Calories: Daily Nutrition Tracking Made Easy
Those of us who are watching our waistlines know how tedious and downright frustrating it can be keeping track of our daily caloric intake. There are a few decent applications that help make the process easier, but even they fall victim to an overcrowded user interface or difficult instructions. Enter Calories, an elegant, powerful nutrition tracking app.
The developer states that his inspiration for the look and feel of Calories was the beautiful, elegant, simple design of the to-do app Things. And he has succeeded in creating the same ease-of-use and meaningfully colorful interface in Calories. At first glance the app looks deceptively simple: search for foods to add to your list for the day, changing the quantities if needed. Calories then tabulates Protein, Carbs, Fat, and 44 nutrients for you. The values are looked up on the fly from the USDA Food Database, and a bar graph at the bottom of the screen tells you at a glance how you’re doing for your caloric intake goals.
This simplicity masks several powerful features happening under the hood. For example, the first time you search for “subway,” you’ll get several hits. Once you’ve chosen the “Turkey, ham, and roast beef club sandwich,” for example, Calories remembers your choice, and then next time you search for “Subway,” that sandwich appears at the top of the results list, with a blue “favorites” check mark next to it. There is no need to mark a food as your favorite; the program intuitively figures that out from the foods you select. Simple and smart!
You can easily change the view to show all foods for the day, or view your foods as color-coded meals: Breakfast (orange), Lunch (green), Dinner (purple), or Snacks (gray), and you can easily drag and drop a food from one meal to the next, and option-drag to create a duplicate entry.
There are also reports you can generate for the day, week, month, or the whole year. This allows you to quickly see how you’re doing each day, or whether that weekend birthday party put you over your average calories for the week.
All of these features are packed into a remarkably clean user interface. But as powerful as Calories currently is, there are several additions that are planned which will greatly improve what the app can do. The next version, 1.1, is due out in mid-July. Future versions will allow you to:
• Add your own foods to the database
• Add your own tags
• Set daily goals for each nutrient that is being tracked
• Bundle your foods into meals
• Improved reporting
• Printing support
Through an online Calories user group, the developer gathers (and really listens to) user feedback and suggestions for future improvements. Two that stand out for the future include an iPhone version of Calories, and a possible collaboration with the developers of the MacGourmet application, to allow for meal planning integration with Calories.
With a clean user interface and many powerful features, this nutrition tracker is well worth a test drive. Calories is $19 from the NSObjects website, and comes with 100-entry trial version, and requires OS 10.5.
It looks great, but it requires Leopard, which you might want to note.
Thanks, but I would rather increase my physical activity rather than counting calories using software.
Invest 60-90 minutes on training bicycle or other similar means 6 days a week
I already lost 5 pounds in 2 weeks
Great review, but I tend to agree with Chriswan. Exercise > calorie counting
A couple of updates to the review:
1. While “Today” is a great app, that was a typo–it was “Things” which was the inspiration for Calories.
2. Not all of the upcoming features listed will be out with version 1.1; some will be farther in the future. Check out the roadmap for more information: http://groups.google.com/group/calories/web/calories-roadmap
3. The demo is limited to 100 entries, not 30 days. There is no time limit.
4. As mentioned by infmom, Calories requires OS 10.5 Leopard.
Awesome!! I’ve been looking for something like this for weeks!
THANK YOU.
Exercise is great for cardiovascular health (among many other things), but as anyone who’s lost a great deal of weight can tell you, if you consume fewer calories than you burn on a daily basis, you lose weight. You don’t have to exercise at all. So counting calories does actually matter!
@Bill: It’s funny, most apps a bit ago had very distinct names, now, for some apps, if you don’t put the name in quotes, people will think its something completely different
Just tried this while eating my breakfast of scrambled egg on toast. Good idea, but much too complicated.
I found toast, fine. Scrambled egg… Hum… Is that from frozed? Dried? Powdered? With fish?!? Erm, it’s from 2 eggs. Which I just collected fresh from the hens.
And what kind measurement is a cup? I’m english, the only thing I consume by the cup is tea. Why is there no weight measurement?
I have to agree that rough calorie counting still needed by people who do exercises, so they don’t overconsume foods which will nullify their effort
You can use your brain instead of a shareware
You need to do excercise in addition to counting calories, otherwise you will be slim but unhealthy
Keeping track of calorie intake is very important during periods of high volume physical activity. In fact, as a cyclist, it is only when I am training a lot that I watch calories to make sure I get enough, but am not overeating.
An additional feature for this program might include an adjustable daily calorie expenditure.
Just a quick note that Calories 1.1 was released today (7/24/08), and includes many new features. You can read about the new features at http://www.nsobjects.com/calories/release-notes, and download it at the link mentioned in the review.
Some of the new features include:
–add your own custom foods to the food database
–create new foods from a collection of foods (recipes)
–improved reporting
–you can now print your daily diet
–faster searches with an improved algorithm
and more.
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