iPhone owners can now use one of the best smartphone keyboards in the world with the SwiftKey Note app.
Until now, SwiftKey was only available for Android devices.
SwiftKey Note is available for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices. While typing, the app will give you accurate autocorrection and provide three next-word predictions. The more you use the app, the smarter it gets.
Fonts can be changed by swiping left and right. Sync SwiftKey Note with the popular Evernote app to help build an archive of personalized word recommendations. You can also type a note in the app, and then send it through iMessage.
Apple's keyboard can sometimes be clunky, so this a great program to use when compiling a to-do list, taking notes in a meeting and other tasks.
Here's how you use it:
This is the main menu of the app. Tap the plus sign in the upper-right corner to create your first note.
At the bottom of the screen, the app offers the three next words that it thinks you are going to type.
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Once you finish typing the note, you'll be able to organize your notes with tags or send them to the trash with a few simple taps.
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Click done and go back to the main menu. Tap the cog icon in the upper-left corner and go to settings.
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Sync to your Evernote account and adjust language settings at the top. The app offers a series of how-to videos in the Advanced section that will help you navigate the app. SwiftKey Note is pretty easy to use, though, but if you get stuck, the videos are helpful.
Evernote’s ongoing plan to improve its technology platform is taking another step forward today with the release of updated apps for iPhone and iPad. The new apps are promised to be faster, easier to use and more customizable, with homescreens you can adjust to fit your needs, better business card scanning, bug fixes and more. The company has been struggling with glitches and bugs related to slipping software development – something which CEO Phil Libin admitted to following a scathing, but accurate, post by former TechCrunch writer Jason Kincaid. Since then, Evernote has been publicly working to address not only the problems themselves, but also the perception that the company’s software has become unreliable. Evernote actually started rolling out fixes yesterday, with an update to its synchronization platform that’s now four times faster. At the time, the company said that refreshed mobile apps would arrive, too, as well as an API update. The iOS apps arriving today seem to be taking advantage of the backend improvements, and now include a “sync status” feature that tells you how recently items have been synced. You can also choose to have this button displayed below the Settings gear, for easier viewing, says the company in a blog post detailing the new apps’ feature set. customize The apps are also promised to be faster and more responsive, as you navigate and make changes. Business card scanning has been improved so you can quickly add scanned cards to your device’s contacts – handy, since LinkedIn has practically abandoned its CardMunch acquisition while focused more heavily on its newer Contacts app. (CardMunch on iOS hasn’t been updated since 2011, and we’ve been hearing rumors of its forthcoming demise). However, after the upgrade, the most noticeable change you’ll see upon first launch of the new Evernote iOS app is the redesign. Users have been requesting the ability to better customize their Evernote experience, which the updated apps deliver via a new homescreen where you can now show or hide the sections (e.g. notes, tags, notebooks, places, etc.) you want to see, and rearrange their placement on the screen. You can also turn on or off the ability to show the recently viewed items for your Notes, Notebooks, Shortcuts and Tags sections. And you can change the look-and-feel of the app, by choosing from one of three color themes: light, dark or Evernote’s classic green. Meanwhile, Evernote’s “New Note” buttons are now at the top of the screen where they’re larger and more easier to tap. Perhaps more importantly, Evernote promises that bugs have been stomped in this release, including the issue that was corrupting audio notes which Kincaid was often running into, as described in his post. New apps are one of many improvements the company has in store, some of which – like its upgraded infrastructure – have only started to arrive over the last few weeks. As Libin recently explained, the original Evernote infrastructure was designed for a few thousand single-device users, but has had to scale over the years to support tens of millions and a range of devices. Of course, upgrading a service’s underpinning while continuing to support a large and growing number of users is no easy task – just ask Twitter. But it can be done. Plus, though Evernote may have been buggy, it still has a significantly sized user base – and, apparently, a loyal one too. Instead of complaining about the glitches, people suffering, like Kincaid was, could have easily just switched apps. But instead, they’ve been voicing their concerns. That’s a good sign – after all, the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
Not every photo you take on your phone will be good. Many will be terrible. Until now, we've used filters in Instagram or Twitter to give these flops a little spunk. Well a new iOS app calledFragment takes a different approach to filters: Rather than adding a gauzy haze over your images, it shatters them.
