For a long time, I’ve been wanting to start a side project. Typically, this desire has led to Game ideas that never really got anywhere. So, I needed something that had an aspect that would drive me forward. Watching my wife go through her nightly routine of counting her calories, analyzing her meals for the day and her exercise/workout routine, it dawned on me. I started googling for Nutrition apps for monitoring these things and found that there weren’t a whole lot, and what was there was not terribly clean and a simpler way was needed. So, that is my goal. Write an app for my wife to keep track of her calorie intake and allow for advanced analysis when desired, but keeping the interface clean, simple and easy to use. Think Mint for Nutrition.
Additionally, I really want to write an application for the Mac OS X platform. I’ve been on a Mac for two years now, and really have enjoyed it. I’ve decided that it is something that I’ve wanted to delve into, and have lately been playing with iPhone development. With the introduction of Snow Leopard there are a number of technologies that I really want to look at that are not on the iPhone. Primarily, Grand Central Dispatch. Therefore, I made the decision to write this nutritional app for OS X and probably extend it with an iPhone App in the future.
So, her is the first public announcement of Celery. The Nutrition application for everyone. (I found it’s best to announce before a line of code has been written).
The requirements for Celery are few:
- Make use of a solid Web API for obtaining Nutritional Information.
- Create a clean and elegant UI for inputting daily values.
- Provide a mechanism to graph historical data in an attractive manner.
- Make something my wife wants to use.
I will be chronicling the development of Celery here, until completion or I quit in defeat (a public defeat will be bitter).
