Utilize your desk time with two Mac apps that’ll have you tracking your diet and drinking water like a fish.
$24.99
Perfect-Diet-Tracker.com
That’s a lot of options for tacos.
Twenty-five bucks might seem like a lot to drop on a food tracker—especially when it performs a task you could presumably do with paper and a pencil. But once you see Perfect Diet Tracker’s colorful graphs and easy interface, you’ll realize it really does live up to its price (and name). For starters, it allows you to use an online database to find your foods. Whether you had tacos at Taco Bell or a pretzel from Wetzel’s, the program has a large database with customizable options, so even if something isn’t there, you can simply add it.
Perfect Diet Tracker also tells you how many calories you can eat in a given day based on how much weight you’re trying to lose and in what time period. With a program this simple and effective, updating it with new information is always a pleasure. After a few weeks, you’ll have an impressive catalog of results, targets, and of course, graphs.
The graphical interface is a little cheap, but it’s easy to use and the Dock notification is a perfect reminder throughout the day.
It’s not like it’s hard to drink water; it’s just that in the course of a day’s work, it can be hard to remember that you need to. That’s where Drink More Water comes in. While you’re taking care of biz, its little display in your Dock will tell you how many glasses of water you have left to drink (it starts at eight a day).
The app is as simple as can be. A toggle in the bottom-right corner switches between milliliters and ounces, and clicking on the various displayed waters will subtract that drink from your daily total. Once you reach the elusive eighth cup (seriously, eight cups is a lot!), you’ll be rewarded by the sound of clapping. Woohoo, positive reinforcement! There’s also a seven-day report to let you know how you’ve done each day and how much water you drink on average per day.
As an added bonus, it comes with 21 tips of the very questionable variety. Our favorite? “If you watch TV at night, pick one show per night and drink a bottle of water while you watch that show.” One TV show? What is this, the Watch Less TV app?
Withings’ next awesome crossover accessory will be a blood pressure cuff that plugs directly into your iPhone’s 30-pin connector. It’ll track your blood pressure with the same fancy charts as the Body Scale, and it’ll have the ability to send a recap email to your doctors, utilizing Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault. Expected this summer (pending FDA approval), the price will be $129.
Outside, mobility’s the name of the game. Put these apps on your iPhone to track your exercise on the go.
All this fitness tech is expensive. If you’re not so sure you want to invest in heaps of gear that just might eliminate more dollars than calories, Nike has a cheap and surprisingly adequate alternative—an app. If you have an iPhone, the Nike+ GPS app allows you to track your workouts with iPhone in hand.
Like the $200 watch, this app can accurately display a map of your run (provided you have an iPhone 3GS or newer) and allows you to challenge your friends to all sorts of social fitness challenges via nikeplus.com. For those that don’t mind running with their iPhones, this app effectively replaces the iPod Sport Kit—and it only costs $1.99.
But what about those who don’t have an iPhone? No problem. iPod touch users can get in on the fun too, tracking their run and pace and listening to music all the while. You’ll lose out on the excellent GPS features, so you’ll probably want to use it in conjunction with a treadmill where you can accurately measure your pace.
Look familiar? The Nike+ GPS app utilizes all the same maps and charts of its nikeplus.com counterpart.
And to our surprise, Nike just keeps updating its $2 wonder. The company recently updated it with a new feature—Nike Tag, which challenges users to outrun their friends (by beating their run pace) before they get tagged. It’s a remarkable app, and at that price point, you can download it for yourself and gift it to all your friends before coming anywhere near the price of other Nike gear.
FitnessBuilder bills itself as the most comprehensive iOS fitness app in the world, and we think they might not be exaggerating. With over 5,600 educational videos and images, FitnessBuilder will have an answer to almost any question you have about any single facet of a workout. Not content with being an overstuffed gallery, FitnessBuilder also comes loaded with over 750 workouts and even access to a live personal trainer.
Outside of the flashy (and ridiculously large) quantities of workouts and images, this app also supplies an excellent workout builder, strength tracker, and an option to remain aware of your body stats (from weight to BMI and more). You can schedule your workouts to your Calendar app, ask an exercise physiologist a question, and even share your workouts. The list goes on and on.
FitnessBuilder has all the tools you need to get more yoked than a dozen eggs.
FitnessBuilder has optional in-app purchases for even more advanced users, ranging from a $4.99 “Month of Plus” (it gives access to printing workouts and asking unlimited fitness questions) to the $199.99/year “Pro,” which grants users an advanced infrastructure to train and track clients (it assumes you’re a personal trainer if you’re buying Pro access), as well as a group-share function to blast workouts to large groups. If all that’s sounding like overkill, don’t sweat it—without any additional access, the app is far from crippled. Suffice it to say, if you’re set on getting fit, be set on getting this app. You won’t regret it.
This summer, BioLogic will release a dynamo kit called the ReeCharge that will make it possible to charge your iPhone by simply riding your bike. Price is still TBD, but whatever it costs, we want it. Safety circuitry ensures you’ll protect your iPhone from power spikes, and the kit is compatible with most standard bike dynamos. We’re already sold—here’s to a timely release!
When our discipline wears thin, we have these four apps to thank for our inevitable—and delectable—backsliding.
This excellent $0.99 app has over a thousand wine and food pairings—we won’t be satisfied until we’ve tried ’em all. While wine might be a good choice for an evening beverage, unfortunately, many of the pairings look like high-fat snacks. Oh well. That delicious cheese has gotta go somewhere, and that somewhere is in our bellies.
We love the convenience of food that comes to us. With TruxMap Lite Food Truck Map (free), we barely have to leave our chairs to find the nearest offering, and its gorgeous user-submitted photos mean we no longer have to guess which truck serves the largest portions! With maps in dozens of cities, odds are if you’ve seen a food truck in your area, it’s supported in the app.
Nothing gets our stomachs growling like a little food trivia. While we’re busy answering questions about everything from dried prunes to chocolate chip cookies, you can bet we’ll be whisking up a few treats. iQ Food Trivia ($0.99) even updates automatically without pestering us about App Store updates, which means we’ll get loads of use out of it.
It’s not like it’s hard to find fast food. In a major city, all you have to do is step outside. But this $0.99 app has us craving meals we didn’t know we had access to. There’s an In-N-Out right around the block? Plus, if you’re ordering ahead, this app has phone numbers for each listing.