After selecting a photo from your library or taking one yourself, Fragment presents you with a screen much like you'd see in Instagram, except that at the bottom you'll see boxes with odd shapes in them where you're used to seeing filters with nostalgic names. Each box plops different shape or series of shapes over your image through whichit's refracted, as if by water. As you can see above, the results are weird and wonderful.
SEXPAND
The app lets you customize the look of the final product many different ways so I highly recommend you just cycle through endless combinations of variables with the shuffle button until you get the hang of it.
You can apply adjustments to common attributes like contrast, blur, saturation, etc. on both the original image and the fragment on top of it. The fragment can be further tweaked in size and orientation. You can also slide the fragmented image around so that it's focused on a different part of the original.
After you're done tweaking your image you can easily share it to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or simply save it to your phone. Overall, the app is a lot of fun to play with and for $1 it seems pretty reasonable, even if you don't use it all the time.
One of the features that I really like about Android is the ability to install feature rich third-party keyboard like SwiftKey, Swype etc.
At the D11 conference in June, when Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said that the company plans to open up a “lot more” on the API front in the future, I was hoping that Apple would introduce APIs for the keyboard in iOS 7, so developers could launch third-party keyboards in the App Store.
Unfortunately, as you all know that didn’t happen. This has forced developers to release standalone keyboard apps such as Hipjot, and SDKs such as Fleksy that could be used by other third-party developers to use the custom keyboards in their apps.
evleaks, who has an immaculate record when it comes to Android related leaks has just posted a photo, which indicates that SwiftKey is planning to release a Note taking app called SwiftKey Note for iOS devices. Swift is an extremely popular keyboard app for Android based smartphones and tablets that learns from you to offer better auto-corrections and next-word predictions.
We can expect SwiftKey Note to offer similar functionality. I also won’t be surprised if they release an SDK so that third-party developers can incorporate the award-winning SwiftKey keyboard in their apps.
The U.S. National Security Agency specifically looks for data sent by mobile apps in order to capture personal data on targets, according to a new report from The New York Times and other news agencies.
Intelligence agencies can grab data as it travels across the Internet, looking specifically for data from smartphone apps including Google Maps -- searches within the app allow Governments to locate users to within a few yards -- and even Angry Birds. Much of the information being sent seems to be related to targeted advertising.
In addition, apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter all support sending some amount of location data and other information, allowing intelligence agencies significant opportunities to capture personal data in real-time on targeted persons without ever having access to phones, something that was part of a different intelligence strategy revealed in previous leaked documents.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has been vocal in his disapproval of some of the NSA's methods,meeting with the President to discuss NSA surveillance and more recently saying the NSA"would have to cart us out in a box" to have access to Apple's servers.
For its part, the NSA says it only analyzes data on foreign intelligence targets and that significant protections exist for data collected on U.S. persons and "innocent foreign citizens". The NSA has said in the past that collection of this sort of smartphone traffic has been useful in cracking cases.
Dark Sky, easily one of the better weather applications on iOS, rolled out an update today that expands its focus beyond rain predictions to become a more comprehensive weather app which offers both 24-hour and 7-day forecasts, global maps, and more. The app was also rewritten from scratch for iOS 7, the company notes.
For those unfamiliar, Dark Sky began its life as a Kickstarter project back in 2011, with a goal of offering “hyperlocal” weather information. That is, instead of just showing you what percent chance of rain there is in your area, Dark Sky looks at your exact location, then predicts the rain down to a minute. For example, it may tell you “Light rain starting in 20 min,” and offer a graph of what that future rain pattern will look like in terms of how light or heavy the rain will later become.
