Happy to hear! You are very welcome!

Updated, thank you.

Thanks for pointing this out. As I’ve mentioned before, I have always been transparent about utilizing AI assistance to help develop my apps. I wasn’t aware of the requirement to include a specific tag for them, but I appreciate you letting me know. I will make sure to include [AIP] in the title of my posts going forward.

Thanks for giving it a chance. Alot of time, effort, and testing went into this self hosted app. I am a longtime Mealie user and though its an absolutely great recipe manager, there were a few more things i wanted to see in an app like this, and thus CookTrace was born. Feel free to report any bugs or feature requests on the github page.

RC2 now includes improved import functionality. I believe this will address your concern above!

should now be addressed in latest RC6.

Genuinely useful feedback, thanks for taking the time. Walking through each:

Per-exercise sharing. Real gap. The exercises table is already structured cleanly enough to dump one as JSON; adding a “share this exercise” button that produces an importable file is small. The community-repo idea is good too: a separate awesome-lifttrace-exercises repo where people can drop contributions, and the in-app importer can read from a URL. Going on the roadmap.

Custom equipment + searchable tags. The schema already supports arbitrary equipment strings; the UI just defaults to a fixed list. Adding a “+” in the equipment picker plus a “what’s available today” filter chip set on the Exercises page is genuinely useful, especially for travel and home-gym use. Adding to the roadmap as a near-term candidate.

Per-exercise timer for time-based work. Real gap. The rest timer infrastructure exists but doesn’t currently cover “do this exercise for N seconds with a countdown and a cue.” That’s a meaningful addition for anyone doing carries, planks, isometrics, hangs, or hybrid stuff. Sharing the same audio + haptic plumbing as the rest timer keeps it cheap. Roadmapped.

Per-set / per-round rest in HIIT-style circuits. Currently rest is global with per-exercise memory, which doesn’t cover the “20s between reps, 2 minutes between rounds” pattern you described. That’s a structural change to how sets express rest. Going on the list to think through together with the time-based timer above, since they share infra.

Heart-rate data. The export direction you called out is the cheap win, and you’re right that PWA makes it easy. I’ll push a CSV export of the completed workout (sets, reps, weights, RPE, timestamps, rest durations) in a near term RC. That covers anyone who wants to feed an external analysis pipeline. Live HR ingestion from a BLE chest strap is the heavier direction and goes on the roadmap.

Thanks again for your valuable feedback. Appreciate the level of detail.

Thanks for highlighting the above:

Banner overlapping the H1 (“rcises”). This one I’m fixing structurally. The illustrated SVG banners across LiftTrace (and my other 2 Trace apps) are getting removed entirely. They were the single biggest source of layout fragility across viewport sizes, plus they were doing the project no favors aesthetically. In their place: the existing compact Gradient header stays as-is, and the “Animated” option becomes a subtly animated version of the same compact gradient (slow accent-hue drift, same height, no overlapping content). Three modes total: Animated, Gradient, Off, all sharing the same compact-header geometry. That removes a whole category of bugs and trims a real chunk of bespoke SVG maintenance.

Until that is released, you can flip your view to Settings → Appearance → Page Banners → Gradient (or Off) and the overlap should go away immediately.

Add button + exercise count missing on mobile. Real bug, haven’t pinned down the CSS yet but I’ll find it. The Exercises page action bar isn’t wrapping or relocating correctly at narrow widths.

Thanks again for bringing these to my attention.

Here is what i see as some differences today between CookTrace and Tandoor:

CookTrace:

• Pantry is a real first-class catalog, not a tag list. Barcode scanner, Open Food Facts + USDA lookup, per-item stock / serving size / nutrition, plus an “8 / 10 in pantry” match pill on every recipe card. Tandoor has the food list; CookTrace treats it as a primary surface.
• AI assistant with tool use — not just a chat bubble. Trace can log a cook, plan a cook, add things to the shopping list, mark a pantry item out of stock, import a recipe URL, etc. by reading and writing your real data
• FDA-style Nutrition Facts box auto-computed per recipe from pantry-linked ingredients
• Android app with full offline mode (on-device SQLite, differential sync when you reconnect)
• NutriTrace federation can import foods from NutriTrace directly into CookTrace’s pantry.

