Building an App in Eighty Days

Abstract

Just like in finance, the purpose of tracking your weightlifting 'gains' and 'losses' is so that you can see how they compound over time under different circumstances and in response to different factors. Historically, a composition notebook and pencil were used to track such data, but in the era of big data why subjugate yourself to carrying a pencil around the gym when you carry around a fully functional computer in your pocket? After taking a course on Android mobile application development here at Kalamazoo College, I noticed a discrepancy in weightlifting logbook applications on the Google Play Store. While many of the logbook applications available on the Google Play store were functional, many lacked the features to backup your workouts or export them for analysis, features that I deem as necessary for a logbook application. Those that allowed for backup or exportation, often do so as comma separated value files which is fine for a computer scientist but isn't exactly user friendly. What if I no longer had to worry about losing my workouts because they were logged directly to the cloud? What if I could view insights of my workout history right on my phone? It is with those two thoughts in mind that set out to build my own weightlifting logbook application. While I hope that one day this application will provide insight into my weightlifting progress, it is going to start out merely as a data collection tool tailored to my own particular needs and interests. I need an application that allows me to create different workouts, or saved lists of exercises. Next, I need to create instances of those workouts in which I can record how many sets per exercise for each exercise and the number of repetitions per set, and weight per repetition for each set. Lastly, I need to be able to view my progress over time in some sort of intelligible manner. As I intend on using this application on my phone, I will develop it as a hybrid mobile application that it can be used cross-platform on Android or iOS. Administrator only at request of department.