I’m not strong enough to stomach this.
Workout Hero for iPhone ($1.99 at the time of writing) is a CrossFit app which “provides you with all the tools to become a Workout Hero”. I bought it because I was under the impression I could use it to keep track of my casual push-up regimen, and other types of workout I might eventually decide against on doing. Turns out I can do that, I just don’t want to.
It is a a crossfit app, meaning it’s targetted not at counting single push-ups but crossfit workouts. Since push-ups can be part of those, I figured I’ll give it a spin. It has an average of 4.5 stars in the App Store (over 400 ratings at the time of this writing), so it clearly has found its fan base. Its feature list is longer than my leg; the app has a lot of features and workout suggestions and whatnot. Its store description clearly doesn’t lie about that.
What it fails to mention is the utterly horrible user interface. It’s like staring into an abyss, and the abyss saying “LOL bro”. Entering workouts is a pain, I can’t put it any other way. There’s a dedicated settings page in the iOS settings app that doesn’t do anything but show text saying “Cool things might go here one day ;)". I mean, seriously. The black intro screen is used as background almost everywhere, and while I could tolerate that even though it’s not my fancy, the forms are just plain broken in the way they work — with sometimes missing cursor indicators, and prefilled “placeholder” text you actually have to delete every single time you want to enter a new workout title. Good stuff.
While $1.99/€1.59 is an acceptable price for an app, I was hoping for something that didn’t feel as cobbled together as Workout Hero. Buying that app was a bad decision.
So, my search continues.
UPDATE, June 8th 2012: Added clarification regarding the app’s target demographic after an email exchange with its author.
