Integrate Your Fitness Apps for Less Data Entry

The iPhone, because of its fits-in-your-pocket size and because of its GPS, is great for tracking your fitness, whether it's what you eat or what you burn. I use RunKeeper, and sometimes Zombies, Run! to track my walking (or my rare and brief running). However, I use Lose It! To track my food intake and my exercise, to try to stay in a calorie budget and lose weight.

That's a number of apps with redundant information in them. Much of my exercise gets recorded in either RunKeeper or Zombies, Run! And also gets recorded in Lose It! I hate entering the same thing twice. you probably do too. If you have an account with each of the services behind these apps, however, you start RunKeeper or Zombies, Run! and have your caloric expenditure automatically show up in Lose It!

Here's how I have it set up:

And here's how to do it:

• Sync Zombies, Run to RunKeeper
• Sync RunKeeper to Lose It!

Happy syncing!

 

Posted with Blogsy

iPhone vs. iPad vs. iPad Mini: Strengths of Each

I've owned three different iPhones over the last five or six year but I recently bought my first iPad, a fourth-generation iPad. Shortly after buying mine, my daughter bought an iPad Mini. After having some time with each of these, there are definitely things that an iPhone does better, things that an iPad does better, and things that an iPad Mini does better.

If you own an iPhone and are wondering if you should get an iPad, or if you own an iPad and are wondering if you should get an iPhone, it helps to know what the strengths of each are. Here are some general comments about each:

Multi-touch Gestures on the iPad

Before this week, the only iOS device I've owned was an iPhone. Perhaps that's why I discovered two of the three multi-touch gestures for my new iPad by accident:

1. If you're in an app and swipe left or right with four fingers, you switch to one of the other apps that are running.
2. If you're in an app and "grab" with all four fingers, pinching toward the center, you'll go back to the home screen.
3. If you swipe up with four fingers, you'll see the multi-tasking bar at the bottom.

These are all extremely useful gestures and can save wear and tear on your home button.  Item #1 will help you switch apps much more quickly so that you only need to do #3 when you want to close apps completely.

More iPad Content Coming

I ordered an iPad from the Apple web site yesterday after confirming that there were no new iPads announced. It came today. That's pretty impressive delivery time for free shipping. I'm actually typing this post on it.

This is my first iPad so expect to have a number of iPad-specific posts sprinkled in with the iPhone and universal app posts. For now, back to exploring my new tool. I'd say new "toy" but, after all, this is Practical iStuff.