FitnessBrain - 3.0.4

I have tried FrenchDiet and liked it, but wanted to try out some of my other options before buying. This program is one of these.

I find the interface difficult to work with. None of the windows' close buttons work, you have to actually press the button inside the window that says "close" or "cancel" on it -- particularly windows-like, as a previous reviewer said. My scroll wheel cannot scroll through the list of foods, which particularly annoys me, because it forces me to use the very light gray (another complaint, grays are too light in many places, making me think that an option is unavailable) arrows at the top and bottom of the list, which scroll the list a lot more slowly than I would like. Though it doesn't look like it, you CAN click between those arrows to jump to a place in the list, but since that bar is invisible, you have no way of knowing where exactly you are in the list.

The search function would be useful except for things like "pnut butter" and "frstd flakes" and "appl jacks" where things are abbreviated in such a way that if you tried to search for them, you'd come up empty-handed. And since the foods in the list don't seem to be sorted in any way other than perhaps the order they were entered into the database, it can take a while to find what you're looking for.

All non-traditional American foods are lumped into a single category -- "ethnic foods", which contains at default only references to alaskan natives and navajo. Things like caribou eyes, walrus oil and owl meat. Because all of us health-food nuts encounter ground squirrel meat on an everyday basis. Or something. Though I did find some mention of mexican food under the "fast food" section, I was hard-pressed to find any kind of asian foods. Perhaps a mention of teriyaki sauce here and there. What am I to do when I go out for chinese or thai for dinner? Let alone sushi... I love how frog legs and turtle meat are listed under the fish/shellfish category. Not as if I'd have any idea where they should go.

Every time I opened it, it told me that the program's date and time formats were different than those used by my system, and asked me which one I'd like to use. It did not ask me which ones I'd like to use from now on, or have a little check box to cause it to not ask me that question again, it simply asks me every time I open it.

I have no idea how well any of the health tools related to heart rate or body mass index work, because they're locked in the demo version to a person completely different from me in every way: a 35-year-old male who weighs more and is taller than I am. You can change the age, sex, height and weight, but you can't recalculate any of the numbers based on those values without buying the program.

The vitamins and minerals included are more limited than I would like, only including calcium, iron, vitamins A C D and E. What about potassium, magnesium, zinc, phosphorus, and all of the B vitamins, among other things written on my multivitamin supplement? I'd love to know how much of those I'm eating in a day, but this program won't tell me.

I don't really do a whole lot of exercise other than about an hour's worth of walking to, from and between my classes every day, but I suppose if you took the time to enter in the exercises you do (as there seem to be only six actually programmed in) that it might be helpful as a log of how many calories you burned versus how many you consumed.

And this program also doesn't seem to have any way to compare what you're eating to a healthy diet. Nothing saying that you should try to eat more of this or less of that, or saying if you've gotten enough of this or that vitamin or mineral. It really puts it into perspective when you've got a graph or something telling you what you need to change about your diet, rather than just telling you how much of each thing you ate.

Also, when I go to select "daily food report" from the file menu, it wants to print something (I'm assuming the list of food you ate on the currently selected day?) and from that moment on, you can no longer change anything. The interface changes into what looks like a page in appleworks (with margins cutting off the edge of the window, even) containing an image of the program you were just using, and you can no longer hit any of the buttons without quitting and restarting the program (oh yeah, and quitting the demo opens up the company's homepage in your browser every time). And I go to see what the thing was it wanted to print (I saved it as a PDF so I could look at it) and it was the same page, basically just a screenshot of the program with the edge cut off because it's wider than the page is.

My search for a program better than FrenchDiet continues.