Online Client Billing For Trainers Just Added

An online /email billing service has just been added to OpenFitness.net For Trainers. This allows personal trainers to bill their clients online, and receive payments through their PayPal business account.

This new billing service is included with all OpenFitness.net Trainer accounts at no additional charge. Trainers may use just the online billing, or they can choose to use the billing and online payments. It's completely up to the trainer.

More details about this service are available at:
http://www.openfitness.net/help/trainerPaymentOverview.jsp

If online billing/payment for OpenFitness.net becomes as popular as I think it will, I expect we will continue expanding our online offerings for personal trainers.

OpenFitness.net For Trainers Now Available

OpenFitness.net for personal trainers has just been made available. This means personal trainers can now plan and track clients workouts, progress, etc online at www.openfitness.net. A brief description of how it works is...

1) A trainer gets an OpenFitness.net trainer account
2) Clients sign up for a free OpenFitness.net account under their trainer
3) Trainer and client both have access to the client's fitness logs

As part of the trainer license, the personal trainer gets up to 25 licenses for OpenFitness.net that can be distributed to clients. The service runs just under $1/user per month (25 client users + 1 trainer user for $24.99/mo).

In addition, a set of major enhancements to OpenFitness.net is planned for the very near future that will quite possibly transform the way many personal trainers do business. More details about that will be coming soon.

Open Fitness Featured in Flex Mag

We were mentioned in this month's issue of Flex magazine! The article (on page 74) listed Open Fitness as the most technologically advanced fitness tracking system. They also printed a screenshot of Open Fitness' weightlifting journal screen in there.

As far as I know, that's the first time we were mentioned in any fitness publication. We did get a mention in MacHome once, and also in a Japanese magazine a while back (can't remember the name of that one).

Very exciting!

Minor Updates Released

A couple of minor updates have been released in the past couple of weeks for all of our products. I can't remember all of the changes to each product, but here are the basic summaries:

Open Fitness.net
Fixed a bug that was preventing many forum posts and private messages from showing up.

Open Fitness Desktop
I fixed an issue that was preventing email from working for Open Fitness Desktop users.

Open Fitness Mobile Edition
I Added an option to the Help menu called Clear All Tables. The mobile edition has an obscure bug related to HotSyncing, where if you HotSync and install the application in some particular order, and have the desktop software installed, you might get a 'SQL Type Mismatch' error.

I have been able to re-create this error one time, about a year ago...when I wasn't trying to, and not since (which makes fixing it extremely difficult). The bug seems to be related to the development tools I'm using, and the HotSync mechanism I'm using.

Apparently, the HotSync tries to copy workouts between the desktop and palm, before the user has run the palm software at least once (the data tables are properly initialized the first time the app runs...but not before).

Clicking on Clear All Tables wipes out all workout and measurement data on the palm, but forces them to be properly initialized, which gets rid of the SQL error.

Switched To PayPal

We have just switched over to PayPal for processing OpenFitness.net payments. PayPal offers better integration capabilites, so the subscription process should go more smoothly for many users.

In addition to the better integration capabilities, PayPal offers more flexible subscription terms than our previous provider. That means we may soon offer more options, like discounts for longer-term subscriptions, fixed-length subscriptions, and things like that.

Open Fitness Desktop - v2.0.5 Released

A minor update to the Open Fitness desktop software has just been made available. It updates the underlying database engine, some flaky screen behavior in the diet and supplement journals, and some other very minor things. Supposedly, the updated database engine is a little faster...I didn't really notice any difference.

Whenever I have time to merge the OpenFitness.net upgrades back into the desktop software (I had to split into 2 codebases temporarily), the desktop should get a huge performance boost...at least in the weightlifting section.

Up until I added the 'hide old records' checkbox to the journals, the weightlifting section was taking quite a while to load, for users that had years worth of workouts stored. The performance concerns in the weightlifting section became much more apparent when I ported the desktop code into a server environment. In order to make the workouts show up quickly (when there can easily be millions of records across all users), I had to make significant changes. As of yet, only OpenFitness.net has these changes incorporated. It's not as big of an issue with the desktop, since in most cases there are only one or two users per database on the desktop.

