Mealsnap iPhone app impressions

mzl.pmpdnall.320x480-75The diet hasn’t gotten off to the best start – perhaps starting it the day ahead of the weekend was a bad idea – but I did try out my diet-tracking website’s new £1.79 iPhone app – Mealsnap – which takes a photo of your meal and tells you the calorie count from – I assume – some kind of clever algorithmic photo-analysis and by referencing the food database from Dailyburn.

First impressions, from three or four photographed meals:

  1. It does sometimes work quite well – correctly (near as damn) recognizing what’s on your plate, and giving sensible caloric estimates
  2. There is quite a range for the estimates – as I’m not sure it has any meaningful way of working out how big a piece of bread, for instance, is.
  3. It doesn’t integrate into Dailyburn, so whatever calorie records you make stay in the app .This renders it completely pointless for me.
  4. It takes an age to ‘process’ the photos – so long that it’s easy to imagine that the photos are being uploaded, and being manually viewed and assessed by a warehouse full of monkeys somewhere.

So I think I’ll leave it alone for now. Anyone worked out any other positives?