Hello dear reader!
In case you hadn’t noticed from my previous post, I’m always looking for ways to use technology to improve people’s life. I’ve always loved cycling, and when it’s not possible to do so outdoors I practice indoor cycling or spinning. In this mode, training is based on how many watts you can move, working with different zones depending on how intense you are working. Typically you fill out a sheet of paper and calculate the zones by using a calculator, this made me think that perhaps we could do better. Make it easier.
For that I partnered up with Alicia Barrejón, one of the best fitness instructors without question. Working with her was a blast, as she is always looking for ways to help motivate people and improve her classes. It’a amazing to see how technology can be used to help such talented professional to push further in their never ending efforts to help us live better and healthier lives
Since the early days of the App, it was clear that we needed to build it both for iOS and Android, so I started toying with idea of making it using Flutter. In fact, it felt like a perfect fit for the new kid on the block in hybrid development and the way the widget approach works. You can read more about it in my post about Flutter. The results, to be honest, were astonishing. The learning curve is a bit steep, but leveraging the power of material design with premade widgets and easily polishing the App with effects and animations was a joy to use. I have to admit the learning curve was steeper than I initially figured, but after getting the hang of it and working around difficulties, Flutter started to shine.
Some limitations were that I couldn’t use an ORM for the database and had to go for old fashioned SQL queries for an sqlite database, or the fact that I had to build my own plugin to take a screenshot and share the image. But I couldn’t be more impressed with the overall result.
MisWatts is an app that allows you to:
- Track you indoor cycling workouts and catalogue them.
- See how many watts you have moved in each zone with cool graphs and share them.
- Automatically upload your progress to your teacher, allowing him to have full control of the classroom and understand their day to day (cool huh ;)?). I actually build this using Node.JS and an admin panel.
- Keep an updated profile of your health and calculate exact workout data.
You can see the result of this idea below, Flutter is so cool that is what the App looks like in Android:
And this is what it look like in iOS without having to change anything 🙂
But don’t take my word for it, download it now for iOS and Android. Is is available in Spanish for now, but will be translated to English shortly :).
Thanks for reading!
Until next time!
Pablo Clemente Pérez 