Nothing like launching into a “New Year’s Resolution” over half a year into the new year, but better late than never, right? Back in July I started a new diet & exercise routine and, as opposed to previous attempts, I wanted results this time around. I quickly found a few great tools for assistance and inspiration.
LoseIt.com - A great site and mobile app combo that give you tools to monitor your weight, set loss goals, and track your calorie intake. While you need to measure your food out (in some cases) in order to track it through the LoseIt tools, I’ve found this isn’t that challenging.
DailyMile.com - If you’re looking to get into an excersise routine, DailyMile is a great site that can help you do this. Find friends and cheer each other on as you track your workouts. This is a terrific site for generating help and getting motivational assistance from others who are looking to accomplish the same goal.
Calorific - A unique take on calorie monitoring, Calorific breaks the foods that you eat into three categories; Great, Ok, and Bad. From there, they employ a measuring system of tiny, small, medium, and large. This system allows you to re-imagine what you’re taking in, not in cups or quarts, but as handfuls. This basic breakdown of calorie counting is a refreshing change from measuring and eagle-eyed monitoring of each food item you eat.
LinkedIn pushed out a (welcome) update for their iOS and Android mobile apps today. Gone are the chicklet-styled home buttons, which have been replaced with an entirely-new navigation scheme. In essence, the header bar rules the day. Everything you need to do and your main mode of navigating through the app is handled through this area. While this is an interesting take on mobile app nav design (as a good majority of apps that I’ve used rely on the footer bar to house their navigation), it’s not the most intuitive option, unless you turn a blind eye to the informational hovering window that appears the first time you launch the updated app.
Once you get the hang of the navigation scheme, you can easily move through the app into the four main modules; Updates, You, Inbox, and Groups & More. The icons for each of these sections have distinct visual traits that help you distinguish what they are at-a-glance.
Areas of the app that have multiple sub-categories or options once you dive into them are sectioned off nicely with visuals that are much larger and bolder than in the past.
Creating a new message or status update also seems to have a more polished/streamlined look.
Overall I’m very impressed with this update and plan to make more use of the LinkedIn app because of it. If you haven’t already, go grab the update from the iOS App Store or the Android Marketplace.
I’ve been meaning to write a review of Instacast, an app that I’m not quite sure how I’ve lived without. It’s allowed me to cut the cord between syncing podcasts from iTunes or even using iTunes to catch up with old episodes of shows I subscribe to. It’s what the iOS version of iTunes should be…at least the podcasting area. Well worth the $1.99 cost in my opinion.
I read a great editorial piece last week written by Nilay Patel for thisismynext.com about how three of the bigger(est) tech giants are aiming to change the way we think about our phones, specifically the phone number. During my latest round of #MowerMeditation, I had some thoughts of my own on a few of these players and the gathering of cloud computing.
One a quick side-note, if you haven’t checked out thisismynext.com, do so now! They have great insight into the world of tech and gadgetry and not only write content that’s entertaining to read, but they also produce a great podcast that’s very in-depth. Now that’s out of the way, on to the regularly-scheduled post.
I see a battle brewing on the cloud-storage and computing front and the lines are becoming more visible with Apple’s announcement of iCloud. The armies are Amazon with their Cloud Drive and Cloud Player services (not to mention their earlier foray into the cloud with the S3 service, plus others), Google with Google Music, and Apple with iCloud. The lines have been drawn and they’re all vying for your hard-earned money. The ultimate question is, which service fits you the best?
There are differences in each offering that appeal to almost any digital content consumer. Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Google Music both offer storage locker-style services that allow you to upload your music for streaming and downloading onto your various devices. iCloud’s iTunes in the Cloud feature gives you the ability to download music you’ve purchase to your computers and iDevices and other elements of iCloud offer some helpful backup and file-sharing options for text and iWork documents. In this battle, the sky’s the limit.
