Images in article are through the Android emulator for development, the values shown are not indicative of anyone’s progress or use.
One of my challenges for the year is to get back into my proper training schedule. I have, a few times, made apps for myself to manage exercises and tracking of exercises. Moved over to spreadsheets to track progress, and even printed pages to track progress. I decided a challenge for this year should be to get back in using my own proper, hardcore, exercise app. This introduces Active e-Fitness.
Suffice it to say, I took ages to decide on the style and visual appeal for myself. Sure, I did exercises, but I needed a better way to manage and organise my tracking for myself. Every now, and then, I spent time building up the main planned exercise app. While several features, hinted at here for example, such as Achievements and Manage, aren’t complete – the strategy needed to be simpler. Aim for usability over features, that is, make a usable app first, then afterwards clean it up and make it better. So, in a Closed Alpha, we have Active e-Fitness starting to take shape.
The goal is to release it for free, with non-intrusive adverts which people can opt out of through a singular purchase. Small, simple, and the focus is on your own privacy.
To create the simplest, most user friendly, experience it goes into simple details to explain things in a way that you would hopefully understand it all enough after your first launch.
With all of that being said, it’s important to note, if you share your backup, other people would be able to see your history, and personal exercise additions in the app. This means with a clean install you could even create the routines you want to track alongside friends, and share it without history, and all follow the same routines as friends. Yes, I organised the backup system primarily for ease of movement to new devices, but it also means people can share their own exercise routines for others to enjoy. In the future I might make it so that the routines can be exported to share, and then can be manually imported, to not lose any existing progress – I just need to consider that for a while to make sure it follows the intended privacy.
The idea is you can schedule routines onto days, consider the image above showing Day 4. The Measurements is set to show on every day, so you can measure to track your progress when you feel like it. As you can tell, it isn’t complete for the layout, it missing some of the information it should show, like Use and Description, but as you can tell the intension is so you can even search all routines which might not even be mapped to a day of the week and do them when you would like to.
Along the same lines, currently I have a full set of routines for at the gym with machines, named starting with ‘RT‘. Then the first ‘ET‘ is the starting base of routines at home with partial equipment. The last one shown here, also ‘ET‘, aims to be routines that target the same areas as the above routines, but focus on bodyweight. The point is for you to be able to customise your daily suggested exercises, with the capability to stick to your focus when needed. If you just want gym, you will set the suggested daily routines to use only the gym focused routines. If you want to go bodyweight alone, it will be easy to organise. The idea is to make a data-oriented privacy conscious exercise app that anyone can use and enjoy.
When doing a routine, it has a simple interaction to get through the program, with resets between exercise sets, and at the end, you will see what you managed to do:
With that being shared, it also cuts off wherever you stop the routine. So, it makes it easier to see, if you have a circumstance where you can’t continue, to see what you did. It is organised in a simpler manner for the main view, as you saw in the image, so you can easily see your own progress.
And like mentioned before, you can go back through the history if you ever want to look back.
The one other important note, you can back-up your progress, and import it into a new instance with ease. One thing I noticed with emulators and my personal phone is I have to also clear the app cache before I do a new install, otherwise I can’t get in with a new database. That might be fixed in the future, but the aim is to not ever need database updates after the Alpha.
Ending Thoughts
With that being sorted, it’s easy to understand, I now have a way to push myself to reliably store my exercise routines tracking. Sure, I haven’t completed all the data to make it all, but it has started to become usable. So now I can move forward with my plans around exercise.
The other thing to mention here, if anyone has suggestions for what I can do you’re welcome to reach out to me. Sure, this will become my small passive income one day, which I won’t give out royalties for, but any suggestions are welcomed for me to explore and possibly add to the app. I can’t always think of everything, mind you, and having a set of third eyes following progress might lead to some amazing feature additions.
The e-Fitness page, and images, will likely be reorganised over this weekend.
