If you’ve been following along with any of my recent posts, you’ll likely have noticed that I’ve been working on something. It hasn’t been a secret but I also haven’t advertised it until now. In this post, I’d like to share with you a little bit about that project. If you’d like to see or use it for yourself, you can visit helth.closingtags.com. Yes, that’s how I intended to spell it but on the off chance you accidentally spell it correctly, that will should work too.
Why?
In the past, I’ve used apps like MyFitnessPal or Jawbone to track calories in, physical activity, and water consumption. I liked those apps but MyFitnessPal became a bloated mess and Jawbone went out of business 😢. I’m sure there are other fitness and health related apps out there that are just fine but I wanted to build something tailored to my needs. I’ve got experience as a web developer, so why shouldn’t I? It would also be a good excuse to learn a new technology like Svelte and SvelteKit.
But, what does it do?
tracking
Helth app is intended to be simple. While it still has a long ways to go, it does already have some cool features. For instance, tapping the camera icon in the bottom right corner will open the camera on your device, and allow you to scan a barcode. Once scanned, if the item is found; helth app will automatically add calories, sodium, and protein to daily totals. Potentially, the app could track cholesterol, sugars, carbohydrates, fats, and even ingredients. It’s simply a matter of adding those components.
history
The app can then show the history tracked and will reset each day at midnight to allow you to start tracking the next day. The graphs still need work and are very limited but I’m hoping to make more progress towards implementing better charts soon.
goals + limits
If you’d like to set custom goals so you can be alerted when you’re approaching a limit or have exceeded your own expectations, the app allows you to do that as well, albeit, the functionality isn’t quite limited. Again, I hope to implement more of this functionality soon.
All your data are belong to… you? 🤔
Privacy and security are important to me. That’s why all data generated in the app is stored locally on your device. Due to security protocols implemented in most modern browsers (CORS), the barcode scanner does have to make calls to a custom API but other than that, all data entered should stay on your device. This can be a double edged sword in that if you clear your browser’s cache, all recorded data will be lost. An import/export feature is planned but is still a ways off.
The Project
Until today, I’ve been developing this project in a private Github repository but as of the publishing of this post, that repository is public. You can find it at https://github.com/Dilden/helth. I’m welcoming pull requests and issue submissions. If you’d like to add functionality, I’d love to work with you. If you want to run your own de-meme-ified version of helth app, go right on ahead. While the app is still a hobbled together mess, the more people are interested in it, the better off it will be.
It’s still missing quite a few features I’d like to see. For instance, I’d love for helth app to be installable as a progressive web app (PWA). But since SvelteKit is still in beta, the plugin I intended to use for adding PWA support has run into some compatibility issues. Once those are resolved, I believe it will be trivial to add PWA support. I’d also like to improve the overall styling of the app, add more data sources, build a text based item search and the appropriate user interfaces, and allow users to save “meals” so that they can be quickly added to the daily total without having to scan/search each item all over again.
If you would like to see a feature or notice a bug, you can report it in the project repository. If you don’t want to sign up for an account on Github, you can also fill out the contact form on this website describing the issue.