In addition, the app’s beautiful but simple design won it support and accolades from its user base, where it has consistently earned top reviews on the iTunes App Store. Its four-star rating in the past seems to only have been brought down by those who complain of battery concerns, or of accuracy. Of course, there may be times where Dark Sky misses the mark, but overall, the app is more “surprisingly accurate” than not, at least in my personal experience living in a humid locale, as well as in the majority of app store reviews.
And as for those battery concerns, co-creator Adam Grossman tells us that each time they’ve investigated complaints, it didn’t end up being the Dark Sky app that was the problem. After all, the app uses battery-draining GPS for location accuracy only when launched. For notifications, it uses cellular triangulation instead.
To date, Dark Sky has excelled its weather predictions, made possible by the backend weather service the company built called Forecast.io. This API, also open to third-party developers, offers current conditions, minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour and day-by-day forecasts, and more. Its data is sourced from a number of places, including NOAA (USA), worldwide METAR weather reports, the US Navy, the UK Met Office, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, and others. Aggregated together, the service provides a statistically more accurate forecast for any given location.
However, Dark Sky is currently only available in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland, due to the costs associated with licensing radar data. Fortunately, in the U.S., radar data is free, but the company has to pay recurring costs for U.K. data. But Grossman says he hopes that, in time, they’ll be able to afford expansions to other markets, like Canada, Australia, other parts of Europe, and Japan.
A number of third-party developers have also built apps powered by Dark Sky’s Forecast service, including Check the Weather, Poncho, Osito, Saga, Today Weather, QuickRoute, WeatherCaster and Weather Line. These steadily increasing API and data sales now pay for Dark Sky’s infrastructure, but the majority of the revenue the company earns comes from app sales, says Grossman. (The app is $3.99 on the App Store.)
Sleep is one of the most important factors contributing to our health and happiness. And yet it’s often the most neglected — or at least the most elusive. Now there’s a tool outside of expensive sleep clinics that could help you improve your sleep quality: an app called Sleep Rate.
Sleep Rate was developed by CEO Uli Gal-Oz and Chief Scientist Dr. Anda Baharav, both of whom have a combined 20 years of clinical sleep medicine experience. The app works by using data from a heart rate monitor and your iPhone’s microphone to monitor your quality of sleep and capture any noise that may disturb you during the night (this includes you or your partner’s snoring). After you’ve woken up, the app sends the data to the cloud for analysis using licensed algorithms developed at The Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine.
After getting a sense of your typical sleep patterns for five nights, you can get a personalized report that offers recommendations on how to improve your slumber. That’s a step above traditional activity trackers that only let you track your quality of sleep based on movement using an accelerometer. As many have noted, this isn’t an ideal way to get a sense of your overall sleep quality.
Poor sleep stems from one of three causes, according to Gal-Oz: medical (things like sleep apnea), environmental noises, and for most, psycho-physiological problems (things like anxiety level, stress, your biological clock, or insomnia). Using a combination of a heart rate monitor, audio monitoring, and questions about your lifestyle, Sleep Rate helps identify whether your snores are harmless and regular, or waking you up and should be addressed by a physician.
Using your heart rate to analyze your sleep also helps paint a far more accurate picture. During non-REM sleep, your breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure lower and get more regular. During REM sleep, your heart rate is more variable.
When I tried the app, I found I often got much better sleep than I initially perceived. When you launch the app, each day you answer a short questionnaire about your napping and stress habits. Then you strap on your heart rate monitor and hit the sack. Sleeping with a heart rate monitor on isn’t the most comfortable thing, but you get used to it. Since I tend to roll around in my sleep, I even managed to wiggle out of it at one point and had to re-strap it back on. In the morning, you rate your quality of sleep and Sleep Rate starts crunching the data.
The app displays your results from each night in a dashboard. You can view sleep quality and sleep duration and view each on a weekly or monthly basis. Below a pie chart breakdown of your awake, light sleep, deep sleep, and REM time, the app lists stats like how long it took for you to fall asleep, how many times you woke up, and the average length of those awakenings. You even get a breakdown of “snoring events” and environment noises that took place during your sleep, and which ones actually woke you up.
