Joshua James

#FitBit vs. Jawbone #UP
#jmr #JoshsMobileReview

For those who are interested. I’ve been playing with both the FitBit and Jawbone UP together the last few weeks and here is my comparison.

Wearability:

FitBit
The FitBit is quite small and can fit into any pocket to track your activity. Mine has found a home in my left pants pocket and once in there I barely remember it’s there. That’s a huge advantage to the FitBit. It’s very discrete and not noticeable in your pocket unless you’re the type to wear super tight pants. Then I guess you might see it, but if you wear super tight pants you probably don’t worry much about your health and most likely will never have a FitBit. Anyway, I digress. To track activity like steps and flights of stairs there certainly isn’t anything better in my opinion. In terms of sleep tracking I found slipping the FitBit in and out of the sleeping band was a hassle.

Jawbone UP
The UP I think was designed very well and I really like the look of the band. It’s always on my wrist so if I slip into some basketball shorts at night that don’t have pockets (and therefore can’t easily have the FitBit) I’m still tracking activity throughout the house. There are several reviews online that complain that the band gets in the way with long sleeve shirts. It’s true it gets in the way a little bit but it’s no different than wearing a watch. The UP is light weight and after a day or two of wearing it I forgot it was even there. The sleep tracking is nearly identical to the FitBit (stats below in images) and is much easier to use than the FitBit sleeping band. The vibrating alarm is a HUGE advantage to the UP as well. My wife is a very light sleeper and this allows me to get up in the morning without waking her up with an alarm clock. Now that I’m used to it, it would be very hard to give up.

Gamification:

FitBit
The gamification strategy of the two devices are quite different. I believe the FitBit is a little bit more mature. What exactly do I mean by that? Well, FitBit ties into the website extremely well. Badges (almost identical to Foursquare) are used as motivators and can be quite effective. I definitely have had a few nights that I did a few extra steps just so I could be sure to hit a goal or hope to get a badge. There are also weekly (the frequency can be changed) emails that are really helpful to report how active you have been and what has been tracked for the week. FitBit includes many aspects of your health. The device tracks steps, flights of stairs, mileage, calories burned, and sleep. The app can track food, water, exercise, and weight. Social aspects are also included in the experience. There is Twitter integration in the app (which I totally love) and Facebook for the web so you can connect with friends on Facebook that also have the FitBit. This is a huge advantage over the UP. There is no Twitter or Facebook integration with the UP and the accompanying iPhone app. The combination of the emails, competition with Facebook friends and badges make the FitBit really fun to use and certainly motivating. I’ve been amazed at how my behavior has changed for the better since using the FitBit.

Jawbone UP
Jawbone has a different approach to their product and I really like the idea and believe a little bit of polish could make it a real force to be reckoned with in this space. UP focuses on a completely mobile experience. There is no website that houses additional charts and data, all is stored on the iPhone. I love this type of design. When I’m waiting for something or have a few extra minutes I can plug in my UP to the phone, it syncs all my data and I can know right in that moment where I stand in terms of my activity for the day. With the FitBit you need to be in range of the dock (the wireless sync has never been reliable for me) or sync it manually in order to view your data online. A small amount of data is available on the FitBit app. Although the UP doesn’t use badges (which I think they should adopt but not in the same way as FitBit) they use activity, sleep, and food bars. You can set your personal goals for each bar and when you have achieved 100% or more of your goal you get a spinning star burst that is surprisingly motivating. I still look at the app and notice I’m a little short on my activity and am motivated to go do some thing so I can get up to my 100% and see the spinning star burst. In addition to setting the goals there is a tab for challenges. You can create your own challenge or pick one that is already set up in the app. There are long term and short term challenges and some of them are quite creative. Personally I haven’t gotten into the challenges that much. Maybe because many of the challenges are “corporate” challenges and are a little bit of a turn off for me. I feel like maybe I’m being sold something if 24 Hour Fitness has a specific challenge for me to do. There is a social component as well to the UP but they have attempted to create their own network and do NOT tap into Twitter or Facebook. I think this is a shame. I’d really like to find people to add to my network but I don’t want to add some stranger and hope they are active enough to motivate me and are friendly to boot. Aside from what I feel is a poor execution of a social strategy I think the all mobile strategy for Jawbone is a winner. I think having all the data housed in the app and available at anytime is a big motivator.

Data Comparison
I picked a random week that I had data for both devices. In the images you can see the comparison graphically. For those who want to know exactly how they size up here is the data.

Number of Steps
FitBit Steps - 6,104; 2,952; 5,259; 3,579; 5,487; 3,936
UP Steps - 5,691; 2,097; 6,185; 2,596; 3,869; 4,502

Hours of Sleep
FitBit Sleep - 7.59; 6.87; 6.37; 6.73; 6.83; 8.12
UP Sleep - 7.66; 6.86; 6.40; 6.78; 6.73; 8.13

As you can see the sleep tracking is nearly identical. I like the UP more for tracking my sleep because I get more detailed data and it’s easier to put into sleep mode than it is to put the FitBit into the sleep band and put it into sleep mode.

