Hi everybody,

We are very excited to announce that we’ve just released a brand new application, Calorific, to help you track everything you eat and drink throughout the day. We’re also rolling out some very important changes to CardioTrainer with version 2.6 (including permanent accounts!) so read on for more details.

Calorific: Calorie-tracking in two clicks

Our goal in creating Calorific was straight-forward: build an application that lets you track what you eat and drink, but make it really simple. Most of the other calorie-counting services we’ve tried over the last few months have required lots of work to use. There are long lists of food to choose from, precise portion sizes required, and too many clicks to make it an easy process that doesn’t get in the way or become a nuisance.

Calorific is different because you just need to say how healthy the food is (green, yellow, or red) and how big your portion is (small, medium, or large). Calorific recommends that you eat 60% green, 30% yellow and 10% red each day, and you’ll get feedback (from 1 to 5 stars) based on how well you meet these recommended goals. You can also see how well you are eating over the course of the day at a glance, and a history of past days to see how you’re doing throughout the week.

Lots of research shows that the single most important step in taking control of your eating habits is to always be aware of what you’re eating. That way  you are consistently more likely to make healthier decisions. Calorie counting is always approximate, and Calorific isn’t designed to help you keep an exact count of how many calories you eat everyday. Instead, it makes it really easy to always lets you know how well you’re eating, without getting in your way.

This is only the first version of Calorific, and we already have lots of idea for improving it. As always, we are dying to hear how you like it, so please test it out for a few days and then shoot an email to calorific@worksmartlabs.com letting us know what you think.

CardioTrainer v2.6

In other news, we’re also releasing CardioTrainer v2.6 today. This update includes some very important and long-awaited new features:

• Permanent accounts. On the history screen, you’ll now see a button to create a permanent account with CardioTrainer. This will now associate your Google account with your CardioTrainer data so that if you get a new device, or have trouble with your current device, your tracks will be automatically re-downloaded to your phone. Thank you to everyone who has been patient when asking us to merge new access codes or had their tracks wiped from their phone. We know these problems were very frustrating, but with permanent accounts, these troubles should be no more. NOTE: Since this is the first version of this sync feature, all of your tracks will be re-downloaded, but without the detailed workout information. Don’t worry — everything is still safely stored on the WorkSmart Labs web servers, and upcoming versions of the feature will restore the tracks completely. This is just the first step!
• Race Against Yourself bug fixed. A big that thank you to all of the Race Against Yourself users for your patience over the past few weeks. The last version of CardioTrainer (v2.5.1) broke this premium feature (the track wouldn’t save after the workout finished), but the bug is fixed now and there should not be any more trouble when using it.
• Speed notifications. If you would prefer to hear your speed instead of pace during your workouts, you can now set this preference in the Voice Notification settings.
• Stationary biking fixed. The bug that prevented the stationary bike from counting calories has been fixed. This exercise type now calculates the calories burned based on how long you’ve been exercising for.
• More Autostart countdown times. We’ve added times greater than 1 minute to give you more time before your workout starts.
• Small UI changes and fixes.

Please keep that feedback coming and let us know if you have any questions or comments, we’re here to help and listen to how you’re enjoying both applications.

All the best,
The WorkSmart Labs family

The recent release of CardioTrainer v2.4 was a particularly bumpy experience for our team, but we wanted to share a bit about what was going on the behind the scenes to help explain some of the problems and how we tackled the issues. Every day is a new adventure, especially these few days (May 17-21) because half of our engineering team was in New York while the other half was at the Google I/O conference in California. We are constantly learning about new ways to deal with problems and keep our users happy and informed, so a very special thank you to everyone for your patience and help. We can’t do it without you!

Very early Tuesday morning, after a long weekend of coding, testing, and reviewing, CardioTrainer v2.4 was uploaded to the Android Market. Since Mark and Artem had a 9AM flight to California for the 2010 Google I/O conference, the team was working under a tight deadline to have everything done before they had to leave for the airport. After the update was finally released around 1AM, there were reports of issues with Android 1.5 devices. Mark stayed up fixing the bugs and pushed out another update right before he and Artem took off for the airport at 7AM. When the rest of the WorkSmart Labs team arrived later that morning, the support email account was filled with messages from frustrated users who couldn’t open the application or find it on their phone, and others were reporting that the application’s size had ballooned to almost 10MB. There were still issues with the latest release, and the unexpected problems would require some immediate attention to figure out what was going wrong.

Armed with Skype and an in-flight WiFi connection at 30,000 feet in sky, the WorkSmart Labs engineering team held a virtual meeting to discuss the problems. With two engineers in New York and two in a plane en route to California, they discussed the issue and soon found that new copyright controls had been accidentally activated when the application was published. This had inflated the size of the application, removed the CardioTrainer heart logo, and changed the name to “com.wsl.CardioTrainer.BeforeBeginActivity.” For some people, it was impossible to open the app because it would keep force-closing. The copyright settings were adjusted on the Android Market, but this wouldn’t help those who had already downloaded version 2.4; getting it fixed for everyone else would require pushing another CardioTrainer update to the Market.

