User interface upgrades

I’ve upgraded the user interface on the main Daily Journals page for the following actions:

• delete a food or meal
• change the serving size or units of a food
• change the name of a meal
• add a new meal

You’ll notice the whole page doesn’t refresh anymore; it behaves much like an application on your computer now and is much more responsive. This was a pretty big upgrade and I think you’ll really appreciate it once you check it out.

Heads Up is now completely free!

Yes, it’s true. Heads Up Eating has gone completely free, so everyone now has full access. My experiment with the two-tiered membership model is over. Tell all your friends, family, and coworkers to get on Heads Up!

In other news, I’m done for the semester with grad school, and at this point I’m thinking I’m going to take the next semester off. That means I’ll have way more time to work on Heads Up. Expect new features and continued improvements. I’ve been sneaking in subtle performance and usability improvements over the last couple weeks (AJAX for you web geeks). Expect more of this, as well as some more major features coming soon. Keep the letters coming, I’m definitely listening for suggestions.

Thanks for the support everyone!

Food details now shows macro chart and meal information

When you view the Food Details screen, you will now see a pie chart showing the macronutrient information for that food. Also, when you’re about to add a food to a meal, or when you view a food already added to a meal, Heads Up now shows you the macronutrient information for the corresponding meal. This gives you a nice preview of what your meal will contain before you add the food, as well as helps you adjust serving sizes.

Food Details page shows new chart and meal information

New food search page

You’ll notice a new “Search” link in the menu bar. This page allows you to look up any public food in the Heads Up database, as well as your own private foods if you’re logged in. There is nothing really novel here for existing users; it is intended as a general resource and is accessible to non-members. At the time of this writing, Heads Up Eating has nutritional information for 18021 public foods, and that’s a tremendous amount of information that can be shared with the rest of the world. Hopefully that will bring in new members, and that means more public foods for existing Heads Up members.

Heads Up Eating is officially launched!

I know it’s sudden, but the time is right. After months and months of work, the site is finally ready to go live! The base URL http://www.headsupeating.com now works. I’m not going to be aggressively promoting the site for at least another month due to my schedule, but please go ahead and tell everyone you know who may be interested. You may use this tool I created to email them if you wish.

I’ve added several tutorials to help new users get up and running; many of you noted you needed a little help getting started so hopefully these will do the trick. I’ve made a bunch of little fixes and tweaks here and there. You’ll notice I’ve added some cool retro graphics to go along with the retro theme I’ve been envisioning the whole time. I’ve kept them as unobtrusive as possible.

I’ve still got many ideas in store for Heads Up, so the site will only get better and better. Feel free to contact me with any thoughts, ideas, or criticisms you may have. Keep in mind I may be slow to respond over the next month as I’ll have limited internet access.

User membership types

I’ve setup two different membership types. Premium members will have full access to the site, with unlimited numbers of saved meals and recipes, Heads Up Eating will always remember their daily journal information for as long as they stay members, and they won’t see advertisements. Free members will still have full access to the site, but they will be limited to 2 saved meals, 1 recipe, their daily journal history will last for 3 days at a time, and they’ll see unobtrusive advertisements. These small restrictions may evolve over time. I feel this will allow more casual users most of the benefits of the site, but if they really want to get serious about it, they will have some incentive to upgrade to a very modestly priced premium membership, with the income contributing towards the costs in maintaining the site. Premium memberships are available in month-to-month increments, or a greatly reduced-price yearly membership. All billing and credit card information will be securely handled and stored off-site on PayPal.com, probably the most reputable online payment site. International payments in most major currencies are okay.

As a thank you to my active beta testers, I’ve given you guys free lifetime premium memberships.

Invite friends tool

Even though I kinda don’t want you to use it until I officially launch the site (and the link is to the base URL which is invalid at the moment), I’ve added a tool to invite your friends to Heads Up Eating. I wanted to have this tool up and running and tested before launch. Besides letting your friends know about this ridiculously awesome site, the more people join, the more public foods will be added for you to use, so everyone wins. The tool includes a pretty cool little widget to import addresses from your address books. Oh and by the way, you can access the tool at the bottom of every page.

Food search more powerful, smarter

I’ve improved the algorithm used for the food search feature; it should now return more relevant results first. I’ve also made a bunch of small usabily enhancements, and updated the graphical look of the site a bit. Visually I think the site is looking pretty good, definitely let me know what you guys think. I just finished reading a book on Javascript/DOM/AJAX so expect the site to become even better (behaving more like a standalone application, less like a website) over time. Oh, and I also created this blog (instead of putting the site updates directly on the login page).

Edit and delete recipes, small usability enhancements

You may now edit and delete recipes. You may also sort by column when searching for foods to add, as well as in the food, meal, and recipe management page. Some minor usability improvements have been made as well.

Recipes are finally here!

Recipes are finally implemented! You can create new ones, and add them as meals or to meals, or convert them to foods. This is a powerful feature, so be sure to check it out. Still left to be done are managing recipes which includes the ability to edit and delete existing ones. A whole bunch of small aesthetic and usability improvements have been made as well.