Lack of sleep contributes to a whole host of negatives — poor cognitive and physical behavior as well as long-term health issues like weight gain, stroke, and high blood pressure. It can wreak havoc on your immune system too. Poor sleepers cost the country 63 billion per year in lost productivity.
If you think you might have any sort of sleep issue, or you’re just curious to track how well you reallysleep, you can grab the app, a Polar heart rate monitor, a sleep assessment, and one year of sleep monitoring for $100 ($80 if you’ve got your own heart rate monitor).
SackSocial has launched an iPhone appto offer a native mobile experience of its Web-based social marketplace. The app offers one-touch purchasing, new discovery features for customers and account management options.
The startup also announced plans to introduce a responsive design for its marketplace later this quarter, as well as iPad and Android apps later this year.
CEO Josh Payne said in an interview that mobile devices now account for one-third of StackSocial’s traffic, up from 10-15 percent in the company’s early days. “Mobile is becoming one of the core tenets of our strategy,” Payne said.
StackSocial revealed on Thursday that the third-party publisher network it works with to offer “native commerce” deals to readers now has a reach of 50 million monthly unique visitors. Revenue for the unit doubled in 2013, with multiple publisher partners achieving seven-figure sales figures during the period. The startup said it’s on track to achieve eight-figure revenue this year and double its staff to 40 employees by the end of 2014.
iPhone (Jailbroken): The fingerprint scanner on the iPhone 5s only offers a few functions, but with a jailbreak tweak called BioProtect you can lock down specific apps as well.P
BioProtect installs through Cydia like any other option—just search for it, pay $3, and download. It doesn't create an app, however, but rather exists in your iPhone's Settings app. From there you can choose a theme to match the color of your phone (or not) and which apps to protect. Any app you enable will require a fingerprint scan each time you open it up. You can also toggle a few little things like vibration on failure and configure your Touch ID settings. Other than that, it doesn't do much else. For $3, however, you get a lot more control over the security of your apps. Now we just need to get something that allows disabling the fingerprintprotection where wedon'twant it.
Sunrise Calendar, one of the most popular calendar apps has just been updated with support for the iPad’s larger screen.
The app lets you sync your calendars using Google or iCloud, with the ability to create events using natural language (“Lunch tomorrow at 9pm”). It has a number of other features, too, like showing the weather forecast based on your location, birthday reminders, and a good design.
Here are the release notes for the latest version:
Sunrise is now designed for your iPad, includes a new Week view and adds background updates.
iPad
We’ve worked hard to bring the best Sunrise experience to your iPad. It’s the most beautiful calendar everywhere now.
We are introducing two new visualisations: Week and Month. They make it easier to make plans from your iPad and navigate in time quickly.
Week View (for iPhone too!)
This new visualisation makes it easier to see free-time between events, see your day at-a-glance, or find a time to get dinner with a friend next week. Tap on the week icon next to the new event button to reveal it. The best part: it works perfectly in portrait mode.
A lot of people have tried to design a week view before, but we think that you’ll enjoy the design of Sunrise better!
Background Updates
Sunrise will now update in the background (every hour by default), so you won’t need to open Sunrise to get the latest changes. Notifications will always be up to date.
When you type a password into a mobile payment app, you'd probably expect it to protect that password somehow. But it seems that the Starbucks app for iOS doesn't actually lock its usernames and passwords down. According to aComputerworldreport, company executives admitted today that the mobile app stores passwords in clear text, with no encryption of any sort. By connecting your phone to a computer, the report claims, someone could easily retrieve your password from a crash log.
What's more, it appears that Starbucks may not intend to actually fix the problem. While the company told both Computerworld and The Seattle Times that the company had "taken steps to safeguard customers' information," it's unclear what steps it could have taken. Daniel Wood, the security researcher who originally discovered the vulnerabiility in November, says that the latest version of the app still includes the same unencrypted passwords and usernames. Starbucks would have to update the application to fix the issue, Wood tells The Verge, and it hasn't done that since May. "Anything they have done on their end won't matter as the vulnerability lies within the application on end user devices," he says.
