We’ve got a new update available on the Android Market today with an awesome new feature and some bug fixes for CardioTrainer. We’ve also released a CardioTrainer Widget app that’s available for download right now. Here are the details:

Time, Distance and Calorie Goals for Your Workouts

We are very excited to introduce a brand-new training feature for all CardioTrainer users. It is always important to workout with a goal in mind, and the new programs allow you to set time or distance goals for your exercise. During the workout, you’ll hear updates about percentage completed, and estimates of your final workout time or final distance. If you are a CardioTrainer Pro or Weight Loss user, it will also let you set a goal of how many calories you want to burn during the workout. We really hope that the new Trainer helps make your workouts more interesting and more exciting, letting you challenge yourself and stay motivated every time you exercise.

You can access all of these features by selecting “Trainer” after hitting “Start Workout.”

CardioTrainer Widget

The CardioTrainer Widget gives you an at-a-glance view of how many calories you’ve burned in the last seven days right on your home screen.The widget is available in two different sizes, and with the large widget installed you can start your workout with a single click. The widget will also change colors depending on the number of calories shown, and correspond to the 7-day Calorie Medals you see in the notification bar.

After you’ve downloaded and installed the CardioTrainer Widget, place it on your home screen by pressing and holding a free space, selecting “widgets”  when the menu pops up, and then choose the large or small CardioTrainer widget.

Bug fixes

CardioTrainer v2.8 also includes a few important bug fixes:

• To help improve the tracking quality of your workouts, the GPS is now started when you open CardioTrainer. This gives your device’s GPS a few more seconds to find your location before you start your workout, especially if you’re not using an Autostart countdown. If you don’t start a workout right away (and browse your history, for example), the GPS will turn off to save battery life.
• We’ve fixed the music integration problem on Nexus One phones running Android 2.2.
• UI updates with some more images and icons for high definition displays.

Give the new features a try and let us know what you think.

All the best,
The WorkSmart Labs family

We’ve just released an update to our calorie tracking application Calorific, with new features and an updated UI. This version introduces Calorie Budgets which let you set up a personal profile with information like gender, age, height, activity level and weight loss goal. Using this information, Calorific will tell you approximately how many calories to eat everyday to meet these weight loss (or weight gain) goals.

We have also updated Calorific’s main food entry screen. You’ll now see a button to access your Calorie Budget profile as well as a new button to view your past Food History. After you’ve set up your Calorie Budget, there is also a daily progress bar under the date that shows how many calories you’ve logged out of your daily budgeted amount. This progress bar will show how many of the foods you’ve logged are green, yellow and red, giving a quick overview of how much you’ve eaten and how healthy the food was. You can review previous days by swiping back and forth on the daily timeline and the date, or taping on a day when viewing your Food History.

Our goal was to make Calorific more powerful while still keeping it very simple. This update would not have been possible with the incredible feedback from all of our users, and we’re going to be very interested to hear how these changes help you track your food throughout the day.

Happy tracking!
The WorkSmart Labs family

At the end of last week, we released an update to CardioTrainer with some important fixes. If you had connected to your Google account and had chosen to send your data to Google Health, you might have had trouble after a few days. We worked with Google to fix the problem, and it turns that there had been some changes to the authentification code for the Google Health login, causing your login information to expire after 5 days. The issue was fixed in in last week’s update, and all of your new workouts should now be uploading to Google Health correctly (just note that for now, only your new workouts will be sent, not your old ones).

In last week’s update we also introduced our new 7-day Calorie Medals feature that shows an icon in the notification bar with number of calories you’ve burned in the past seven days. When you pull down the notification bar, you’ll also see your weekly workout schedule at a glance, and we’re hoping that both of these features keep you motivated to stay active throughout the week. We completely understand that space in your notification bar is very precious, and if you don’t want to see the 7-day Calorie Medals, you can turn them off in CardioTrainer’s settings.

When we released the feature last week, it ended up causing a lot of frustration for many users, and we are really sorry for all of that trouble. It was a little unclear how to turn off the medals, and the settings were not working correctly for everyone. In the latest update to v2.7.2 we’ve fixed this problem, and you’ll immediately be given the option to use the feature, as well as be able to turn it off from the notification bar. Also, this notification will not use any extra battery life, since it is only sampling the data from your workout history each day to see how active you’ve been. The notification itself is not using any GPS or accelerometer sensors.

We want to thank everyone for their patience as these issues were ironed out, and as always, please send along your feedback!

All the best,
The WorkSmart Labs family