In general, developers try to be strategic about releasing updates to their application. Frequent updates can be frustrating for users, and can also go unnoticed if the Android Market doesn’t send out notifications about the newer versions. Sometimes unplanned updates are unavoidable, but the goal is to minimize these situations as much as possible. Luckily, we have lots of enthusiastic and dedicated users who are eager to help us debug CardioTrainer problems, and this allows us to test fixes without inconveniencing the majority. We commissioned help from some people who had reported problems, sent out test versions of the application, and waited for the feedback. Soon everyone reported back with good news: the new fixes had worked, but with one unfortunate side-effect: their workout history was gone. It turns out that if you updated from v2.4 to v2.4.1, the change in copyright settings forced the application to clear it’s user information, but updating from v.2.3.1 to v2.4.1 wouldn’t cause any problems.

If you’ve been exercising with CardioTrainer, you’ve probably had that satisfying feeling of accomplishment when looking at your workout history; it’s an awesome overview of how many calories you’ve burned and how active you’ve been over the past few days. You might have also had the frustrating experience of losing your entire workout history when switching to a new phone or resetting your device. While it’s possible to back up your tracks to your SD card, the ultimate goal is to have two-way sync between the CardioTrainer website and the mobile application. Our team hasn’t had the chance to fully develop this system yet, and it’s always painful for us to hear that workout histories are being lost. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any choice but to stomach the issue as an unforeseen and unavoidable circumstance for some users. The good news is that the CardioTrainer v2.4.1 update on Tuesday evening should have fixed most of the reported issues. Additionally, after more brainstorming and testing, a new version of Move Your Bot was also released on Wednesday to resolve the Facebook problems and added a couple more features. The whole process was a delicate balance of development, testing, fast research, tough decisions and cross-country communication.

Despite all of the work getting the unexpected bugs fixed, we’re really excited about everything included in the latest version of CardioTrainer. We’ve updated the home screen design and introduced the Move Your Bot game. Move Your Bot is designed help motivate everyone to exercise and use the rewards from that exercise inside the game. We have also added an Autostart feature that makes it even easier to record a workout: open CardioTrainer, click “Start Workout” and the application will automatically start counting down, eventually announcing “3, 2, 1, workout started!”

We are definitely aware of the many things that are still in need of improvement, but as always, we just ask that everyone be patient as we move forward with development. The feedback over the past few days has been incredibly helpful, and we can only hope that it continues as more features and improvements are released. Please continue to share your ideas, and be as specific as possible when reporting problems. All of this will continue to make it easier and more fun to exercise and be healthy, with a little help from CardioTrainer.

Mark poked around with the tongs as he carefully analyzed the salad. He saw some baby tomatoes and found a chunk of blue cheese underneath the lettuce. He knew that cheese would make a big difference, and factoring in the vinaigrette dressing, he made his guess: “110?” Shaking her head, Jane exclaimed, “Nope, only 75!” Salad was always tricky, but with all of this practice, he was much getting better at it.

Counting calories is a task that’s usually associated with people who obsessively keep track of everything they eat to shed a few more pounds. For the rest of us, we’re aware of calories, but we know very little about the calorie content in the food we eat. It’s no surprise that eating well and maintaining a healthy weight are two of the most important steps we can take to live longer, healthier lives. But knowing this, how does the vague notion of “eating well” actually translate into our day-to-day eating habits? What should we be eating, and where do our calories come from?

At every meal in the office during the week, we’ve been taking turns guessing how many calories are in a single serving of each dish. Our food is prepared by our talented chef, and each of her recipes is saved online with service called DailyBurn that automatically breaks down the number of calories per serving, as well as lots of information about the nutritional value about the dish. You can see a sample meal listed here: WorkSmart Labs lunch 2/2/10.

And just because we’re eating healthy food doesn’t mean that the meals aren’t delicious. Our chef has done a wonderful job filling every meal with color, variety and taste. Browse through the photos below to see what we’ve been eating.

As a company, our mission has always been to make wellness a seamlessly enjoyable part of everyday life. But if we expect our users to be eating healthy, then we had better put our money food where our mouth is. We sympathize with anyone who has found that recording everything they eat throughout the day is a difficult and frustrating task. However, counting calories is one of the best ways to start taking control of one’s eating habits, and that’s exactly why we’re doing it: we want to understand this challenge better so we can find ways to make it easier. Our little ”calorie guessing game” is just an example of how we approach these kinds of problems before trying to solve them. Whether it be nutrition or fitness, we want to exemplify the healthy lifestyle that we are promoting through our products and technology.