Admittedly, a criminal would still need to have physical possession of a user's phone to make use of the vulnerability, which is a fairly high bar to clear, and here it's only usernames, passwords, and email addresses at risk. Wood says that the Subway Ordering for California app, which lets users build sandwiches to order, stores the complete street address, credit card info, email address, and geolocation of its users in plain text.
Take a look at your iPhone. Now try and find your Voice Memos.
Has it taken you more than two minutes? Are you flipping through screen after screen of apps you don’t remember using?
You may very well be an app hoarder. Don’t worry, I’m here to help.
This is how you create folders for your apps so the ones you don’t use aren’t clogging up your home screen:
1. Choose an app that you would like to group into a folder.
2. Press your finger on the icon until all the apps on the screen begin to twitch. You should see little “x” bubbles on the upper-left hand corner of each app icon. Don’t touch those unless you want to delete something.
3. Keep your finger pressed on the app you’d like to file away and move the icon toward whatever else you’d like to group it with. Hold it on top of the app you want to group it with until a new screen automatically pops up.
4. The new screen will populate a title for the grouping — in this instance, it has deemed the two apps to be very generically “Social.” If you want to spice up the name of the folder, tap the “x” bubble on the right and type in whatever moniker you prefer (“Chats!”).
5. You can exit the new folder by clicking on the home button. Repeat the hold, drag, and drop until you’ve put all the apps you want into that folder.
And now? No more pages and pages of apps you’ll never use. Dang, iPhone: You clean up good.
The iPhone shoots pretty awesome video but there's always been one really annoying flaw: If you don't hold it in landscape mode, your video can sometimes come out with a funky letterbox effect.
If only there was a way to always shoot in wide mode and stop the "vertical video syndrome."
Well, today is that day.
A new app called Horizon has just made it into the App Store and it always shoots wide shots, whether you hold it in portrait, landscape, or even sideways.
"While many apps like Instagram offer straightening in photos, Horizon is the first app to do this on video and in real-time," Evil Window Dog, the development studio who built the app, said in a press release. "As the user records, Horizon auto-levels videos utilizing the device's gyroscope. The orientation of the resulting video stays corrected so that it is always parallel to the ground."
From TUAW:
Horizon uses a neat trick to always record in horizontal mode. The app has a rectangular indicator that always stays in the center of screen. It's within this viewport that the Horizon app is capturing. No matter how you rotate the device, this box stays centered on the screen. When you start shooting in portrait mode, for example, all you will capture is the horizontal content within the viewport.
The iOS app (it runs on iPhone 4s/iPad 3 and above) has other features as well, including Instagram-like filters and the ability to capture in multiple resolutions. You can find it in the Apple store now.
Box has gone back the drawing board and completely overhauled its apps for iPhone and iPad, pointing toward a more fine-tuned mobile strategy going forward. With boosted preview support for more than 100 file types, the upgrade includes full text search within documents, new grid views (and the ability to move, copy and delete multiple files at once), and recommendations for partner apps particular to each file.
David Still, vice president of mobile products at Box, reflected in a blog post on Wednesday that the company is continuing to "find ways to improve how people engage with their content and collaborate with each other on Post-PC devices."
While he didn't provide a timeline or a roadmap, Still promised that Box is following up with similar investments on its Android, Windows Phone, Windows 8, and mobile browser apps. New features aside, Box has also planted a substantial incentive to get new users onboard and online: 50GB of free storage space. Box has run promotions like this in conjunction with mobile launches before, including the iPad and even dating back to the HP TouchPad in summer 2011. Nevertheless, compared the regular freebie allotment of 10GB, which is even generous compared to some other cloud storage providers, 50GB of free space is still considerable in this digital day and age.
A new iPhone app enables North Americans to identify bird species by asking just five simple questions.
