Announcing Line Diet for iPhone - huzzah! Find out all the details at LineDietApp.com. Below is some background on the project for those interested in those sorts of things..

Get Line Diet for iPhone now!

It's always exciting to get to announce a new product. This one was a fun one that was born out of a personal desire for an app. My buddy @thinky told me about something called a "Line Diet" several years ago. It's also known as the bang bang diet, the Steve Ward diet, or Bang-Bang Servo Diet. You can find a few articles on the web about it, but the simplest summary is something like this:

• Set a goal weight and date
• Graph a line from your starting weight to the goal date/weight
• Weigh in daily to see if you're on target (the line)
• If you're under the line then eat normal, if you're over the line then diet/exercise harder to catch up

Ever since Zach brought it up to me I've been interested in the concept. It's a crazy simple scientific approach to dieting that makes your dieting as simple as a yes and no (or a 1 and 0). You're either on a diet that day, or your not - and it depends on if you are staying on your target line. It solves the issue with folks getting burned out on diets because you can get ahead of your goal and then enjoy yourself on the weekend for example - so long as you are staying on track with your longer term weight loss goals.

(hit 'read more' below..)

When I recently went to look for a line diet app I was sad to see those that existed hadn't had been updated in over 3 years. I had some things I wanted to see in a Line Diet app, so I spent some precious spare time to create Line Diet. The diet concept itself is crazy simple, so I wanted to create an app that was just as simple. The design of Line Diet is incredibly simple and minimalistic as well, utilizing large color fills and color themes to indicate whether you are in fact on a diet that day or not. I tried to make something that would fit in well with iOS7 but also be somewhat platform agnostic and have its own distinct style. I haven't decided yet on whether Line Diet will come to other platforms (or when rather), but it's definitely something on my list of things to do in the coming year. I had a lot of fun building Line Diet and I'm tinkering with a Windows Phone version at the moment for fun. If you want to see Line Diet on other platforms please sign up at LineDietApp.com for future email notifications.

Line Diet was built using Xamarin.iOS. For those that don't know, Xamarin is a company that builds amazing tools that make building native apps for iOS, Android, and Mac with C# a reality (an awesome reality actually). Line Diet was built to show off what Xamarin.iOS can do and to leverage relative learnings in upcoming contracting work. If you ever have any Xamarin.iOS mobile development needs please don't hesitate to reach out!

I'm also doing a sort of experiment in my pricing structure. Basically what I'm doing is charging 99¢ until September 1st at which point it goes free. Basically if you want to support me in writing the app then give me a dollar, but if you'd rather get it free then just wait a month and it will be free - sign up at the website to get notified once it is free. I'm doing this for a number of reasons, but most of all to learn from how it affects adoption, etc. If anything interesting comes of it I'll be sure to follow up - maybe ;)

Go to LineDietApp.com to get the app now, or to sign up to get notified when Line Diet becomes available on other platforms.