MyFitnessPal Blog

As we've hinted in previous blog posts, Al and I have been hard at work on a new design for MyFItnessPal.  The current look of the website has been in place for almost 5 years now, and was created by probably the worst designer I know - me.    It's functional enough, but I'll readily admit that it's not beautiful.  But usability has always been our top priority, so we left the current look in place for all these years even though we yearned for something more appealing.

A few months ago, though, Al and I talked it over and decided to finally bite the bullet and redesign the site.  The redesign would have a few goals in mind:

• Update the look and feel of the site to be more modern, professional, and attractive
  
  
• Increase the page width from ~800 pixels to ~1000 pixels.  5 years ago, a significant portion of our traffic was coming from people with 800x600 monitors, but today, 99% of our members browse the site on 1024x768 monitors or larger, and we really wanted to be able to use that extra screen real estate.
  
  
• Make sure that the site stayed "familiar" with our current users.  We deliberately kept the same color scheme and almost exactly the same general user interface.  We actually are planning some changes to how the site works in the future, but for this first step, we wanted to keep the changes between the two designs to a minimum.  We wanted the transition between the two designs to be as easy as possible for our users.
  
  
• Retain the things that make MyFitnessPal great - simplicity, ease of use, and a lack of "clutter".

*UPDATE*  - we've got enough users for our test, so we're no longer accepting any applications to the beta. If you didn't make it in, don't panic - we hope to submit the application for approval into the iTunes store next week, so hopefully you won't have to wait long before you can use it on your iPhone.  Thanks!

Great news!  Our iPhone app is coming along very nicely, and we're finally ready to have some real users bang on it and help us work through any remaining bugs/issues. We're really excited to have some other folks use the app and give us feedback.  Hopefully, you'll like it as much as we do.

If you are interested in participating in the beta test, please send me a mail message with your iPhone UDID and your email address.  You can find your UDID by taking the following step:

1. Connect your iPhone to your Mac or PC.
2. When iTunes opens, click on your device under the "Devices" section in the left-hand column.
3. The "Summary" tab in iTunes should now be visible. Click the "Serial Number" label.  You'll notice "Serial Number" changes to "Identifier".
4. Click on "Edit" in the menu at the top and select "Copy"
5. Now compose a mail message to me, and you can paste that Identifier into the mail message. 

Don't post this information as a comment to this blog post.  Please send me a mail message through MyFitnessPal instead by visiting:

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/messages/new/28

Anyone out there can apply, but if you are accepted, we do require that you answer a few questions about your experience with the app, i.e. give us your opinion about the application as well as let us know of any bugs/crashes/etc. that you find.  We probably won't be able to accept everyone, so please don't be disappointed if you don't make it into the beta.  We hope to have the official app available very shortly.

Thanks, and hope you are enjoying the site!

- Mike & Al

I really love working on MyFitnessPal.  It's such a joy to see people reach their goals with help from MFP and the community, and it feels great to have played even the smallest part in someone's success. Thank you all for making the site such a pleasure to run.

But I have to admit that MFP has also been a major source of frustration over the past few years because the site is just a fraction of what it could be.  I have a long list of ideas on how to improve the site, and I've been dying to make those ideas a reality.  If I could just complete this list, trust me, the results would knock your socks off.  But sadly, finding the time to improve MyFitnessPal has been a struggle.  Working a full-time job at a start-up leaves you with little time for family and friends, much less side projects.  And so MFP has always been the last priority.  

Well, I finally decided to change all of that: I quit my job!  And I convinced my brother Al to quit his job too!  We're both going to be working on MyFitnessPal full-time and really trying to help the site reach it's potential.

WHAT DOES THAT MEAN FOR YOU?

With both Al and I working on the site, we hope to be able to make improvements to MyFitnessPal at a significantly faster pace than before.  We're already hard at work on a bunch of new features for the site, including:

• an iPhone app which we modestly think will be the best calorie counting app in the app store
• a brand new site design which will hopefully give MFP a more polished look and feel but keep the site simple and easy to use
• lots of new social features which are still in the concept stage but hopefully will let all of you take much better advantage of the support you can get from your friends and the MFP community
• a recipe calculator and better recipe sharing
• ...and much more including editing meals, better food search, cleaning up the food database, etc. etc. 

