Fit Report is a simple fitness visualization I made for myself that tracks my daily workout and nutrition activity and correlates that to how I feel.

The visualization attempts to app correlate mood, with whether I worked out and ate well that day. worked out, ate well and good mood are deliberately qualitative metrics which get redefined as I get fitter. A 5k run might be the workout of a lifetime for one person and a warm up for someone more experienced.

Over time, I’ve had to increase the frequency, intensity and variety of my workouts and get ever stricter about nutrition. This approach sees fitness more like a marathon than a sprint.

How it works

There’s far more detail on the github page, but here’s the gist:

The data for the Fit Report is recorded nightly using Reporter for iPhone. I choose to use Reporter because it’s the nicest, quickest way to answer simple questions on my phone and get JSON exported. The questions are set up like so:

Then a local shell script cleans things up and uploads the result, which is then processed by the Fit Report webapp to render the visualization.

(Writing shell scripts is the worst).

Purposeful Tracking

I’ve been working out for years now. In that time, I’ve fallen into my share of ruts – times of sloth or plateaus in my progress. But even looking back, I still don’t really know why.

Fit Report is tied to the hypothesis that how consistently I work out and eat well is strongly correlated to my mood and mental wellness. By being able to quickly identify these patterns, I’ve already been able to better understand the complex relationship between these three factors.

Translating time-series activity into visual patterns should also give me an earlier indication of when I’ve hit a fitness plateau. If I’m reporting a good activity streak but my mood or notes imply meh-fulness, I’m probably in a slump and should up my game or try something new.

Ultimately, the hope is that, by shining a light on my activity patterns, I’ll be able to tackle the root causes of defeat, instead of just the symptoms.

One size fits you

I think there’s a place for something between the worlds of passive wearable tech and hyper-accurate detailed manual tracking. Just like the endless ways to workout, everybody is going to have something that works best for them.

Fit Report is a purposefully simple and unrefined tool, because I built it for myself. Also, over-thinking things puts me in a bad mood.

Fit Report on github

Comments…

Much has been speculated on the future of ipads and mainstream computing. Most recently, that there needs to be a iPad Pro for real serious people that’s as large as a laptop, allows multiple windows - but also isn’t less ergonomic, more complicated to use, or less capable than OSX. So magic then.

Thing is, I think we may pretty much already have the iPad Pro - just buy another iPad and use them both together.

Imagine you have 5 sheets of paper stacked on top of each other, this is the ipad right now:

Even if you can quickly switch between pages, you can only view one thing at a time. This one screen, one app model is really easy to understand but doesn’t scale to complex workflows so well.

If you wanted to view two of those paper sheets side-by-side what would you do? You’d likely just put the pages next to each other.

In the same vein, if you wanted to view a news story, while editing a photo to put into a blogpost why wouldn’t you use a device for each task/app?

The reason you probably wouldn’t do that right now, is because iCloud isn’t sophisticated enough for this yet. But if it was?

• A designer working on a website with a stylus could have an image editor in one iPad, a copy of diet Coda in another and a site preview in another. iCloud would let you reference the image in your site’s code and the web preview would instantly update.
• Or, a programmer using a physical keyboard could grab an additional ipad to become a second (or third) text editing window. iCloud would detect the nearby device and enable a shared clipboard and a single active cursor between the devices.

You could probably come up with others, from everyday useful to full on apple ad.

Revolutionary products tend to look obvious in retrospect. Sometimes they’re obvious even earlier.

p.s. That being said, you’ll have to pry my Mac out of my cold dead hands.

Comments…

For the past 5 months or so I’ve been working on Metome, a personal diary web app. Today, I decided to throw in the towel.

I started on the sketches for it after leaving a particularly crappy job. There were things I wanted to reflect on and express that I felt I had no real place for.

The design of the app was guided by the belief that a good diary is an unfiltered place of raw expressiveness. I was designing a no-pressure place for intimate, imperfect content to feel personal.

The pitch for Metome, is something I was particularly happy with:

Write for yourself and answer to no one.

A lot happened in those 5 months though. I got a new job, I made this blog, and I’ve been enjoying the paper Hobonichi Planner more than I thought I would.

But at the heart of it, working on the code just started to get depressing. It wasn’t an unmaintainable spaghetti mess or anything - it’s not so bad. And while the last straw was having yet another middleware component get deprecated without a well-documented alternative, it wasn’t that either, not really.

It just wasn’t fun anymore. I feel shitty for saying that, like I’m a quitter or something.

Rationally I know I shouldn’t feel guilty though. Nobody was depending on it yet, and I was passing on the things I wanted to do to spend time on the thing I didn’t.

I don’t think working on Metome was a sunk cost though. Diving head first into the world of servers, I learned Mongo, Socket.io, Node and a bunch of other things arguably ahead of the curve. I also gained an appreciation for the nuances of form design, software pricing, and single page apps.

This was my first large end-to-end project, and my first time with a lot of new things. Likely, future attempts will be smaller and less tumultuous, although I may end up trying something totally different next time.

Fork it on github

Comments…

Once upon a time people communicated by writing their emails on paper and putting them in envelopes. We tend to remember these personal letters as being pretty elaborate.

Dearest Nora,

I hope this letter finds you well. It is with a wistful heart that I write you. When it’s raining like this, and we’re together it feels as if we’re the only ones in the world.

Missing you,
Manuele

The shorter, snapchat equivalent is a tad more ambiguous.

Hey girl,

Less is more? Less is less!

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

While the creation of emoji for Docomo in the 90s has been well told, the history of the kaomoji only really exists in the dustiest corners of the Japanese internet. From what I could piece together (I’m a real archeologist), the first kaomoji was used in 1986 on a disability-related bulletin board.

It was this guy by the way: (^_^)

As you can probably guess, I really like kaomoji.

Sometimes I use them in code comments (mostly to myself):

var hello = "world"
// this function is demented ヽ(゜Q。)ノ？
function() {
	return "hello" + hello
}

I’ve snuck them into error messages on stuff I’ve designed:

Being expressive and easy to remix, they’re just fun to send. After the apocolypse, it’ll be beetles, .txt files, and kaomoji.

(／^)／ 　　　●　＼(^＼)

No one’s gonna argue against emoji’s (personally, I’m partial to the snowman). I think there’s a place in the world for both to sex up your correspondence.

Comments…