The free app, released this week by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, uses data from a citizen-science project called eBird that helps rapidly narrow down a bird species based on the location and time of year.
“We named the app ‘Merlin’ because of its uncanny, almost magical, way of guessing which bird you saw,” said Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Jessie Barry, whose team developed the app together with Birds in the Hand, a software developer. “This type of precision is only possible because bird watchers report their sightings to eBird from locations across North America every day of the year.”
Merlin currently includes 285 birds from North America. Barry's team is working to add more species.
Green kingfisher
Merlin is but one of dozens of new apps used for identifying species. Some, like WeBIRD, function as a Shazam for birds, recognizing them by their calls. Others cue off the physical description of species. Researchers now are working to develop apps that would enable a camera-phone user to snap a shot of a species and have it automatically recognized.
iPhone (Jailbroken): The fingerprint scanner on the iPhone 5s only offers a few functions, but with a jailbreak tweak called BioProtect you can lock down specific apps as well.
BioProtect installs through Cydia like any other option—just search for it, pay $3, and download. It doesn't create an app, however, but rather exists in your iPhone's Settings app. From there you can choose a theme to match the color of your phone (or not) and which apps to protect. Any app you enable will require a fingerprint scan each time you open it up. You can also toggle a few little things like vibration on failure and configure your Touch ID settings. Other than that, it doesn't do much else. For $3, however, you get a lot more control over the security of your apps. Now we just need to get something that allows disabling the fingerprint protection where wedon'twant it.
iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch owners who use music apps can control them now through a ring on their finger. Launching this quarter at a price of $25, the iRing responds to the gestures of your hand to perform specific tasks on an iOS device. Nestled on your finger, the double-sided ring talks to your device's camera, which reads your various gestures. You simply move your hand up and down, left and right, or twist it around to control the action. Created by IK Multimedia, the iRing supports the company's music apps, including GrooveMaker and VocaLive. As such, it's geared toward professional DJs and music makers who'd like to manage their music and sound effects without having to touch their iPhone or iPad. But the company wants to expand the ring's power beyond mere music apps. It's encouraging developers of games, health and fitness software, and other mobile apps to take advantage of the technology. Interested developers can contact IK Multimedia to learn more. The iRing is up for preorder at IK Multmedia's Web site and select musical instrument and consumer electronics stores. Buyers can choose a paint job of white, silver, or green. Two apps that work with the iRing -- iRing FX/Controller and iRing Music Maker -- will be available as free downloads from Apple's App Store.
With the new year upon us, a lot of us are looking at our habits—good ones we want to pick up and bad ones we want to give up. There is some science supporting the idea that, if you do something on a daily basis for a month (or two or three), it will become a habit and so be a lot easier to do regularly from then on.
For me, that has meant that it’s time for “habit apps” for my iPhone. While in theory I should be able to just do these things without any electronic assistance, I’m geeky enough that tracking habits with my iPhone actually provides me more motivation to keep up with them. I know I’m not alone. Talking to geek friends, I know many of them, too, are using habit trackers these days to start doing things like keeping their inboxes empty, taking their daily meds, and cleaning the garage every Sunday.
The right app for the job
The Habit List app lets you quickly and simply compile a list of habits you want to establish, with flexible reminder times.
When I first started tracking habits, I did it in Omni Focus, my task management application of choice. But it wasn’t a great fit: I didn’t like my habit-related tasks mixed in with my work and personal ones. The app didn’t provide an easy way for me to monitor my historical progress, either.
That’s why I opted instead for more specialized apps. For a year, I used one called Good Habits (free). It’s a well-designed app that easily lets you set up and track habits.
In the list view, Good Habits displays your current streak on each habit you’ve chosen to track. (So, for example, it can show that I’ve flossed every morning for the last five days.) It can also show your longest streak for each. (I once flossed in the morning for 37 straight days; hooray for dental hygiene!) Tapping on a habit opens a month-view calendar that displays when you did (and did not) perform that task. Good Habits also has the ability to send you daily reminders at a specified hour—useful if you need a little extra bit of nagging.