Overall, we want MFP to be the best diet and fitness community on the web, and are excited about finally having the time to make it happen.

WHO'S THIS AL GUY?

Meet my brother Al:

Al is a great guy, and I'm not just saying that because he's my brother.  He has a ton of experience working on the web, and I'm really excited that he was crazy enough to join me in this little adventure. You can view his profile at:

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/albertl

I'm sure you'll be seeing more from him in the forums and around the site, and I hope you'll all give him a warm welcome.

That's it for now! But stay tuned - we have lots of new stuff on the way!

Thank, and hope you're all enjoying the site.

- Mike & Al

Today we added a new feature to the site: the ability to share your food and exercise diaries with other people. 

By default, your food and exercise diaries are private and only viewable by you. But if you wish, you can change the privacy settings on your diaries to one of the following options:

• Private (viewable only by you)
• Public (viewable by anyone)
• Friends (viewable only by your MFP friends)
• Locked (viewable only with a password set by you)

To change your diary settings, go to "My Home", then "Settings", then "Diary Settings."

If someone wishes to view your diary, they can view it at:

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/diary/USERNAME

...and...

http://www.myfitnesspal.com/exercise/diary/USERNAME

...where you replace USERNAME with your own username.

If you have any questions or see any problems with this new functionality, please let me know in the Technical Support or Feedback forums.

Thanks, and hope you're all enjoying the site!

As many of you have discovered, I've had a blogging feature almost ready on the site for some time now.  Member blogs have been secretly available if you knew the URL to get to them, but they were buggy and incomplete, and I just haven't had the time to finish them.

But this weekend, I finally buckled down, coded my little butt off, and launched member blogs!  I'm hoping the blogs will be a great way for all of us to share our weight loss experiences, as well as our best tips and advice.

HOW DO I CREATE MY BLOG?

To create your blog, just go to the "My Home" tab, then click on "My Blog" - your blog is already there, waiting for you to start writing posts.

POPULAR POSTS AND VOTING

I've also created a popular posts page to highlight the best posts from all the blogs in the MyFitnessPal community.  How do I determine what the best posts are, you might ask? Well, I don't - you do!  Each post on a blog has a small "voting" feature next to it.  When you read a post that you like, recommend it to the rest of us by voting it up.  The posts that receive the most votes will appear on our popular posts page. 

From the popular posts page, you can also see any recent posts that have been made but haven't gone popular yet.  Just click on the orange "Recent" link to see the latest posts, and vote up the ones you like to help share them with the rest of us.

If you find a blog post that contains inappropriate content, i.e. spam or advertisements, offensive material, etc., you can also vote it down.  Enough down votes will cause a post to get buried where no one will see it any longer.

As always, I've tried to do my best to find any bugs, but with any new feature, there are always some kinks to work out.  If you have any problems with your blog, just let me know on the forums or in the comments and I'll do my best to get the issues resolved ASAP.

I'm looking forward to reading all of your posts!  Hope you're enjoying the site!

Two quick updates to the site:

• Track more nutrients: A lot of members have said they'd like to track more than 4 nutrients on your food diary, so I recently added the ability to track up to 6 nutrients.  To change the nutrients displayed in your food diary, just click on the "Food" tab, then click on "Settings."  You can change the nutrients you'd like displayed on your food diary on this screen.
  
  Also, remember that you an always click on the "View Full Report" button at the bottom of your diary to see a version of your diary with the full list of nutrients that we track.
  
  
• Change your time zone: For our international users, it's always been a bit of a pain to log your foods because the default date on your diary would often be incorrect due to the time zone difference with our site.  So today, I added the ability to change your time zone - just go to "My Home", then click on "Settings", then "Change time zone."  No more clicking the date arrows!

