

Show HN: 20 Minute Workout, my first mobile app built with Phonegap and Ember.js - wnm
http://www.20minuteworkoutapp.com/

======
sergiotapia
I just used it to work out for 5 minutes since I'm currently 20kg. overweight.

Here's some feedback from someone who actually used your app to work out.

1\. On my iPad in horizontal orientation, I had to scroll up and down to see
the exercise name and the timer, it was --really-- unintuitive.

2\. I want to tap the X Minutes button and have the exercises run one after
the other. Having to get up and press the "Start" button for every exercise is
really counterproductive.

3\. The gifs are really lacking in explanations of certain exercises. Can you
use actual videos instead low framerate gifs?

\---

Otherwise this is excellent. I'll start doing 10 minute sessions in the
morning and at night. Hopefully in a month I'll have lost this weight.

~~~
wnm
this is so awesome, you have no idea how happy it makes me to hear someone is
actually using this to get healthier! i would love to hear from you and how
you are doing in half a year or so: if you want drop me a short line at
muellerwolfram@gmail.com

I promise I will fix the scrolling issue in the meantime.

The reason why I decided against running the exercises one after the other is
because it makes it possible to chose the length of the break yourself. When I
do the 20 minute version for example, I almost skip the breaks altogether in
the beginning, but in the end I am so exhausted that I almost need a whole
minute to recover between exercises. But I guess I could make it an option.

Do you remember which exercises are lacking explanations? I really want to
avoid videos, that would make the app size enormous.

~~~
sergiotapia
I don't remember what exercises were hard right now sorry. But yeah, I think
video is lighter than gifs in most cases. See gfycat.com for proof. :P

I will definitely ping you in 6 months, already set up the google calendar
reminder with progress pics. Thanks a bunch, really. This rocks.

~~~
wnm
oh wow, you're right! i just tried it with one of my gifs [0], and it reduced
the size from 537k to 147k. that is amazing. I will definitely look into this.
Apparently on some android phones the gifs are not playing correctly anyways,
so I need to find a solution...this might be it! thanks!

[0]
[http://gfycat.com/CooperativeFlusteredIchthyosaurs](http://gfycat.com/CooperativeFlusteredIchthyosaurs)

------
quaffapint
Your tagline says 'The simplest bodyweight workout app ever!' You need to
change that.

Why? Everyone seems to always have the simplest of everything. I want to know
why. Why is it the simplest? When you answer that, use it for your tagline.

~~~
wnm
Fair point. I used to spend a lot of time on thinking about custom workout
routines, measuring my progress, adjusting my workout plan etc., until I
realized, you don't really need all that if your goal is to just stay healthy.
For that you only need consistency. My app is simple because all you have to
do is press "start". I found it difficult to put all that into one tagline.
But thanks for your feedback, I will keep thinking about it...

~~~
mbesto
Here's the thing, these apps are everywhere. The problem is people come up
with excuses why they can't use them "I'm not near gym equipment", "I don't
have time", etc.

Tagline suggestion "Rock hard core in 20 minutes. All you need is a
smartphone, a mat, and a chair. It's free!"

Subtext - "Stop paying for costly $100/month gym memberships or expensive
fitness equipment. Get the body you want, when you want, and in the comfort of
your own house. Upgrade to a Pro account and unlock 3x times the exercises."

Subtext 2 (the upsell) - "Pro memberships are 2x more likely to see the
results they want. Upgrade now (click)"

viel Glück!

~~~
wnm
those are awesome suggestions! i especially like the subtext, comparing to gym
membership costs makes so much sense! danke!

