by Geof Newton
A few of the vendor's surveyed have responded with details, updates, and additional information regarding their products. Since it's difficult to fully represent a complex software package in a few sentences, we've tried to convey the general gist of the product and provide some of the features and pitfalls we came across during our evaluations. This section is an opportunity for the vendors to elaborate and speak back.
| Kathleen's Diet Planner 10 |
|
$75 | 25407 | Yes | xxxxx |
Us: Its largest fault lies in the database. The company hasn't taken the time to adjust its database to "real-life" units, or servings. Instead, each item is left in the default SR-15 format of 100g forcing you do to some calculations to determine how many grams are in each serving of your item.
Vendor: I don't understand. The food database does contain all foods in 100 gram measures but it also contains common household measures that come with the USDA and CNF food databases. It has always contained the common household measures. Perhaps you were filtering the food database on "100" and "grams"? As well, there is a menu choice on most of the food grids to convert the measure to other measures, making it a snap to convert from grams to ounces, or ml to fl oz etc. While I appreciate the review, I'd appreciate it if you could re-examine the food database in Kathleen's Diet Planner for you will see over 16,000 entries in common household measures. Your comment is totally inaccurate.
One more point, the food database is large. But, the quick find does go to the food instantly when you start typing. If you find the other method of searching called "Advanced Search" is slow, and you know which food category the item you are searching for might be in, you can narrow your search and speed up the search time by selecting the food category from the "Search within this food group category" dropdown list in the upper left of the advanced find window. Usually an advanced search on a chosen food group takes 2 or 3 seconds..
Actually, Kathleen's Diet planner is loaded with many features, like the ability to sort, group, filter and export most grids. You can export all you data to a file and load it in another copy of KDiet on another PC. It has so many features in fact that it would take anyone a long time to discover them all. Once you know about most of the features, menu creation, daily food tracking, progress tracking and chart analysis become a breeze. Currently I am working on converting KDiet's food database to USDA 16. They've added some nutrients to the database and this will require extensive changes. And yes, I am including the common household measures...
| Nutribase IV |
|
$69.96 | 23636 | Yes - on request | xxxxxx |
Us: But we do have a few complaints or requests for enhancements: exercise and food lookup can be sluggish due to the size of the database (NutriBase EZ includes an automatically populated Favorites tab which speeds lookup significantly);
Vendor: We have an Auto-Record function in the Junior, Personal, Personal Plus, Clinical, and Network Editions that allows you to customize automatic entries (similar to the EZ Edition's Favorites Tab, but more sophisticated). Also the Junior, Personal, Personal Plus, Clinical, and Network Editions allow you to make any database item a "PFI" (Personal Food Item) that resides in a short alphabetical listing of frequently used foods. This makes database lookups unnecessary for the most commonly used foods.
Us: the program uses a multi-window configuration which runs out of screen real estate quickly, especially on lower resolution systems;
Vendor: We originally optimized to 640x480 screen. The current edition optimizes to 800x600 resolution. Next edition will likely optimize to 1024 x 768 windows. If you are interested, take a look at the screen resolution poll at http://personalcomputing.portrait.com/us/products/ This report indicates the percentage of users (who participated in the poll) according to their normal screen resolution:
640x480 1% 800x600 4%
1024x768 28%
1152x864 2% 1280x1024 49% 1600x1200 10%
We've attempted to be conservative in our resolution use by staying one or two levels behind the norm.
Us: there are no facilities provided to track health variables like cholesterol, resting heart rate, doctor's visits, etc.;
Vendor: We have an Info Tracker Icon that tracks the three variables you mentioned above plus dozens of others, such as blood work, urinalysis results, personal information, body weight, body fat, clothing sizes, body measurements, and fully customizable entries… you can, for instance, track the number of jelly beans you eat and have the software automatically time stamp the time you ate them. The Info Tracker is a feature of our Junior, Personal, Personal Plus, Clinical, and Network Editions – it is missing only in our EZ (Easy) Edition.
If you did not customize our Tool Bar, you may have missed a dozen or so Tool Bar Icons that represent functions that are not core. We leave them off to avoid confusing new users, but any user can customize their Tool Bar and add the Info Tracker if desired.
Us: and it sometimes raises dialog windows behind other windows.
Vendor: True. That is why we allow windows to be resized and repositioned… NutriBase remembers this information and will always display any window in its previous size and position.
Us: Enhancements in the next release, due anytime now, include support for Palm devices and a full SR-16 database.
Vendor: We will be releasing NB5, with Palm support soon. We are in beta testing (and documentation writing phase now).
Columns represent the opinions of the individuals and do not necessarily reflect the attitudes of the club.