30 Pounds

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I weighed 220 pounds in May last year. That isn’t unusual. Before the bike riding season begins for me I often have weighed in the high 210s over the last dozen years. And I usually lose weight quickly once I started riding. 2013 was no exception. I dropped to 207 within a month or so. But then I was stuck. That has never happened before. Usually I drop to 202 or so and then stick there.

It’s not that I liked being even that heavy but I hadn’t been motivated before to lose extra weight. Sure, I thought about 185 as if it was some long ago dream like my baseball career, but really didn’t focus on losing weight as a goal.

In the fall that all changed. My wife lost too much weight after teeth extractions and braces so started tracking calories to make sure she was getting enough. She suggested I do it with her.

I wrote about the start of the process back in November, about the switch that flipped in my brain the minute I started tracking. I couldn’t let the system win. I had to always be in the green (I under-ate my calorie goal). I had to exercise more so I could eat more.

I’m proud to announce that I blew through my goal of 195 and sit today at 190, exactly two months after writing that first post. Officially I’ve lost 30 pounds.

A few things I learned along the way:

  • As I said, the key was tracking food intake. Once I did that everything else fell into place. I wanted to exercise more so I could eat more. I was motivated to get to the gym, which I have done six days per week since.
  • Tracking food is hard and impossible to really do accurately. MyFitnessPal makes it easier as it has many foods already and found, in many cases, that there was always something close. But we measured and food scaled our way throughout the process.
  • It has saved us money. We eat less food, we go out less often.
  • Speaking of eating out, this is the most dangerous thing to do when trying to lose weight. The portions are ridiculous and riddled with heavy calorie stuff that makes it taste really good. Luckily, we only eat out (or bring in) once a week, plus lunch meetings (at which I eat a lot more caesar salads then I used to). Also, iced tea is your friend! (No calories without sugar.)
  • Vegetables and meats have low calories; pastas are the worst. Planning is the key. If it is spaghetti for dinner than I better get to the gym, do a solid work out, and eat low calorie meals for breakfast and lunch.
  • I can’t eat as much now as I used to. I get full quicker.
  • I found that I eat a lot of the same foods, partly because they are easy to track and partly because I know the caloric impact on my day. Staples include Chex cereal or a couple of eggs for breakfast, yogurt with a banana or smoothies or humus with flat bread at lunch, plenty of vegetables which have almost no calories. I like a big dinner so try to save calories for it.
  • I didn’t track things like cholesterol before starting this, but I’ve been very happy to note that my count has been below my goal every week. Sugar, though? Forget it. Everything has tons of sugar in it, which is likely why diabetes is so common. I’m actually looking forward to my next blood test as my cholesterol has been high for a while. It will be interesting to see if it drops.
  • The best lesson I learned, though, is that I can eat cookies and candy and chips. Again, planning is key. A lighter breakfast and lunch, a solid dinner, enough exercise, and there was plenty of room for a couple of cookies or a few chips in the evening.

I am reaching the end for now. My body is telling me to slow up and let it recover. I get cold more easily than I used to and I have had a couple of dizzy spells and headaches for no specific reason. My body is sore from all the exercise. But overall my energy is way up and I’m not embarrassed to change in the locker room anymore.

As my wife has said to me on more than one occasion, “Food doesn’t taste as good as skinny feels.”

2014 Software Business Models

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I have to admit, I generally hate New Year’s posts. You know the ones I mean, right? Some silly “look back” at the year before or some bloviated “look ahead” at what the new year will bring, lamenting all the lost opportunities and swearing the author will do differently [1]. First of all, I think few care (except the person writing it). Second, the new year is artificial. You want to do better in August? Then do better in August. But no one ever writes these screeds in August.

But then Ben Thompson came along and wrote the New Year’s post that is better than all the others, as it is actually practical and supposed to be for us, not him. Ben wrote an absolutely fantastic piece called 2014 Business Models that is well worth the read for anyone trying to make a living selling software (oops, apps) in 2014.

There are two concepts he discusses here. First he sets up his business models by first discussing marginal cost, and this is incredibly important to understand in the “download” economy:

The implication for apps is clear: any undifferentiated software product, such as your garden variety app, will inevitably be free. This is why the market for paid apps has largely evaporated. Over time substitutes have entered the market at ever lower prices, ultimately landing at their marginal cost of production – $0.

Marginal cost of a single additional unit is 0. Development is sunk cost.

Then he explains his business models. I won’t spoil the fun or rip off his excellent writing here. Go read the entire article.

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[1] On occasion I’ve written these too and, after the fact, hated myself for doing it.

Sunk Cost

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Sometimes it just isn’t working. We have this window of opportunity to get a first beta version of Equals shipped and, for goodness sake, it just isn’t getting done. Here’s the problem: we realized last year that delivering the iOS version first was a mistake. Instead we needed to do a web version first.

