Today, DailyBurn (formerly known as Gyminee) is releasing a new kind of food journal for the iPhone: FoodScanner.
As the title suggests, FoodScanner uses the iPhone's built-in camera to scan barcodes of food items. Using DailyBurn's database over 200,000 food products, you can scan what you eat (or what you are thinking about eating) and get the nutritional information and your daily calorie count.
If the item you are eating doesn't have a barcode or if it isn't in DailyBurn's database, you can search for the product and select it, or add new foods to the database and add photos and UPC codes.
I tested the app on some of the items sitting on my desk and I was impressed with the speed an accuracy of how it worked. Even on an aluminum soda can that is both a rounded and reflective surface, the barcode scanning picked up and worked as expected.
It's also nice that you get a running count of all your calories for the day at the bottom of the app, and that the app can also sync with your existing DailyBurn account, with the updates showing up instantaneously.
If I had any complaint it would be that while you can log your food charts for past days, you can't view your counts for those days. The free DailyBurn iPhone app does show this data, but it would be nice if you could track at least a weekly log with FoodScanner (which costs $2.99) too.