As much as I liked Good Habits, however, I’ve replaced it with another: Habit List($2.99) is actually pretty similar to Good Habits. The screen includes a list of your habits that are easily updated and ticked off as you go about your day. There is also a monthly view showing your progress on your individual habits and a reminder system. Habit List also shows you a monthly calendar view of days when you were successful.
But while Good Habits lets you set reminders on the hour only, Habit List lets you set them for any time you want. You can also set reminders to occur on specific days of the week, at regular intervals (every three days, say), or a certain number of times per week. For habits that need to be obeyed only on certain days, you won’t see them on your list until the designated day. For example, I’m trying to scan all my mail every Saturday; that reminder doesn’t show up on my habit list until Saturday.
Habit List also knows enough not to send you a reminder if you’ve already ticked off the habit as accomplished. For example, I set a Morning floss reminder for 9:00 a.m., but rarely see it on my iPhone since I’ve usually ticked that accomplishment off before then. Habit List also adds a statistics screen for each habit that shows your percentange of success by week and for all time.
While these additional features are nice, the real reason Habit List has replaced Good Habits for me is its design. Since I’m in my habit app several times a day, I want it to be easy to use and to look good. Good Habits has been looking long in the tooth every since iOS 7 shipped. Habit List has a nice, clean iOS 7 design; it’s a pleasure to use.
Making habits social
Everest enlists your social-media friends in your quest to change your habits.
Neither Good Habits or Habit List have any social media features. That is just fine with me. I don’t feel any desire to share my daily dental hygiene with the world. For some people, however, social sharing and the peer pressure that comes with it may just provide that extra prod they need to get to the gym every day. There are several apps that add such social features.
Two of the most popular are Everest (free) and Lift (free). Both services allow you to share your goals and habits with friends (or strangers) and publicly share your progress. With Lift, if you create a goal that others are also trying to achieve, it will show you their progress, too. Everest lets you assemble teams of motivators and also tells you who else you’ve motivated as you move toward your goals.
But, as we move into 2014, I’m happy with Habit List. I’m just geeky enough that having an app to help me establish new habits makes it that much more likely that they’ll really stick this time.
When you buy Apps through the App Store, these automatically become available on your other iOS gadgets - assuming that a version is available for that device. You should just be able to log in to the App Store and download them from the Purchased section of Updates. The more important issue is making sure that your application data is transferred from one device to another. Configuration settings, accounts, saved progress in games and so on. To do that, you ll need to back-up the device to iTunes or iCloud. Restoring from iTunes over USB is recommended for a first time set up. The easiest method is using iCloud, because it's a switch on and forget it deal. Go to Settings then iCloud and tap Storage and Backup. Switch iCloud Backup on. The backup will process automatically, every time your iPhone is connected to WiFi and locked. If you have a Mac and you've never backed up your iPhone, it may be quicker to backup to iTunes. Making sure that iCloud backup is switched off, connect your iPhone to your computer. iTunes will launch and should automatically begin synchronising the iPhone. If not, you can right-click (or CTRL-Click) on the iPhone icon to backup straightaway.
Backing up to iCloud gives you 5GB of free space for photos, documents and application data When you switch on your brand new iPhone, it gives you a choice between restoring from iTunes or iCloud. Choose iCloud and you'll be prompted to enter you details. The backup will restore over WiFi - so make sure you do it at home for security and reliability. If you choose iTunes, you'll need to connect the new iPhone to your computer. A prompt will ask if you'd like to set up as new or restore from a backup. Restore the backup and everything will be right in the world again.
Fitbit is known for making some of the best activity trackers on the market. It's latest product, the Fitbit Force, sits atop the fitness tracker market according to our very own Brian Bennett's review.
In an attempt to gain more users, Fitbit released an update to its iOS app introducing a new feature called MobileTrack for iPhone 5S owners. The feature takes advantage of the M7 coprocessor in the iPhone 5S, which can count your steps and track your activity.
