What’s new in Gym Buddy 2.0? 03/20/09
Ok, finally! Gym Buddy 2.0 is here. The reason it took so long was that my first two attempts were rejected by Apple. The first time because it didn’t give a warning that you needed a wifi connection to backup, and the second time because the localization was very poor. Each attempt only takes about an hour to fix, but then it’s another week of waiting for approval.
My apologies to anyone who was using a language besides English. To get it approved as quicky as possible, Gym Buddy 2.0 is English only. But I hope you agree that English is a better option than your first language done incomprehensibly. At least that is what my feedback tells me. Once Gym Buddy is mostly complete, I will localize it for different languages correctly, but right now Gym Buddy is changing so fast that it just makes sense to wait.
As you would expect, 2.0 is a major update and brings two powerful and overdue features: Backup/Restore and Calendar View.
Backup & Restore only works via wifi, so a network connection to a computer is required. It uses open-source software called SyncDocs, which is the simplest (and cheapest -- free!!) way to get files on and off your phone. See our instructions and links for downloading here: Backup & Restore. It’s a small download and doesn’t require any configuration. Just start SyncDocs on your computer and Gym Buddy is ready to go.
The only challenge will be getting a wifi connection to your computer, but if you haven’t done it yet you really should anyway -- a broadband connection will make your phone/Touch 100% more usable and fun.
The Calendar view is far and away the best way to view your history. At a glance you can see your workout days for the month, the name of the workout used (if you used multiple workouts, only the first one is shown), and your workout volume for that day. Touch any workout and it takes you to the history (list of sets) for that day. Scroll between months with just a quick flip.
As you can see above, I have redesigned the History tab and replaced the Email tab with Data Mgmt. Each gives you four buttons to select your task. In the History tab, the ‘Workouts’ and ‘Exercises’ buttons give you quick and easy access to all your charts and reports. Now that I have a good place to put them, many more will be coming soon.
Notice in the Data Mgmt tab, along with Backup and Restore, there is another new function called Purge. Many users have asked for a way to bulk delete sets. Purge lets you do that by date, but it only deletes sets, not exercises, workouts, or body measurements. I figured those are finite enough in number that manually deleting them is a better way to go. Gym Buddy will inform you with how many sets you will be deleting before pulling the trigger so you won’t accidentally delete more than you think.
But of course you should now have your database backed up anyway!
Other changes in 2.0:
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• Selecting on a workout in the ‘Last 5’ Previous section of the input screen now takes you to the complete history for that workout. Once there, you can edit it as you wish.
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•Sets on the input screen now appear in reverse chronological order -- that is, last set first. So if you’re doing a lot of sets per exercise, you no longer have to scroll down to see your last set.
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•You now have the option to turn off the celebratory ‘Yes!’ when you set a new One Rep Max record.
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•Gym Buddy will now remember your Previous Section setting (last workout, or last 5) so you don’t have to change it everytime you workout.
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•You can now edit the year of a set directly rather than having to scroll through months and months. You can’t set the year prior to 2002 or after 2010. There’s has to be a limit or drawing some graphs could get crazy.
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•Gym Buddy now defaults the value of weight and reps to your last set. If you want to duplicate a set, just hit the enter button.
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•You can now change the workout and exercise of a set. For example, if you perform an exercise from the Exercise tab, it gets assigned ‘None’ as the workout. When editing the set, you can now change that to any of your workouts. Also if you create a new exercise and want to move some of your sets to it, you can do that also.
Anyway, hope you like it. I’m not done yet and there’s much more to come. Thanks for joining along.
What was new in older versions? Gym Buddy 1.1 Gym Buddy 1.2 Gym Buddy 1.3 Gym Buddy 1.4 Gym Buddy 1.5