New Logo and Look

The New Logo
OpenFitness.net now has a new logo, and a new look. I think the logo turned out very nice, with the 'O' being a weight plate (if you can't tell). The new logo also became part of the new look to OpenFitness.net, which has a more 'fitness-friendly' look.


Many people have the idea that Open Fitness is more for personal trainers and hardcore weightlifters, but in truth, its very useful and motivating for folks who want to lose a few pounds or just be healthier.

Our new look sort of shows that idea. But to all of our hardcore weightlifting and bodybuilding users...rest assured we will continue to deliver features that meet your tracking needs like nothing else!

New Server Performing Well
Unrelated to the logo...the new HP server that was purchased a few weeks ago has been running like a champ for about 2 weeks now. Hopefully it performs as well as its predecessor, which has never actually needed a reboot. On at least one occasion, it ran for more than a year without any downtime. The only reason it was even powered off after that stretch was to physically move it to a different location.

Server Retiring

During the past couple of months, I've been spending a lot of time trying to find a good server to replace the existing OpenFitness.net application server. Apparently, finding a server that actually works can be difficult.

The app server that's currently working on OpenFitness.net is an athlon-based server that is a few years old. It was really built to handle the backend sales automation processes for us, and it has proven to be a very reliable system. So, I felt comfortable running OpenFitness.net on it for the short term. The only problem is, that it's a few years old, doesn't have much memory (actually only 256 MB!), and I think its hard drives are nearing the end of their useful life.

I wanted to replace it with a more upgradeable 64 bit system that would be just as reliable as the current one, but much faster. So, I started shopping around...

First Attempt

My first purchase was an intel-based system, which would work OK for a week or so...followed by memory being fried. I replaced all the memory, and after a few days, the new memory was fried. This was not cheap memory either! Of course, by the time I decided I could not trust this server at all, it was past the latest date for return it.

Second Attempt

This time, I went for a 'barebones' server, thinking maybe I can salvage some of the parts from the original server (which contained about $1k worth of brand new hard drives). This one was a Tyan-based barebones system, with a dual core Opteron and plenty of memory.

Unfortunately, when I took it out of the box, plugged it all in...NOTHING! This thing was dead before I even got my hands on it. I was not about to get stuck with another dead server, so I returned this thing for a refund right away (minus a restocking fee of course).

Last Try

I debated for a while about whether to try and resurrect the first attempt, or go for a third. After deciding once and for all that I'll never be able to sleep at night with that first server doing any work for me, I decided to order an HP ProLiant server that had pretty much the same capabilities as the Tyan (without the hot-swapping...oh well).

Here's the new server humming away in my office, waiting to go into production next week. OpenFitness.net should see a little bit of a speed improvement, as those Opterons and 10k rpm hard drives make a big difference in the database speed. Also, having quadruple the memory doesn't hurt either. I'd say we'll have that thing up to 8 Gigs of memory within the next 12 months.

New Workout Sharing Feature

This afternoon, I finished a new feature that's pretty interesting. Now, there's a setting under edit profile that lets you make your fitness logs public/shared. If you do that, your weightlifting log becomes publicly viewable via a special link.

The image above is a screenshot of what people would see if you send them your 'fitness profile' link. Currently, it's only for weightlifting, but I'm sure it will be expanded to include diet and cardio before long. I doubt if most people would be comfortable sharing their measurements publicly, so most likely you'll be able to pick and choose which logs you want to share (if any). This sharing option is turned off by default for all users.

It's nice to see a vision come together, and this new feature takes OpenFitness.net another step closer to the vision of open-ness I originally had when creating Open Fitness.

OpenFitness.net - My biggest project ever!

I've worked on a lot of different types of projects over the past 8 years or so, but OpenFitness.net takes the cake. Overall, the Open Fitness Desktop was probably more work, but it was spread over a 10 year period, rather than in one big lump.

It's hard to believe the sheer amount of work that went into OpenFitness.net, and it's even harder to believe that it's done! Even though 50-60% of the work was done before I started (I leveraged a lot of work from the desktop version), it took an enormous amount of effort to complete this first phase of the online version. It is easily the biggest project I have ever taken on.

