Szalty
A nutrition tracker that feels like a social feed, not a spreadsheet.
- Role
- Product Designer & Developer
- Timeline
- ~1 month
- Team
- Me (Product Designer & Developer)
- João Hooks (Creative Director)
- Shane Barrone (Stakeholder)
- Skills
- Product Design
- iOS Development (SwiftUI)
- Motion & Interaction Design
- Design Systems
Shipped the redesigned flow; the client wants to adopt the v2 design system across the app.
Key pain points
“Most of the current design is straight from Lovable.”
I needed to streamline the design system into something that was scalable and reusable.
“The Figma file has no real structure, so the devs are blocked.”
I organised the components and prepared clean, developer-ready handoff screens on a tight timeline.
“Onboarding feels heavy and it's not obvious what to do.”
I redesigned the whole flow, from account creation through Strava integration and location permissions.
“The colours are all over the place, dozens of near-duplicates.”
I audited the palette and cut it back to a clean, intentional, categorised colour system.
The Problem
Most nutrition apps feel like admin. You log your food into a grid, you get a number, you close the app. Nothing about them makes you want to come back. I wanted the opposite. Something that looks good, feels alive when you touch it, and treats food and training as things worth sharing, not just numbers to hit.
Overview
Szalty is a social nutrition and fitness app for iPhone. You post a meal with its macros attached, link the workout behind it, and scroll a feed of what other people are eating and training. It started as a web prototype, and this is the native SwiftUI build where I could get the motion and the small interactions feeling right.
Personal Goals
- 01
Make logging feel good, not like a chore
Every tap has some weight to it. Buttons bounce, the heart bursts when you double tap, sheets slide the way you expect.
- 02
Port the web prototype properly
Rebuild the whole thing in SwiftUI instead of wrapping the web app, so it feels native everywhere.
- 03
Sweat the details
A real light and dark theme, custom fonts, shared element transitions, a glass tab bar. The stuff you only notice when it is missing.
01 / 04
A quick tour
Feed, explore, analytics, profile. The whole app in one pass, with the transitions and the glass tab bar doing their thing.
02 / 04
Posting a meal
Pick your foods and the macros add themselves up. Attach a workout, rate how it felt, post it. The whole flow is a stack of custom sheets.
03 / 04
The feed
Double tap to like and the heart bursts. Tap through to a post, drop a comment, keep scrolling. All the little interactions you expect from a social app.
04 / 04
Light and dark
A proper theme system, not a filter over the top. Every colour, shadow and surface is defined for both.
The icons
Under the hood
- SwiftUI
- Rebuilt from the web prototype. iOS 26, iPhone, native navigation, no web views.
- Custom tab bar
- A glass tab bar with a centre create button that opens a sheet instead of switching tabs.
- Stacked sheets
- Create, food picker and rating are custom overlay sheets so they can layer on top of each other, which native sheets fight you on.
- Motion
- The Framer Motion springs from the web mapped onto SwiftUI springs, with matchedGeometryEffect for shared-element transitions.
- Theme system
- Light and dark colours resolved through an EnvironmentKey and remembered with AppStorage.
- Type
- KMR Melange Grotesk and Milligram, registered at launch.
Conclusion
Szalty is the version of a nutrition app I would actually use. Building it native let me chase the feel, the little bounces and bursts and slides that make it worth opening. Next up: real data behind the mock, and hooking the workout side into Strava and Apple Health.