for api access to user data, for those tinkerers / automators
As a career full-stack dev with over 8 years Angular experience and a former user of MFP and MacroFactor I’m totally interested in helping out.
Will pull stuff down and take a look soon!
I’d love to hear your thoughts! I’ve only got 2ish years of experience with Angular myself. I’m also using this project as an excuse to get familiar with signals so I’m better equipped to introduce them at work.