Equals is partly written in C, partly in Apple’s Objective-C, and partly in Javascript, but the Javascript code was done before either of us had any experience writing HTML5. (Read: hack job.) If we were going to do a true web version then we needed money (time) and we needed to learn Javascript so we lined up a contract job that paid us to learn it. It was painful (unstable, new platform without much documentation) and it didn’t buy us as much extra time as we would have liked, but it worked. By the time we were done we could re-write the code for Equals.

But too much of Equals code was still in Objective-C, which won’t work for the web version, so we needed to move it into C. Rick started to make the changes. He made it part way and then was interrupted by a health issue (now stabilized) and then contract work. He started again in late December. He thought three weeks.

Four weeks later and it isn’t done. In fact, Rick looks exhausted. He isn’t sleeping well and even days off don’t feel like days off because it isn’t done. Worse, every time he makes a change it breaks other code, so it is really fragile. Edge cases are killing him. He told me Monday he just stares at the code, not knowing what to do anymore.

I’ve been worried about the fragile code for a while. I’ve also been concerned about storing the notes in HTML as every browser changes it and will make it very hard to track changes some day. We needed a different approach.

The fundamental problem is that the code was written to handle text. When we added HTML, it was added as a side layer as to not disturb the functioning engine. Originally Rick was trying to strip the HTML, note the cursor position (which HTML doesn’t want to handle correctly to begin with), make adjustments as the code was changed, then add everything back in. As mentioned this wasn’t working.

So I suggested we change the approach. A la Markdown, which gave me the idea, I suggested we just replace the HTML with our own “markdown”, text that Rick could safely ignore and that we could store as a neutral format in the database. In fact, Rick realized we could use a feature from an early version of the app that we are no longer using, one that already was being ignored. The first thing Rick gets to do is rip out months of code.

Sunk cost. It doesn’t matter anymore.

Now we are back on track, I hope. Let’s hope we don’t hit any major snags. It is time for people to start using Equals.

Learning From Our Customers: Soliciting Feedback For powerOne v4.1

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A week ago we released a major update to powerOne that brought the look of the application in line with iOS 7. It was a major overhaul. Every aspect of the application was touched and, in the process, plenty of bugs were found and squashed.

The release created a minor uproar among some of our customers though. While some people absolutely loved the re-design, others hated it. From most of those customers we received very constructive feedback, including many things we didn’t, and in some cases couldn’t, have foreseen before releasing.

We learned things like the new look was hard to see in sunlight (we live in Oregon so don’t see sun this time of year :-), it was particularly hard on color blind people (should have thought about that one especially since my wife’s brother is color blind), the contrast wasn’t strong enough for poorer eyesight, and the buttons felt smaller (only because there were no borders as in reality all buttons are larger).

We are human over here, folks, and we work very hard to make the best choices we can. We do what we think is right then we get feedback and make adjustments, which is what we are doing now.

Here is what we are going to do: instead of one calculator design option, we are going to give you three. The themes will be available in the calculator settings. Since we made the mistake last time of not soliciting feedback, I thought this time we would. I’ve added the three screens here. Please leave a comment to this post or email help@infinitysw.com to tell us what you think.

theme #2
Theme 1: This is the original v4.0 theme. We still really like this and think it is the closest we can get to the iOS 7 design aesthetic. While it will be available, however, it will no longer be the default. It might just be a little too radical for some.

 

theme #3
Theme 2: This theme is designed to be as close as we can get to the version 3 design but remain true to iOS 7. This theme should be good for those that need high contrast or just prefer the old look.

 

theme #1
Theme 3: Personally, I’m tired of all the white and black in iOS 7 and wish people knew how to use another color. This theme still provides those striking colors prevalent in v4.0 but also provides more contrast a la v3. This will be the new default.

Again, I’m looking for your input, especially from those of you who don’t like the version 4.0 re-design. Please leave a comment here or email help@infinitysw.com.

Buggy Software

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MG Siegler wrote:

Since the moment it was unveiled at WWDC in June of last year, I’ve been a big fan of iOS 7. While I certainly understand the people who hate change, I am not one of those people. In technology, I welcome change — especially big, bold changes. At the very least, it shows that a company isn’t afraid to experiment. More importantly, it shows that a company isn’t content to rest on its laurels.

So I embraced the gaudy neon and I entered our newly flat world excited. And I remain convinced that in just about every way, iOS 7 is a huge upgrade over the previous iterations. Except one. And it’s a big one.

The software is so inexplicably and inexcusably buggy.

I’ve noticed the same thing and the problem seems to be getting worse over time. It seems, once upon a time, that when Apple shipped a new release it was pretty stable but this doesn’t appear to be the case anymore. Maybe it really never was.

iOS 7 of course was a major change. Add to to this fact that Apple is now supporting a ridiculous amount of software titles. Not only do they have iLife and iWork titles across three platforms (web, iOS, Mac) but they also support professional titles like Aperture, Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, developer tools like XCode and all of its universe of sub-applications (like Instruments and Simulator), all the iOS and OS X bundled applications including many that require data like Maps, and iCloud. And this list doesn’t even include the grandaddy of software apps, iOS and OS X themselves.

I want to feel sympathetic. After all I know what it is like to support software. On the other hand, I have to use this stuff.