Calendar Subscriptions

Posted by Stephen - 04/07/09 at 04:04:18 pm

Your Calendar allows you to see a high-level overview of your tracking behavior, and it also allows you to schedule your Workouts and Meals if you are a PRO user.

This PRO functionality has been greatly improved in a couple of ways.

Calendar Subscriptions

The new “Subscribe To My Calendar” feature allows you to subscribe to an ical feed in any calendar software that supports calendar subscriptions (and all of the major ones support this). So, if you are the type who manages your day-to-day activities using Google Calendar, Apple iCal, or Microsoft Outlook, you can now have your Gyminee Workouts, Meals, and Notes right there alongside the rest of your life. Also, all the changes you make on Gyminee will be automatically kept in sync with your calendar software.

Event Time & Duration

Second, you now have more control over how you schedule your workouts. Settings for time and duration have been added, which provide the level of control that many of you need to properly schedule your activities.

So, let’s say you want to schedule your Cardio workout for every other Tuesday at 3:45-4:30 PM? No problem, and now thanks to the new Calendar Subscriptions you can use your favorite calendar software to help keep yourself accountable to your fitness routine.

Enjoy!

Fresh Features

Posted by Stephen - 03/25/09 at 04:03:24 pm

1) New Challenges

Challenges have become one of the most popular features on Gyminee, and they have really done a great job at helping people stay motivated and see results - users have recorded over 48,800 pounds lost in Weight Loss challenges to date. To help continue this trend, we have added some new styles of challenges.

Body Fat Challenges

Now you can create or join a challenge that lets you compete to see who can lose the most off of their percentage Body Fat. For example, you can join a challenge where the goal is to lose the most Body Fat within 3 months.

Reps Based Challenges

These allow you to compete in certain exercises to see who can do the most reps. For example, you could challenge your friends to see who could do 5,000 Crunches first.

Calories Burned Challenges

This type of challenge looks at all of your exercise activity recorded on Gyminee, and then uses the total Calories burned to update your challenge progress. Currently, these are only available as “Everybody Wins” Challenges (see below).

New Everybody Wins Challenges

A handful of new “Everybody Wins” style challenges have been created. Here’s a few of them (you can browse for more by visiting here):

	Burn 25K Cals Get recognition for all the hard work you’re doing. There are Challenges for burning 5K and 50K Calories well.
	1,000 Pushups How long will it take you to do 1,000 Pushups?
	Lose 10% Body Fat If you track your Body Fat, then this type of challenge is for you.

2) Progress Image Improvements

Keeping a visual log of your progress over time can be a great motivator. We wanted to improve this experience in a couple of ways. First, we bumped up the supported image size so that people could upload more detailed images. Also, we moved away from a small, contained slideshow viewer to one that allows you to click on thumbnails and easily view images at their full resolution.

Second, we added a new way for users to browse public images. Before now, the only way to view a user’s Progress Images was to click through to their Profile page. Now, there is a Browse Public Progress Images section that lets you easily find other users who have shared some public images.

Side-note: If you see an image that is inappropriate you can now flag it for removal and an administrator will review it. This is also available for flagging posts as spam in the Forums if you are an active Forum user.

3) Workout Program Browsing

The last feature to cover is a small, yet quite useful, improvement to finding Workout Programs. Before now, your only option for finding a Workout Program that may be interesting to you was to enter a search term. Now, when you browse for workout programs you will see a drop-down box that helps you find programs by category (Fat Loss, Cardio, Free Weights, Intermediate, Advanced, etc.).

That wraps up this quick look at some of the new features that have been added to Gyminee. Lots of other stuff is also in the works!

Native iPhone App - Sneak Peek 2

Posted by Stephen - 03/20/09 at 07:03:16 am

Here’s the second sneak peek at our upcoming native iPhone application. In this installment we’ll look at the BodyTracker, which allows you to keep track of things like your Body Weight, Body Fat %, Waist Size, etc.

New Stuff (And a PRO Coupon!)

Posted by Stephen - 03/09/09 at 01:03:26 pm

There were a few changes added over the weekend. In case you haven’t noticed them yet, here’s a brief overview of the highlights.

Daily Actions

When you visit your Locker Room you will now see three bright buttons. The purpose of adding these buttons is to make it very clear to users (especially new users) what the main actions are that they should be doing. While many of you are seasoned Gyminee experts, it is also important for new users to have a clear picture of how to get the most out of using Gyminee.

Plan This

This is a new feature that, personally, I was pretty excited to see added. When you search for foods, you will now see a “PLAN THIS” button right next to the “QUICK ADD” button. This feature allows you a quick and easy way to plan foods without having to navigate into the Meal Planner. If you’re already a PRO user, then feel free to check it out, if not then you’ll have to upgrade before taking advantage of this feature.

If you’ve been wanting to try out PRO for a while, but needed a little extra push, then feel free to use this coupon code for a FREE 14-day trial. You better hurry though, only 50 people can use this coupon before it expires!

TRYPRO14

To use this coupon, enter it into the “Coupon Code” field when upgrading your account to PRO.

Native iPhone App - Sneak Peek 1

Posted by Stephen - 02/16/09 at 04:02:40 pm

We’re very excited to finally have something to show on our upcoming native iPhone application. In this sneak peek I’ll give an overview of the Nutrition section - which gives you the ability to track the foods you eat using Gyminee’s database of nearly 100,000 food items. Without further ado, here is a quick showcase of what’s in store. Enjoy!

Our three main focuses while designing the native iPhone app are usability, usability, and usability. Removing the number of steps necessary to perform common actions is our main goal. When you first enter the Nutrition section you immediately see the most pertinent information - your daily nutrient intakes and goals. Throughout the day, you can easily view this information with 1 simple tap.