Where Tandoor still wins today: PDF / image OCR bulk import, longer track record, larger ecosystem, iCal meal-plan feeds.

Importer’s there in CookTrace, so you can move a copy over to compare with zero risk to your existing library whenever the time shows up.

Honestly, not automagically. CookTrace’s bulk importers today handle JSON, HTML, schema.org Recipe markup, and full-backup zips from Mealie / Tandoor / Paprika. Plain text, RTF, and PDF aren’t on that list yet, and there’s no “point at a folder and import everything” mode.

What works today for the same end goal:

• Photo Import — point Trace AI at an image of any recipe (including a PDF you’ve screenshotted) and it extracts it. Fine for a handful, probably painful for hundreds.
• Trace AI chat — paste the recipe text into the assistant and ask it to create a recipe. Same idea, no image step.

A proper OCR import is a worthwhile feature. I created a feature enhancement request in the GitHub repo, so that in the near future I can set aside some time to explore how feasible it would be to implement.

That URL should import cleanly; it’s a standard food blog with the markup the importer expects.

TikTok though, honestly, no. TikTok pages don’t expose the recipe text to scrapers and the AI fallback has almost nothing to work with. A real TikTok URL importer would need to call TikTok’s caption API and transcribe the video audio, which isn’t built yet.

Workaround that may possibly work today: screenshot the recipe overlay (or the comment where the creator wrote it out) and use Photo Import the AI extracts the recipe from the image. Two taps, same result.

Not right now. I want to get all my apps past the RC stage and into stable GA but will certainly consider it in the future.

The app is primarily aimed at lifting weights but does also account for body weight exercises such as pullups, pushups, etc. with respect to walking/running/cycling etc, i have that incorporated into my other app which is primarily focused on nutrition/wellness called NutriTrace.

just added. Was a request for my other NutriTrace App so made sure to add it here as well.

Thanks for taking the time to write this out and thank you for the feedback that helped improve the onboarding process.

I completely respect your preference (as well as the community’s). LLMs definitely have their flaws, and they aren’t for everyone. For me, AI acts as a thoroughly tested extension of my workflow rather than a shortcut, but I know that doesn’t fit every project’s philosophy.

I really appreciate your mature approach to the “No thank you” mindset. I hope you find a solution that works perfectly for your needs and aligns with your principles!

Thanks for asking. Reception of this app has actually been positive overall since my first post here, with upvotes well ahead of downvotes.

Last week I posted about my newer app LiftTrace, which I also build with AI assistance. Once folks realized AI was part of how I work, “AI slop” became the read on that post and the downvotes came fast. I assume some of this week’s downvotes here are coming from the same crowd reacting to a familiar name, which is fair. Everyone is entitled to their opinon and I respect that.

I’ve never hidden the AI involvement, and from what I can tell on the NutriTrace GitHub page real users are getting value out of it: stars are steadily climbing and issues and enhancement requests are coming in. I’ll keep posting these updates because I think the apps are genuinely useful, I use them every day myself, and I wouldn’t share them if I didn’t believe they could help someone with their own health or fitness journey.

Happy to answer any other questions folks have.

Unfortunately there are no demo sites for either of the projects yet, that is planned for the future.

Appreciate the tip. Thanks!

Sorry to hear that. It’s completely optional and you can go minimalistic with no banner if you so choose. Try it out and hopefully it works for you.

Cookidoo has no public API and their ToS prohibits scraping, so a direct integration would be both legally fragile and maintenance-heavy (the scraper breaks on every UI change Vorwerk pushes). The indirect path that works today: Mealie is a self-hosted recipe manager that imports Cookidoo URLs as one of its many recipe sources, and NutriTrace has Mealie integration built in (Settings → Mealie). Your wife adds recipes from Cookidoo into Mealie once, and they show up as searchable foods in NutriTrace with full nutrition.

Also worth mentioning: I’ve got a sister app called CookTrace (may not be final name) in development as a purpose-built self-hosted recipe manager that pairs natively with NutriTrace (same UI patterns, same AI assistant, federation already wired between them). It has a schema.org Recipe scraper for URL imports, though Cookidoo itself is gated content so it’d still need either a Mealie middle layer or manual entry. Currently private; aiming for a public release in the next month or so.