Now, I'm kind of switching to a 'get the word out' mode. It will be interesting to see how the system grows over time. I already have some exciting ideas for new features, but I think it needs more time to grow before I switch back to 'enhancement' mode.
Of course, there will be some minor enhancements that go in during the next few months, but the hard work should be done for a while. I will probably add more variety to the meal planning and workout planning pretty soon.

I'm especially happy with how the diet planning section turned out. The automated planning adds a nice touch. It really improves on the whole diet tracking process, and takes out 95% of the work for most people. When you add in the shopping list feature, I think people tracking their diet with OpenFitness.net may actually come out ahead, since they save time not having to think about what food to buy for the week.

The animated pie chart for carb/protein/fat breakdown is very cool. You can click on a part of it, and the whole thing spins around.

The food breakdown (foods being components of other foods) was also a new feature for the website that is not currently part of the desktop app.

One thing I've tried to do was integrate the different pieces ('journals' in the desktop) better. With the other versions of Open Fitness, there are sections of the software completely dedicated to tracking one particular piece of fitness information. I'm trying to move away from that approach wherever I can.

The weightlifting log and routine sections turned out nice too. I was able to integrate graphical depictions of how to perform many exercises. If you print out the workouts to take to the gym, it just makes it a little easier to look read.

The exercise grouping-by-bodypart is new too.

Unfortunately, the most innovative things about OpenFitness.net can't be listed here, for fear of who might see them. They are kind of in the background, and you'll probably never conciously notice them.

About the Developer

My name is Matt, and I'm the developer of Open Fitness. If you ever send in a support question, it comes to me. If you download Open Fitness or track your workout on OpenFitness.net, you're executing my code (and I sure do appreciate it).

I created this blog, because I figured my users might want to know a little background about my software, or maybe what direction it's headed. Since you're reading this, I guess I was right!

Open Fitness is something I created (and still work on) in hopes that it will help people stay motivated to work out, watch their diet, and stay healthy. I have personally found that keeping a journal of your workouts makes you feel better about what you're doing.

A Short History of OpenFitness

The Reason
About 10 years ago, I was still in high school and working out all the time. I was keeping track of my workouts in a paper notebook, so I would always be able to look back and see how far I've come. I also wanted to be able to figure out which workout strategies worked well, and which ones didn't. Keeping a journal on paper lets you do that, but it's pretty tedious.

The Idea
Around the same time, I was taking a computer programming class, and realized I could make a computer program that would replace the notebook. I also figured if I could use such a program, other people could too.

Building It
The first version of my fitness software was created in 1995, and had exactly one customer (myself). It was written in FutureBasic, and only ran on MacOS. I can't remember if it even had a name, but it did let me record my weightlifting workouts.

While in college, I bought a PC, so I had to rewrite the thing in C++, and it was called Workout Journal. I still didn't know what the internet was yet, so unfortunately WorkoutJournal was not available for download.

Still in college, I learned about a new programming language called Java. Sounded like a good thing to learn, so I ported Workout Journal to Java and renamed it to Personal Training Workstation. I also created a website for it (http://www.workoutware.com/).

Over the course of 7 or 8 years, Personal Training Workstation (users called it PTW) sort of evolved into whatever the users asked for. Sometimes a user would request a new feature, and I'd have it built within a couple of hours of their request. I added sections for tracking diet, measurements, supplements, and many other things.

Somewhere around 2003, I created a Palm-based version of PTW, called PTW - Mobile Edition. It let users track workouts and chart strength progress on their Palm-based device.

In 2005, I renamed PTW to Open Fitness, gave it a makeover, and added a lot more features to it. I also created the OpenFitness.net website (http://www.openfitness.net/) to let OpenFitness users share their workouts and diets. PTW - Mobile Edition also got a makeover and a new name. I built a syncing mechanism too, so users could enter workouts on their Palm and have them automatically copied into the Open Fitness desktop.

Just this month, I finished rebuilding the OpenFitness.net website to basically be a web version of the Open Fitness desktop software. I also added many new features that would have been difficult (or nearly impossible) to add to the desktop software.