Come join me on a joyride into the fascinating world of mobileware.

While walking down a busy shopping centre the other day, I met up with a long-time army friend whom I’ve not seen for a couple of years. We served in the same unit and were the best of friends throughout our service. But what he did that day somehow made me feel like shoving an M16 rifle up his rear.

Instead of a warm brotherly handshake, I was promptly greeted with the old platoon prank! He rubbed my tummy and asked how long I’ve been “expecting”.

Don’t get me wrong. Guys are usually not as sensitive about their weight as women are but the harmless gesture did get me thinking about seriously losing weight. Below are some software I’ve come across that might be able to help me get back into shape.

First up is the Diet Tracker by Dream Fusion Technologies. A special feature of Diet Tracker is a database of over 8000 common food item like French Fries and Big Mac. So there will be no trouble guessing the exact number of calories any particular food item would contain.

This nifty application logs the foods that you eat in combination with any exercises you perform, allowing you to quickly see how many calories you’re consuming and what adjustments you need to make to shed those pounds. 

Diet Tracker also automatically calculates your body mass index and intelligently sets an energy target for you based on your height, weight and gender. In other words, this software will tell you how long you need to work out based on your weight. The program runs only on Palm OS and will set you back US$17.00. A 30-day trial version will be available at www.handango.com

Note that this particular method of dieting and exercise has been rebutted by pundits as inaccurate. This is because every one of us burns up calories at highly variable rates. The BalanceLog Weight and Nutrition Monitoring software by HealtheTech aims to address just this.
This diet program allows you to establish a personalized weight loss program based on your unique Metabolic Fingerprint – basically vital information about your lifestyle and physical parameters.

Like the Diet Tracker, the application also houses a database common food items, but a considerable lesser amount of only about 4,000 foods. It does however contain another database of about 300 exercises and how many calories each activity will burn up.

This program which runs only on Palm OS is available for a premium price of US$29 and can be downloaded at www.healthetech.com. A 30-day trial version is available.

As you would have most probably realised by now, diet programs do not come cheap. But should you need to go diet on the cheap, go for CalorieZ, which will set you back by only US$5.
Don’t let the low price fool you into thinking this is low quality software. It’s actually packed with quite a lot of good features. Amongst these are the visual graphs showing your progress towards your caloric and weight-loss goals.

Though it has no database to draw food calorie figures on, it allows you to create your very own customised one. So go ahead and enter your favourite local dishes which would not usually be on the database. Good luck asking the hawker how many calories his plate of Char Kway Teow contains, though!

CalorieZ is available only for Palm devices and can be downloaded at www.digital-alchemy.net. There is no trial version.