Attention, foodies and nutrition-istas! Successful Kickstarter SITU, a smart scale for iPad, has just added a couple of neat new features for its iOS app — while also getting a reduction in prices ahead of Black Friday.
Given that ex-Apple employee creator Michael Grothaus credits Cult of Mac readers with making the invention a reality, how could we not cover it?
Photo: Michael Grothaus/SITU
Regular Cult of Mac readers may remember that I previously covered Grothaus’ SITU project back in its crowdfunding days. Grothaus says that it was the response to this article which helped push his project over the Kickstarter finish line.
“It was the single-biggest source of traffic to the project’s Kickstarter page,” he says. “So many readers became backers and, I hope, satisfied customers. We really couldn’t have done this without Cult of Mac readers.”
Eighteen months on, and Grothaus has now shipped SITU scales to all backers, is busy selling the product, and has even had the opportunity to visit places like China and Portugal to talk about the device. Having had time to absorb feedback, he is currently in the process of releasing two major updates for the accompanying iOS app: one which has already hit the App Store, and one of which will go live any day now.
The goal of both of these is to make the SITU hardware more responsive to the needs of individual users.
“I was an overweight guy,” Grothaus says. “I designed the app for how I wanted to use it. That worked really well for me, but once we started shipping the device to users, we started hearing all this feedback and different use-cases.” These use-cases, some of which can be read here, include everything from tracking salt and sugar to building muscle mass — none of which Grothaus had ever focused particular attention on himself.
Photo: SITU
The first update (“My Dishes”) is the ability to add completed meals to the SITU smart scale, which means that users can now save completed recipes, rather than having to piece them together every time. The second, which Grothaus says is now waiting for approval from Apple, will let users add completely custom foods to the database — entering their nutritional values from scratch to make the scale even more universal.
I first interviewed Mike back in 2012 for my book The Apple Revolution, and it’s definitely great to see his Kickstarter dream become a reality. I’ve used SITU myself, and I’ve been very impressed by many of its features.
If you’re interested, SITU is getting a 25 percent discount on its regular retail price of $119.99/£79.99/€109.99 from today through Saturday November 28 for customers who use the code BLACKFRIDAY at checkout. More details can be found here.
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
2 responses to “iPad-compatible smart scale gets a tasty new update”
I have the scale and really only use it as that…a scale. The app was terrible for trying to find foods, entering data, etc. There may be improvements but ultimately is trapped to itself.
I would really love if it would tie into myfitnesspal. That would make it awesome
Situ has an SDK, so getting the scale to work with MFP is totally possible. It’s just that MFP would have to be the ones to do the work to integrate it.