Calorie Tracker

The problem

I am an avid gym goer and with that comes with needing to keep on top of my nutrition. The issue I ran into is that to get the good features of these apps, like barcode scanning you need to pay a monthly subscription. With just a little bit of research I found an open source API that takes a scanned barcode and gives you the nutrition information for that product, and thus this project was born.

Building the project and main challenges

The main challenge of this project is that it was my first crack at creating a mobile app with React Native and Expo, so getting the project setup correctly and learning how to use this new framework was tricky. The reason I went with React Native is that I have a lot of experience with React and Next, and so transferring those skills over made getting started much easier.

After this it was simple, access the phones camera using built in React Native functions, scan a bar code and call the API and then display the information. This is the core user loop of the app.

In it's current state it is exactly that, just scanning barcodes. As time goes on and I have the time to revisit this, I want to add in journal entries for what you eat each day and a weekly analysis of how your diet compares to your goals.

More to come soon.