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.