Friday 9 November 2018

Weight Tracker User Guide

Welcome, this is the user guide for the Android Weight Tracker app. This app allows you to record you daily weight measurements and then see your progress as a chart or report.

Home Screen



The app is designed around the home screen, it is a navigation hub for the apps features. From the home screen you can:
  • Add new daily weight measurements
  • Review and edit your data
  • See a chart showing your weight versus time
  • Statistics about your weight and BMI
  • Change settings like the weight units
  • Share your readings with other devices

New Weight

Here you enter you daily weight measurements that you have taken from a bathroom scales.



The date will automatically be set to today's date, however to change the date press the - button to roll back one day, or + to roll forward one day. Pressing the date itself will pop up a date picker for you to select the date. Note that you can not enter time, the time recorded for the entry will be your device's current time.

The app will automatically set the weight to your last measurement, you can change it by pressing either the + or - buttons, or pressing the weight itself to pop up a text field where you can enter your weight via the keyboard. The + / - will change the weight by either
  • 1/2lb if your weight unit is pounds
  • 0.1kg if your weight unit is kilograms
  • 1lb if your weight unit is stones
When done, press the ADD button and the weight measurement will be recorded and you will be returned to the Home screen. 

If you wish to enter more weight readings, check the Stay on the screen check box.


Edit Readings

Here you can view a list of your readings, you can also delete and edit your readings.


You can share your readings by pressing the share button, top right. The app will export readings to other apps such as Email clients. This is useful if you want to view your data in a spreadsheet. 


Touch a reading and you will be shown a screen similar to the New Reading screen, here you can edit or delete the reading.



Chart

You can view your weight measurements as a chart showing weight vs time.


The chart will show your all your data and fit the axes accordingly. However you can change the time scale via the menu top right, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 1 Year or all time. 

The graph will show a red trend line, the trend will depend on the time scale you have chosen. If you are close to your target weight the app will show it as blue horizontal line.

Pressing the share button (top right) will take a screen shot and allow you to share the image via other apps.

Sync


Here you can save and restore your data from your Google Drive, this is useful for synchronising readings between your devices.

Firstly the app will need permission to access your Google Drive, it will pop up a dialog asking you to choose an account. If you do not wish to use this feature, press back several times to get back to the home screen.

If you have allowed the app permission to access your Google Drive folder, the app will search for the latest weight readings in the folder and display the date and time at the top of the screen.  Press REFRESH LATEST button to make the app search again for the latest readings as Google Drive can take several minutes to Sync across your devices.

Press SAVE TO GOOGLE DRIVE to store your readings in the Weight Tracker folder of your Google Drive.

Press RESTORE FROM GOOGLE DRIVE to load the latest the latest readings from the Weight Tracker folder on Google Drive. When loading readings, the app will synchronise them to those stored in the apps database, new readings will be added, same readings will be over written with the readings from Google Drive. 


Example 1

If you store your readings on your phone but wish to view them on your tablet, follow these steps:
  1. On your phone, SAVE TO GOOGLE DRIVE
  2. Wait a few minutes to allow Google Drive to sync
  3. On your tablet, press REFRESH LATEST until you see the latest time stamp
  4. On your tablet press RESTORE FROM GOOGLE DRIVE

Example 2

View your readings in a spreadsheet on your PC

  1. On your phone, SAVE TO GOOGLE DRIVE
  2. On your PC open the Google Drive app (or website)
  3. Wait for the readings to appear in the Weight Tracker folder
Note that Google Drive is a cloud service, so ensure you have WiFi or mobile data enabled to allow Google Drive to communicate to Google's servers.

Report 

 The report screen shows your BMI, statistics and trends.



Trends are calculated using line of best fit and are then used to work out if you are losing or gaining weight. The app will use the trend line to work out when you will reach your Goal weight.

Settings

Here are all the settings you need to configure the app for yourself, side swipe each screen to get to the next.


  • Set your weight units and target weight you are trying to achieve.
  • For BMI calculations you will need to enter your height

Auto Backups


Every seven days the app can save your readings to Google Drive, but first you will need to

  1. Allow the app permission to use your Google Drive, eg go to Sync and choose an account.
  2. On Settings, go to General Settings and check Automatic Backups
If you lose data, you can go to Sync and press RESTORE FROM GOOGLE DRIVE to recover data from your last back up.

7 comments:

  1. John Sturdy25 November 2018 at 09:59
    I've been using this for a few years now (it's excellent), and also imported earlier data from a spreadsheet. So I have about six years data in it, which leads to a small change request: when displaying all days, if there are several years in it, could you change the time axis labelling to years? The present labels are confusing as it gives dates within the year but for several different years.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for the feedback John, yes the time axis labels need sorting. I'll put it on my to do list

      Delete
    2. I guess this never happened?

      Delete
  2. That should be "displaying all dates"...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Can't find this app on the play store any more

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Reluctantly I've had to pull the app due to Google stopping their support for the GDrive Android API. I recommend that you switch to another app.

      Delete
  4. That's disappointing, as I've enjoyed using this app. Do you know of any other apps I can download my backed up data to? I have about 6 years worth of data.
    Thank you.

    ReplyDelete