------
deadfall
May I suggest a new feature that I don't see in the fitness apps i've checked
out. I listen to a lot of athletes on podcasts (JRE) and they always talk
about proper form and its importance for taking care of your body. In things
like yoga you could be damaging to your joints, spine, or muscles. Maybe have
"exercise tips" or "learn how" section/videos. I know some exercises are
intuitive and may not need this. Just throwing ideas.

~~~
flipchart
This is so important. It's incredible the difference it makes to the
difficulty of the exercise let alone the damage you prevent to your body.

What would be awesome to take this idea a step further and create a Kinect app
(or perhaps some other related/similar tech) which could determine if you are
executing the correct form and make suggestions about how to correct yourself.
This could also be used to monitor your progress in getting more flexible
(e.g. in yoga).

EDIT: Obviously, not applicable to this app, but the idea stands nevertheless

~~~
wnm
also, if you are serious about it, i suggest filming yourself a couple of
times and observe your own movement. While filming the exercises I spotted a
lot of weird movements that I did and never noticed before.

------
wnm
hi there hn, I build this app because I loved the concept of the 7 minute
workout [0], but quickly got bored by the static routine. I showed it to a
couple of friends. They all seem to like it, but I would love some more
feedback!

Also, I'm happy to answer questions about the tools i used, if you have any.

[0] [http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/the-
scientific-7-mi...](http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/the-
scientific-7-minute-workout/)

------
chrisweekly
1\. Congrats on your first app!

2\. The [lack of] font styling in the Instructions is a minor issue, but
little things add up. Also copywriting-wise, probably best to avoid first-
person eg "I suggest..."

3\. Feature request: history of workouts! Day, duration, and (ideally) the
specific exercises. These should be plotted to show progress. Check out "100
pushups" for a great example. Seeing that chart climb steeply up and to the
right is a big motivator.

4\. Feature request: display list of the whole array of potential workout
elements (grouped by type). Allow for "favorites" or perhaps ratings so only
higher-rated ones show up in the mix, and/or an exclude feature to block
particulars that aren't right for me. A simpler way to get this would be a
"skip" button to simply select another one from the same type/group.

5\. Suggestion wrt making $: you might do better to just have the one free app
with upgrade, vs selling Pro for $2.99 (steep)? Any of the features above
could be catalysts for upgrading. App Store Search optimization is arcane (to
me anyway) but I don't think having 2 versions is as user-friendly. Hopefully
others here w more experience on generating revenue w iOS apps will weigh in.

Anyway it's a solid start, good luck taking it to the next level! :)

~~~
chrisweekly
PS Forgot to mention social integration. Strava sucks for their API rug-
pulling maneuver, but they get the social aspect right w easy "kudos" for
friends and posting to FB/twitter. Peer pressure is a strong motivating factor
for workouts, and the more engaged your users are the better you'll do.
Cheers.

~~~
wnm
what exactly are they doing that sucks? I was thinking about giving 'badges'
that you can earn for various things like working out 7 days in a row,
completing your 100s workout, etc. which people could share on FB/twitter. is
strava doing something similar or what are they doing for peer pressure?

edit: as for your feature requests: they are noted, watch out for the next
version :) thank you for your feedback!

~~~
praneshp
I guess he was talking about [http://engineering.strava.com/strava-api-
update/](http://engineering.strava.com/strava-api-update/) which was a while
ago.

~~~
chrisweekly
Yes, thanks pranehsp. (Strava retired their API w little notice, and only
granted access to its replacement to a handful. Many got left out in the cold.
Not very developer-friendly. Made me mad.)

------
jfernandez
I noticed there's a lite and pro version of the app. You might want to combine
these into one app for a couple reasons off the top of my head:

\- easier maintenance and sanity for you as a developer/creator

\- leverages lite users to just for example pay an in-app purchase to upgrade
(vs having to discover the paid/pro version)

------
yabatopia
Congratulations with your first app. I've tried the Android version and it
worked as advertised : it's simple to use although it can use a little polish
design-wise. Others have already made some great suggestions, here's what I
would like to see.

1\. Skipping an exercise (eg for people with a health problem) 2\. A little
description of the exercise, what muscles are activated and so on 3\. Auto-
count. One of the app permissions is for camera/microphone. Wouldn't it be
nice if the front facing camera could be used for automatically counting how
many reps you actually did? 4\. Choosing between a countdown and number of
repetitions

Good luck with your app, may many follow!

------
wizawuza
I'm looking into phonegap stuff myself... were you a mobile app developer
before using it? Or only javascript/html/etc?

