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Why are calories in the diary displayed with improbable precision?
I'm new to Cronometer and loving it for its data accuracy and thoughtful UI.
But I'm baffled by how the product displays calories. I put about a tablespoon of butter on my toast and logged it. Cronometer displays the diary entry as "101.72 kcal". But that precision is laughable; butter varies and I certainly didn't measure exactly 1.0000 tablespoons. Surely "102 kcal" would be more reasonable to show? It'd make the display easier to read, too.
Cronometer is usually so thoughtful in its design I'm wondering if this decision not to round the numbers is for some reason I don't understand.
Comments
I would imagine this is to accommodate both metric and U.S. customary measures and the many options users have for diary entries:
Ex: consider:
Butter 14.5g for someone who does weigh their food. -or-
Butter 0.66 cups for 2/3 of cup in a recipe.
An accurate weight will of course be the best. Sometimes we must choose the lesser of two evils because weighing 100% of every item may make you frustrated.
The best baking (cakes, pies, etc.) recipes use weight because that may really affect the quality of the end product. Flour weighs more/less depending upon humidity and sifting or not.
After using Cronometer for a couple of weeks I think this calorie display is just a bug, or rather a small design problem. There's no useful reason to show "101.72 kcal": "102 kcal" would be easier to read and more correct.
Precision is absolutely required for formulating many recipes, not only flours, but sweeteners, fibers, gums, etc. This is usually done using ratios and decimal math. When exporting data it also makes for fewer errors and neat columns in spreadsheets. I find it immensely useful.
I am talking about the display of calories in the main diary view. For instance this is showing 15g of pastrami (carefully measured on an actual scale) is 22.05 kcal. Really? not 22.04 kcal? 21.97? I use this display to understand how many calories parts of a meal contributed. Having to compare "155" and "22.05" is a distraction, it'd be simpler to compare "155" and "22".
I think rounding to 1 kcal in all cases in the diary display would be better. A data export to other software is a different use case. For an export I'd prefer all data I inputted to repeated verbatim and any derived data (like kcal) to be to some reasonable precision and don't much care if it's rounded to 1kcal or 0.01kcal or whatever. It's up to the receiver (the spreadsheet in your case) to decide how to display that.
There seems to be two camps, those who find the precision useful and those who would rather not see it, but hardly a bug or design problem. This would appear to be more of a "feature request" to provide the end-user an option for whether or not to show more or fewer digits after the decimal point (to round to the nearest whole number or not).