Also, you will notice that the Food Search is right there at the top of the screen. Type in what you ate, and click go.

Here’s an example of Food Search results. All the important information is right there - Calories, Fat, Carbs, Protein, and Serving Size. If you found an exact match, recording what you ate is as simple as tapping the “+1″ button. Streamlining the process of entering your daily food intake is something we’re really focused on - it’s something you will usually do multiple times per day, and it needs to be as easy as possible.

Of course you can still drill down to see the full Nutrition Facts, add it to your Favorite Foods, and customize the date and serving size for your food entry.

Having your Favorite Foods one tap away is very valuable. Here we utilize the iPhone’s alphabetizing functionality (similar to what you see in your iPhone’s Contacts) for quick scrolling through your favorites.

While you can see your daily totals from the main Nutrition page, drilling down into your Nutrition Log will show you the specific foods you have eaten for a particular day. From here you can remove and modify food entries, drill down to view full nutrition facts, and the Food Search control is still right there at the top of the page only 1 tap away.

So, that wraps up this first sneak peek of the upcoming native iPhone application. We’re excited about how the iPhone and other mobile devices will allow us to make tracking your fitness activities much easier. Stay tuned for the next sneak peek!

Facebook + Challenges = More Fun

Posted by Stephen - 02/09/09 at 10:02:40 am

A cool new feature was added over this past weekend. Facebook provides some amazing tools that allow other web applications to integrate their site with facebook.com. We have started to take advantage of these tools and believe it will help users better share their fitness activity, and also begin to help solve the problems that arise with having multiple accounts on multiple social networks.

After joining a Challenge you will now see a link towards the top of the page like the following.

Clicking this link will display a window - one that should look familiar to you if you have used Facebook before (and who hasn’t?).

From here you may customize what the story will look like and choose whether or not you would like to post this to your Facebook Profile. If you have friends on Facebook who may be interested in either competing with you in a challenge or in simply keeping up with your progress, then this is a very quick and easy way to let them know about what you’re doing.

Of course this is all optional and nothing will be posted to your Facebook account without your explicit permission. Depending on how well-received this feature is, we plan to add more Facebook integration down the road, so be sure to let us know what you think about Facebook integration (and also post one or more of your challenges to Facebook).

P.S. We plan to post to our Twitter account more often. Click here to follow us if you would like to stay posted about some of the smaller development updates that don’t necessarily make it to the blog.

Thanks and have a great day!

Don’t Panic, Here’s a Great Gift Idea!

Posted by derek - 12/14/08 at 02:12:22 pm

With Christmas less than 2 weeks away and the start of a New Year just around the corner, you’re probably beginning to panic as you try to think of what to get that special someone. There is no shortage of ideas but finding something meaningful is no easy task.

Wouldn’t it be great to give a gift that could change that special someone’s life?  Well, here is one idea…

How about giving the ‘Gift of  Health’ ?  The timing is perfect and armed with our new 1 year Gyminee PRO Membership, he or she can start fresh and begin that ‘Life Change’ in 2009!  Subscribing to PRO workouts, setting some achievable fitness goals, and participating in a Challenge are just a few of the small steps that lead to significant change.

Now if you wanted to impress them even more, you could add a cool Gyminee T-shirt from our Gyminee Store with that membership!. If you have a humorous side, go a size or two up or down as an incentive for them to reach their goals.

Healthy holidays from the Gyminee Team.

Gyminee Wins Mashable Open Web Awards - Blogger’s Choice

Posted by Andy - 12/10/08 at 12:12:43 pm

We are pleased to announce that Gyminee has been selected to receive the Blogger’s Choice Open Web Award for 2008.  We were selected as the best in the “Sports and Fitness” category by a panel of over 100 Blog Partners.  The full announcement can be found on the Mashable blog.

The final round voting for the People’s Choice is still in progress.  You can vote for us once per day, per email address by using the following widget:

Voting closes this Sunday night at midnight!  Thanks for your support!

Gyminee is a Finalist

Posted by Stephen - 11/20/08 at 11:11:12 am

We’re excited to announce that Gyminee is a finalist in Mashable’s Open Web Awards. The Open Web Awards are:

the only multilingual international online voting competition that covers major innovations in web technology. Through an online nominating and voting process, the Open Web Awards recognizes and honors the top achievements in 26 categories.

If you think Gyminee is the best fitness site on the web, then please cast your vote right away. Simply enter your email address in the widget below to vote. Thanks!

Better Food Search!

Posted by Stephen - 11/13/08 at 09:11:24 am

So, I know many of you have been wondering what’s been going on behind-the-scenes at Gyminee. Well, the answer is a lot!

Most of what we have been working on recently has been totally behind-the-scenes (server upgrades, bug fixes, optimizations, etc.). We expect the Gyminee user-base to continue growing, and to do so at a much quicker pace in the near future. Soon, the Gyminee website will be able to scale at near 100% efficiency.

One of the updates that isn’t completely behind the scenes is a new and improved Food Search. I would expect that some of you keen-eyed users have noticed some improvements with their search results lately. This is because of a combination of things.

For one, we have completely revamped the search engine that helps drive the Food, GymBuddy, Exercise, and Forum searches. It will be faster, more stable, and also return more accurate results for all of the above.

On top of that, the (surprisingly complex) algorithm that helps return the best food results possible has been completely rewritten. Things such as how many times the food has been eaten and whether or not it has an image are now taken into account when you search for foods.

Enjoy and stay tuned for more updates in the near future!

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