If only js/html/etc, was the transition to phonegap for web apps pretty simple
for you?

Thanks!

~~~
wnm
I played around with phonegap before, trying to make use of the native camera
through the phonegap api, but never finished it. I found it cumberstone/slow
to debug, but everthing else, is just like developing webapps. This time, it
really was developing a web app. I used chrome (and chrome developer tools,
with the ember debug plugin) to develop the app until it was completely done.
Using the phonegap cli to build out an ios, android and firefox version took
just a couple of hours, and the phonegap documentation is very helpful. So
overall I would say, if you are not using phonegap's native api, and all you
need is a wrapper for your html/js app, go for it, it is super simple...

~~~
e_w
Sounds interesting. Could you maybe post a couple of resources that you found
useful and would recommend going through? Thx!

~~~
wnm
For ember I feel like the official guides[0] are a good place to start. I
found that a lot of other guides or blog posts where heavily out of date,
since ember has changed quite a lot in the last couple of months. There are
two other guides that I skipped over, which seemed to be pretty good [1][2].

For phonegap I always just used the official docs[3] and stackoverflow for
times when i was stuck. There is one thing i can highly recommend though:
Install the webview-debug plugin[4] for phonegap. With that you can make use
of the awesome remote debugging functionality on android.[5]

And one more resource I can highly recommend is brunch.io[6]! It is a tool to
help you structure your html/js app, it bundles all your files together,
compresses them and spits out 3 files in the end: index.html, app.js and
vendor.js. And that's the 3 files you put into your phonegap folder. You can
even setup brunch.io to automatically push those files into your phonegap
folder everytime you change something. This is not ember specific either.
There are nice sceletons to get you started with backbone, spine, angular,
etc..

[0] [http://emberjs.com/guides/](http://emberjs.com/guides/) [1]
[http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/11/07/an-in-depth-
intro...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/11/07/an-in-depth-introduction-
to-ember-js/) [2] [http://ember.vicramon.com/](http://ember.vicramon.com/) [3]
[http://docs.phonegap.com/en/3.5.0/index.html](http://docs.phonegap.com/en/3.5.0/index.html)
[4] [https://github.com/jrstarke/webview-
debug](https://github.com/jrstarke/webview-debug) [5]
[https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/remote-
debugging](https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/remote-debugging) [6]
[http://brunch.io/](http://brunch.io/)

~~~
e_w
Thanks a ton, brunch looks awesome!

------
mikehotel
The app has a nice clean design and the website provides a good overview of
the features and pro differentiators. For android, you may want to include in
the description why you need access to the camera/mic, etc. Nice work!

~~~
wnm
thanks! yeah the permission thing really bugs me. The app plays a sound, so
you can hear when an exercise is over, and apparently the phonegap plugin I
use needs those permissions... At least I couldn't figure out how to remove
them. But I will add a comment in the description. Thanks for your feedback!

------
stefanha
Why does the Android app need access to my photos, camera, and mic?

~~~
concerned_user
I'm intrerested in that as well. And why would it want to know whether the
call is active and what number is it connected to?

------
ibrahima
Very nice! Incredibly simple to get started with, and like you said, if all
you care about is staying healthy the important thing is consistency and
reducing options makes it much easier to be consistent. I guess it doesn't
really look "native" at all but for something this simple I don't think it
matters.

------
yojo
Nice work! I've been wanting something exactly like this, now I don't have to
build it.

If you keep working on it, I'd love to see an option to pick curated routines
for targeting specific muscle groups/activities.

------
dscrd
Typo on first page under "Sane": "The workout is the right amount of
challenging to keep you in shape, without being too though to stay motivated."

------
k-mcgrady
Nice work. One minor suggestion:

A light content status bar seems like it would look better. Or change the
status bar style based on the colour of the navigation bar.

------
tjkoury
I would give your .box class a height of 300px, and your .container a bottom
margin of 70, to keep the text from overflowing.

------
elwell

      .stores a { text-decoration: none; /* keep spaces from appearing as part of the link */ }

~~~
Kiro
What?