It's not the first app to use the coprocessor to display activity stats; as we have previously covered there's a healthy list of different apps available for that.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Cipriani/CNET)
To get started with MobileTracker, download the Fitbit app from the App Store and sign up for an account. During the process you'll be asked to set up a tracker, but at the bottom of the screen is the option to set up the app without one. If you previously had a Fitbit tracker and want to use your old account, you'll need to log in and select "Set Up a New Fitbit Device" from the account screen. MobileTrack will be the first option on the following screen.
After everything is set up, the app will track your activity based on information from the iPhone 5S and its M7 coprocessor. So as long as you have your phone on you, your steps will be counted and tallied in the Fitbit app. You can add friends, track your weight, food, and even compete with friends on Fitbit.
This simple feature is a smart way to introduce users to the Fitbit system, with an end goal of converting them from a MobileTrack setup to a Fitbit on the wrist or waistband.
Losing weight in 2014 is easier, thanks to free weight-loss apps on your iPhone that encourage you to keep track of your calorie intake and exercise regimens. Check out these top apps that you should download to start your year off right. Lose It! Lose It! promotes weight loss with the goal being to keep it off. The app tracks what you eat and how often you exercise, and even enables you to share food choices with friends. In a notepad, you can also write about your weight loss, exercise and your goals. For Weight Watchers participants, reaching your goal weight has become easier with this app, which allows you to scan barcodes and immediately figure out the nutritional content of foods. The weight-loss program is based on a points-based system, and the calculation of the daily points targets is based on creating approximately a 1,000-calorie/day deficit. The mobile app keeps track of how many points you have used and how many you have remaining, so you don’t have to worry about whether you have overindulged or not. GymPact GymPact is an app that enables you to earn money if you meet your weight-loss goals. The added motivation may certainly help you hop off the couch and head to the gym. It works by users making a pact about how many days you’ll work out. You then offer an amount for how much you will pay if you don’t make your target. Wherever you exercise, you check in with RunKeeper, or you can hold your phone while working out to keep track of your workouts. Noom Noom helps you keep track of your weight by providing feedback about individual food items. It also keeps a calorie budget so you are aware of how much more you can eat throughout the day, helping you make smarter food choices. In addition, it tracks exercise and weight so you can stay motivated and achieve your goal of maintaining or losing weight. Map My Fitness Want to map your route or keep track of daily food intake? Map My Fitness is the perfect app for you. The fitness-tracking app tracks over 600 types of activites. Like running outside? The app lets you know how many miles you ran and new routes to take if you want to check out different scenery the next time you go for a jog. They have even added a new feature, enabling members to ring in the New Year by competing with friends or athletes around the world to win prizes and badges.
Fitbit is known for making some of the best activity trackers on the market. It's latest product, the Fitbit Force, sits atop the fitness tracker market according to our very own Brian Bennett's review.
In an attempt to gain more users, Fitbit released an update to its iOS app introducing a new feature called MobileTrack for iPhone 5S owners. The feature takes advantage of the M7 coprocessor in the iPhone 5S, which can count your steps and track your activity.
It's not the first app to use the coprocessor to display activity stats; as we have previously covered there's a healthy list of different apps available for that.
(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Cipriani/CNET)
To get started with MobileTracker, download the Fitbit app from the App Store and sign up for an account. During the process you'll be asked to set up a tracker, but at the bottom of the screen is the option to set up the app without one. If you previously had a Fitbit tracker and want to use your old account, you'll need to log in and select "Set Up a New Fitbit Device" from the account screen. MobileTrack will be the first option on the following screen.
After everything is set up, the app will track your activity based on information from the iPhone 5S and its M7 coprocessor. So as long as you have your phone on you, your steps will be counted and tallied in the Fitbit app. You can add friends, track your weight, food, and even compete with friends on Fitbit.
This simple feature is a smart way to introduce users to the Fitbit system, with an end goal of converting them from a MobileTrack setup to a Fitbit on the wrist or waistband.
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