Nutrition Tracker 
Copyright © 2010 Tyler McHenry <tyler@nerdland.net>

LICENSING

    This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
    (at your option) any later version.

    This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with this program.  If not, see
    <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

ABOUT

    Nutrition Tracker is a program for tracking personal food
    consumption. Once foods are entered, the user can view aggregate
    nutrition data in several different forms. 

STATUS

    This application is still heavily in development and is not fully
    functional. At this stage, it should not be used by anyone except
    those who wish to contribute to its development.

    The name "Nutrition Tracker" is generic and considered temporary.

BACKGROUND

    The development of this application was inspired by the shortcomings
    of free nutrition tracking websites such as SparkPeople and
    NutritionData. 

    The basis for all of these tools, including Nutrition Tracker, is
    the freely available USDA nutrition information database. However,
    the existing tools were missing some obvious and useful features,
    particularly relating to home cooking. The two main "itches" I hope
    to scratch with this tool are:

      1. Arbitrary Compositing of Foods

         All nutrition tracking tools allow you to create composit foods
         (or "food groups") by combining several existing individual
         foods. However, no existing free tool makes it simple to
         combine multiple composite foods into a new composite food in a
         straightforward and coherent manner. In other words, no other
         tool treats composite foods as first-class food items.

      2. Automatic unit and dimension conversion

         All existing nutrition tracking tools have severe and
         unnecessary limitations on the units and dimensions that
         custom-entered foods and composite foods can be specified
         in. This often requires the user to do a large amount of math
         on their own to come up with measurements that the tool will
         accept. This is very user-unfriendly. Math is always something
         that the application should be able to do on a user's behalf.

TECHNOLOGIES

    Nutrition Tracker is based on Nokia's Qt framework, and is intended
    to be cross-platform.

FUTURE PLANS

    Eventually, the plan is to break this into a back-end server that
    wraps the underlying database, and a "dumb" front-end GUI so that
    ultimately other GUIs (e.g. a web interface) can be created that
    will interoperate with the same backend. Initially, however,
    Nutrition Tracker is a single, self-contained application.