If you’re into your personal fitness then the DailyBurn is an essential tool for helping you reach your goals.  The free version (there is also Pro) lets you track what you’re eating, how much exercise you’re doing and track your weight.  It also lets you set goals, like your target weight and helps you eat the right amounts by calculating your BMR (how many cals you need a day) and if you get stuck for an exercise then it’ll help you find the perfect one, with video!  They’ve had a web app for some time, but have just released a “propper” app, this is a quick tour and some of my thoughts.

At a glance: The first screen of the app, after you’ve logged in provides easy access to your daily stats, and brings the opportunity to go Pro front and centre (that’s an in app purchase by the way).  Navigation is the familiar and not very fun 5 icons down the bottom, they stick with you throughout and provide access to all the areas you’d expect from the web site.

Works offline: This app will work offline and keeps itself in sync with the website and so every so often there’s a “synchronising” message that appears at the top.

Body: Rather obviously the Body page shows information about your current body stats, but it’s also where they can be changed.  There are three selections here, the first changes the body statistic being measured, in the picture it’s weight, but it can be changed to any of your bodily dimensions that you happen to be tracking.  Current lets you set your current measure for that level and Goal lets you adjust your goal.  The latter is something that I thinks’ a bit superfluous in a mobile app and something best saved for the full web application.

The body page also includes the familiar line chart of your progress. 

Secret if you tilt iPhone, ala the Stock app, then you get a landscape view of the graph. There’s a bug here, though.  The graphs on the website have always impressed me how they move smoothly between my goal (74kg body weight) and my progress (currently 170.75 lbs) even though the scales are different, the website converts on the fly (goal is KG progress is LBS).  That fails on the iPhone app and it makes it look like my goal of 74lbs is way off – I’m glad it is!!!

Workouts: The workouts page helps you track and zero in on your workout progress, the first 3 sections just give you an overview of where you are today, the next four take you off to more stuff.  My workouts takes you to all your predefined routines so that you can track progress.  Progress can be tracked for an individual exercise by selecting it and then selecting Submit Progress or for the workout as a whole by selecting Start Workout which then walks through each exercise in the workout.  Back on the Workouts page Find Workouts lets you find workouts submitted by the community and Find Exercises does the same.

Find Exercises is also the place to access videos of exercises if you aren’t sure of the correct form for doing one, which can be very handy.  The video’s open in the video player but just clicking the Done button takes you back to the Daily Burn application.

The Workout Log option takes you to your log of exercises for the day, initially this looks rather useless, each options selectable but does nothing.  At the top there is however an Edit button and once selected it allows for the removal of any exercise or set that you didn’t actually do.  That’s really useful as I make lots of mistakes like that!

Secret: swipe left to right on any set to reveal a Delete button, quicker than Edit if you only need to remove one!

Nutrition: Obviously this is where you track what you’ve eaten for the day, but what I like is that there are small progress bars that indicate how much of your intake of Calories, Fat, Carbs and Protein you’ve had.  There’s two ways to enter foods you’ve eaten, the first is just to search at the top, which is quick and always my preference on the website.  In this app though it’s easier to use My Favorites and select one of your favourite foods.

Either route there are two ways to add that item to your intake.  The first is to select the +1, but beware, doing that gives you no option to change the portion size, it’s litterally +1 portion, so make sure the portion sizes of your favourites are right!  The second way to add a food is to select, the food (use the icon area) and you then get the option to change the serving size.  Phew!

The edit button at the top right again lets you remove favourites (which can be added from the search).  Secret: again swipe left to right to reveal a Delete button for just one item, and again it’s the faster way to remove just one thing!

Adding a new food is more simple, use the search and just select the food and enter the serving size, to favourite it resist the urge to +1 it and select the food by it’s icon and the Add to Favorites.

My Nutrition Log is where your days intake is available and again from here items can be removed, which is great for that accidental addition.  Again either use the Edit button top right or swipe left to right to delete.

Account is the last option and it lets you change account details, and again upgrade to Pro.

Final thoughts – This is a good first effort for the app, everything seems to work (apart from that annoying bug with the chart).  The one problem that I have with this, over the web app which I’ve always found to be perfectly great, is that it seems harder to quickly enter my food and workout progress.  Well see how I get on with it over time, but I won’t be removing the web app yet.  It does seem more capable for sorting out those mistakes though.  The big thing that’s missing is the ability to add new foods, it’s in the web app, why not here?!