scale Archive

Today begins our in-depth look at the web applications that are part of the Web Apps Fat-Off. First up is Skinnyr. This is the most basic of the tools so this review will be short as well.

The idea with Skinnyr is that you can create a graph with your current weight. You can put the graph on any site you are associated with like MySpace or your blog. Here is a test graph I just made to demonstrate:

Pretty cool, eh? What’s nice is that you don’t need to know how to code HTML or any programming languages to get this measurement tool into your web site. You can also grab a RSS feed of the measurements which will allow you to keep track from anywhere that accepts a RSS feed.

I think Skinnyr does a good job at what it set out to do. It does not claim to be a fully-featured health and fitness site. It is an online scale. And it is a great online scale. A couple of suggested improvements would include:

• a way to add past weights, for example if I forget to add yesterday’s measure, there is no way to backdate the weight
• perhaps a converter from metric to British
• maybe look at a more friendly name than Obfuscatr :)
• more options for the graph – colors and so forth for better integration into various sites

I have spoken with the Skinnyr team over the past few weeks and they really are a bunch of good guys. They have been very open with me about the site and listen to ideas I have. And that’s what Web 2.0 is all about… creating a site for the user’s needs.