sergeo's comments

Shameless plug (from one of the developers) - you might want to give a try to our app/website - MyNetDiary https://www.mynetdiary.com .

1) We prioritize user experience and health over profits - there are no ads, no user data sharing, even account creation is optional, and all advice, all materials are carefully prepared and reviewed by RDs and CDEs.

2) Technology-wise it's as state-of-the-art as it gets - fully re-written in Swift 5, modern UX, ruthlessly optimized for minimum of taps, fully configurable (even the Dashboard), with awesome apps for Apple Watch and iMessage, with AR Grocery Check tool, etc.

3) Food database (805,000 items) is our crown jewel – if something is not correct or missing, users can send photos of food packages and nutrition facts from the app, we will verify and correct or add the food to the database. Thus, the database has no duplicates and as complete information as available. This is a free service for our users.

The Android app and web app are on par.

Yes, it's been confirmed to be sufficient.

As an additional evidence, one of our apps that included this file received "required screenshot is missing" iTunes Connect status upon update upload today, and it had all regular screenshots, but not iPhone5 ones.

The idea that Xcode 4.5 is required for iPhone 5 development is incorrect. If iOS3-4 & ARM6 support is needed, Xcode 4.4 could be used (at least for now) to build iOS3-5 apps. The trigger to make an app use full iPhone5 screen is to include [email protected] into the project. Of course, you'll need to modify screens to adjust layout depending on screen size.

Having said that, Apple typically pushes everyone to upgrade to the latest Xcode, and OS/X, so I'd expect that Xcode 4.5 will be required rather sooner than later. IMHO, this is a good thing in the long run, better than supporting multiple generations of hardware and software - it's better for the ecosystem. Even though about 8% of our users are on <iOS4.3, we would be fine when Apple drops them - they would provide us more users on iOS6+.

Please don't consider this as a plug, just trying to help.

Our company, MyNetDiary, provides an awesome food diary app (the only 5-star paid diet app on the iPhone). It's highly polished and uses some very advanced tech under the hood. The most frequent word in user review is "easy".

For almost a year, we are working on a special diabetes tracking app built on top of it. It does not integrate with BG hardware (would need FDA Class 1 approval), but we are exploring options.

The app will help you keep track of foods, exercise, and - with manual entry - your BG readings and insulin.

We've been doing this for 5 years and know what we are talking about - this is the best app for tracking diabetes.

It's a couple of weeks from release, we are testing release candidate. If you are interested in trying it sooner, we can provide an Ad-Hoc build for iPhone. More info: http://www.mynetdiary.com/diabetes-tracker-for-iPhone.html

My contact info is in profile.

Agree, from my experience any good software for a platform should take as much advantage of the platform as possible. And then work around platform limitations. Any cross-platform apps look non-native, missing subtle platform conventions, and ultimately feeling awkward on such a distinctive platform as iPhone OS. This seems to be a consistent line of Apple's, ultimately aiming to project the "quality" image of the platform, and not diluting the valued brand. This is the same line as John Gruber suggested pondering the purge of overly explicit apps. It did not come down to purging crapware developed natively with Xcode yet, but with thousands of apps in each category, the purgatory moment in one form or the other (e.g. if not purging outright, but subjectively separating into premium and "others" stores) probably is not too far ahead.

A recent multi-year study published in The New England Journal of Medicine (abstract: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/360/9/859 , full text is also available there) concludes that "Reduced-calorie diets result in clinically meaningful weight loss regardless of which macronutrients they emphasize."

811 overweight adults were randomly assigned to one of four diets: percentages of energy derived from fat, protein, and carbohydrates were 20, 15, and 65%; 20, 25, and 55%; 40, 15, and 45%; and 40, 25, and 35%.

By 2 years, weight loss remained similar in all four groups - about 7 lbs.

Among the 80% who completed the trial, the average weight loss was 4 kg; 14 to 15% of the participants had a reduction of at least 10% of their initial body weight.

Satiety, hunger, satisfaction with the diet, and attendance at group sessions were similar for all diets.

Attendance of counseling groups was strongly associated with weight loss (0.2 kg per session attended).

Bottom line: 1. It's all about eating less - eat what you like (so you can stick to it for life). As long your calories are reduced (to lose a pound of fat you need to lose 3,500 calories) and you stay within healthy nutrient ranges you will lose weight. 2. Consider participation in some sort of community (or even online groups), for support, motivation and accountability.

www.mynetdiary.com , also see in the App Store

As a developer of a calorie tracking service, also with an iPhone app in the App Store, I would point out that the example with calorie tracking does not work in RL.

1. There are hundreds of food chains in the US, with widely varying recipes, serving sizes, and nutritional contents. Even being familiar with the subject area, I generally won't be able to recognize a food. Even if I see a burger photo - how would I know the brand, flavor, whether it has cheese in it, etc. The error rate will be huge, rendering the service useless, and even worse - misleading.

2. You cannot estimate portion size on a photo, not having anything to compare with. This also results in significant errors.

I am not arguing against other uses of MT, just pointing out that this is a not very well thought through example.

MT is applicable only for very rudimentary tasks, requiring absolutely zero qualifications and training. There are fewer such tasks around than it looks at the first glance, as this example demonstrates.

I would recommend iUI, which is based on the code originally developed by Joe Hewitt - the creator of Firebug.

I have developed a pretty advanced iPhone webapp with it (online food diary searching while you type). The only thing was that I had to disable page transitioning emulating sliding screens, as the animation was quite slow and unpleasant.

Since then, Apple added support for proprietary CSS extensions providing access to "native" animations, but due to the availability of native SDK, I don't think it is widely used and on a first glance this is not supported in iUI.

For reading and reference I would recommend Apple's Developer Connection topic http://developer.apple.com/safari/library/referencelibrary/G..., which provides several "entry" points to documentation, guides, and samples. Still, for development it makes a lot of sense to save efforts and build on top of an existing library, such as iUI, which provides you the app structure, pre-built JavaScript for iPhone-specific manipulations, and images.

I would be careful with iWebKit since it seems to use GPL, which may result in issues with non-open source use.