I'm pleased to announce that I launched two new features to the site last night: weight loss tickers and forum signatures.  Here's the lowdown:

WEIGHT LOSS TICKERS

Weight loss tickers are a fun and easy way to show off your weight loss progress to the world.   If you've visited other diet websites or forums, you've probably seen some around: a little graphic that shows you how much weight someone has lost, and how far they have to go to reach their goal.  There are a lot of other websites that will let you create a ticker for free.

So why are MyFitnessPal's tickers different?  Frankly, I've always thought that the tickers other sites let you make are — how should I put this — butt ugly.  So when designing our tickers, I asked a friend of mine who's a fantastic designer to help out, and I think she's done a fantastic job.  The MyFitnessPal tickers, in my humble opinion, are gorgeous!  Here's some examples:

PERSONALIZE YOUR TICKER

Even cooler, with MyFitnessPal, you can actually create a personalized ticker with your own photo on it.  So you can create a completely unique ticker that is all your own.  Add a photo of your family, your wedding, a paintiing you've done — the sky is the limit.  And when you're done, it might look something like this:

How cool is that?

To create a ticker, just go to http://www.myfitnesspal.com/weight-loss-ticker 

FORUM SIGNATURES

I've also added the ability for MyFitnessPal members to create a forum signature.  Your forum signature will get added to the bottom of every post you make on the site.  You can put things in your signature like you're favorite quotes or motivational sayings, a poem, or of course, a weight loss ticker.

To create your signature, go to "My Home", then click on "Settings", then "Forum Signature"

If you have any questions about these new features, just leave me a message here or on the forums and I'll get back to you ASAP.

Hope you are all enjoying the site!

As many of you know, currently when you choose to share a new food with other MyFitnessPal members, there can be extremely long delays before that food is available for use by other members.  Each day I'd receive hundreds of submissions to the database, and because I was manually checking each food that was submitted, it would be weeks, if not months, before I'd get a chance to review a food.  There just wasn't any way I could keep up with the massive volume of submissions.

So today, I made some changes to the way foods are shared and updated. Here's how the new system works:

1. Submitting a food is now composed of two steps.  First, you tell us the brand name and description of the food you want to submit.  As you are entering the brand name, we'll suggest spellings to you from the brands we already have in our database.  If you see your brand there, make sure to choose it so that your brand name is consistent with the existing foods. 
2. After entering the brand and description, a quick check will be performed to see if that food already exists in the database.  The goal is to reduce duplicate submissions so that we don't clutter the database with multiple copies of the same food.
3. If your food is not already in the database, you'll see the same old screen you are used to seeing to enter the nutritional information for that item.  Now, however, if you elect to share your food with other MyFitnessPal members, it is immediately enteredd into the public database and available for all to use.
4. Public foods used to not be editable - that is no longer the case.  You can now edit any brand-name food that is in the database.  So if you see a food that has incorrect information because it's outdated, a member made a typo or data entry error, etc., you can correct the error yourself.  If you edit a food, you won't affect anyone's old diary entries.  The changes will only take affect on entries made after your changes.
5. The "confirmation" system remains in place.  You can still check the nutritional information of any food in our database and confirm it if you know it's accurate.  The confirmation system is a great way for you to get a sense of how accurate the information is - if it hasn't been confirmed by another member, you may want to check it yourself.  Then, of course, confirm it so that other members can benefit from your accuracy check.

Overall, the food database has become a lot more wiki-like.  It's easy to make new entries to the database so that everyone can benefit.  The danger, as with any wiki, is that the entries can be inaccurate.  But because editing foods is also easy, and because the confirmation system helps you easily see if a food needs to be checked, as a community we should be able to catch any errors quickly and correct them.

I'm sure the system will need some tweaks as we go along, so please try to be patient if it's not performing perfectly right away.  But in the long run, I'm optimistic that it will help us grow quickly the food database while still maintaining a reasonable level of accuracy.

If you have comments or questions, let me know!  Hope you are enjoying the site!