Linked List: January 18, 2020

Saturday, 18 January 2020

MyNetDiary 

My thanks to MyNetDiary for sponsoring DF this week. MyNetDiary is a modern diet/food tracking app with a strong focus on design, quality, and usability.

Developed with a team of registered dietitians, MyNetDiary offers a huge and reliable database, lightning-fast food tracking, a totally configurable dashboard, and no ads or user tracking — even in the free version. Their UI design for food tracking is incredibly efficient, with features ranging from a huge database of food, smart parsing of your typed input, and bar code scanning. They even have an AR “grocery check” feature — point your camera at a barcode while shopping and you’ll see a heads-up display with information and recommendations.

A lot of apps like this are just thin wrappers around web apps. MyNetDiary offers excellent native apps — for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. They even have an iMessage app. They are really on top of Apple’s latest stuff, and very privacy-minded. You can use the app fully without signing up for a (free) MyNetDiary account. But if you do sign up for an account, your data will sync between devices and the MyNetDiary website seamlessly. They even support Sign In With Apple when you create an account. I’ve been using MyNetDiary all week, and this is the first service I’ve used with Sign In With Apple — and it was a terrific experience. Probably the best “sign up for a new account with a service” experience I’ve ever seen.

MyNetDiary is now the most comprehensive, accurate, and user-friendly diet app in the App Store, as well as on the web and Google Play, and users and reviewers love it. If you’re looking for an app to help you lose weight or just eat better, you should check out MyNetDiary.

The Talk Show: ‘Sport Mode’ 

Special guest Merlin Mann returns to the show. Topics include the renewal of U.S. law enforcement officials’ disingenuous campaign against iPhone encryption, the Houston Astros cheating scandal, how that cheating scandal relates to the Trump impeachment saga, and Catalyst and the art of Mac software design. But mostly we talk about finding a good pair of slippers.

Brought to you by these fine sponsors:

  • Techmeme Ride Home: 20-minutes of today’s top tech news, every day around 5p ET. A terrific podcast that you should subscribe to.
  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code talkshow for 10% off your first order.
  • Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. Get a server running in seconds with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and choice of 10 node locations.