Fundraiser for 'FoodStats' mobile app
2014-04-16 19:14:08.774067+00 by
Shawn
4 comments
As my first foray into a new way to think about employment, I've launched a crowd-funding campaign to build an open source Android (and later iOS, Windows Phone, etc.) app for looking up nutrition information. The initial focus is on getting nutrition stats for restaurant menus, but it will also support USDA data for individual foods.
At this early stage I could really use help spreading word about the campaign. (The short URL http://tiny.cc/foodstats points to the campaign for now, and will redirect to the app afterwards.) The app should be especially useful for those with diabetes, high blood pressure and/or varioous dietary restrictions.
The full announcement can be found on my blog.
Thanks for your help :-)
[ related topics:
Free Software Health Open Source Food Economics
]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2014-04-16 19:55:41.589375+00 by:
markd
I'm curious about the data portion of the app - I've thought about doing something similar myself (I don't
like the search interfaces for anything I've seen) but 500 queries a day aren't much, and the next pricing
tier for nutritionix is $300/month. which even for a successful mobile app is a lot of money. (Calorie King
has slightly more queries per day, but then goes to $500/month)
#Comment Re: made: 2014-04-17 01:06:12.096249+00 by:
Shawn
[edit history]
Mark, there are two aspects of my overall plan which address this, at least in part:
- [If the campaign is fully-funded, and maybe even if it's not] the app will be free in the Google Play Store. I'll be contacting NutritionIX in the coming days to discuss API usage for free apps, per their documentation:
If your app is free to any user, you may qualify for additional free API usage.
- Half of the project (and to be honest, the part of most personal interest to me) is the creation of a cross-platform Portable Class Library, upon which any app/website/service can be built. It will be up to such apps to obtain their own API keys for NutritionIX data. (And Calorie King, etc. as I add support for more data sources.)
I'm also considering other, related aspects of the application design...
I plan to look into whether it makes sense to pull from the USDA database (thanks Dan!) directly (NutritionIX already has USDA data), which could potentially mitigate the number of calls to NutritionIX. I've also been doing some preliminary thinking about possibly caching some data locally to reduce round-trips to the server.
#Comment Re: made: 2014-04-17 06:44:42.862526+00 by:
meuon
Within whatever you can do legally, by all means make a local "cache" copy of data received from
other sources.
#Comment Re: made: 2014-04-17 15:40:21.288754+00 by:
Dan Lyke
I haven't downloaded the USDA database in a couple of years, but it seems like with modern storage, making an option to just cache the entire thing locally is totally within the realms of "good idea".