The differences in activity I attribute to the location of the tracker. The FitBit is in my pocket and is not restricted by any activity I do. Since the UP is on my wrist, if I’m grocery shopping or holding my wife’s hand while walking, my arm is not moving naturally and I believe causes discrepancy in the recording of my actual steps. On the two days that the UP has a higher step count I believe I put the device into activity mode to play basketball or run (shorts didn’t have pockets) and it accounted for more activity than the FitBit. Since the time frame is a little over a week ago I can’t be sure if that’s the case, but makes sense to me.

Conclusion
Both the FitBit and the UP have motivated me in different ways. I much prefer the paradigm of having my activity available to me at any time on my phone with the UP but the tools to motivate are more sophisticated on the FitBit. I have every intention of using both to continue to help me live a more healthy life.

Hopefully this has been helpful to some one who may be sitting on the fence about whether or not they should get a FitBit or the UP.

If you’re still on the fence and have a few more questions I’m more than happy to share additional thoughts. Just let me know in the in the comments. If you have an UP or FitBit I’d love to add you to my circle on Google+. Shoot me a message with your email and I’ll add you on FitBit and UP too.

#tumblr
+Joshua Dance, +Louis Gray, +Tyler Smith, and +Jesse Stay I’d love to get your opinion this and whether or not I’ve missed anything. Please share with anyone who has a FitBit or UP.

from joshnicholls’s Zipl.us Google+ Feed http://bit.ly/InCSAG

Shawn Achor: The happy secret to better work

Incredible talk. Well worth the time to watch it. I love the list of thing, at the end of the clip, that we can do to improve our happiness.

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from joshnicholls’s Zipl.us Google+ Feed http://bit.ly/w6a7ym

Gamification and Social Networking In Jawbone UP
#jmr #JoshsMobileReview

I’ve been thinking more about my previous post about the Jawbone UP and I feel like I’ve left too many things out. There are so many features that are crammed into that app that I want to be able to cover them all and give a real critique.

The Dashboard
This is the first thing you’ll typically see when you open the app. Here you have a snap shot of your sleep, activity, and food consumption for the day. Incorporated into the dashboard is a gamification strategy. Each category has their own bar that will grow as you contribute to it. Depending on your activity in a certain category your bar will grow towards the top of the app. When you reach 100% for the day a small star burst spins around your percentage for your category. For me as a user I’ve found this to be extremely rewarding. I noticed I’d try to go to bed early to make sure I got my star burst on sleep. When I get home from work I’ll check to make sure I did okay on my activity for the day. If I haven’t moved around much I’ll make sure I squeeze in time to run on the treadmill or walk the dog to make sure I could get to my 100% for the day. I’ve been amazed at how my behavior has changed as a result of this small gamification strategy. I’m sure not everyone will have the same experience I enjoy but Jawbone nailed it on the head with the most important part of the app.

Tilt the device to landscape mode and you’ll be able to see more details on your activity (sleeping, moving, eating) for those who are interested in really dialing down on how everything is recorded. Tap on the section and you’ll get even more details. The sleep chart to me is the most valuable. I feel that if I can get a good nights rest then I will have the energy I need to carry out my busy life. The short coming in the data displayed for sleep is there is no way to know how you can improve your sleep quality number. If I understand correctly it’s good to have several deep sleep cycles. How many is ideal? How long should these sleep cycles be? What can I do to get a better nights rest? These are questions that I’ve had and I believe every user will have. In order to hit it out of the park Jawbone needs to address this.

In the previous post I addressed my frustration with recording meals. I won’t go over it again but I’ll say that it’s worthless and I never record any of my meals because it requires too much change to my daily routine. It should be effortless or at least nearly effortless to keep track of this stuff.

Social Network Gone Wrong
Having worked for a start up that focuses on social media services for small to medium sized businesses I’m confident in my opinion that Jawbone had a great idea connecting users around their product but they poorly executed a niche social network. To begin with there is no connection to any existing social networks. All of my friends either have Facebook, or Twitter and soon I’m sure I’ll have friends that are only on Google+. How will I know if any of my friends have UP if I can’t connect any of my current social networks? Another advantage to connecting a social network is to take advantage of the reach a user has through their social network. I envision the app automatically posting my activity (only the activities I choose of course) to Twitter. This way the UP is put in front of more eye balls and gives me a chance to explain what I’m doing to my friends and get them excited about tracking their health with me. The “social network” should be created organically. Make it easy to find people using UP and to connect with others using UP on any network and naturally groups and teams will form. Forcing people into a specific system that is not tailored to their own experiences stifles growth. It will be interesting to see how Jawbone evolves their product.

Challenges
The idea behind challenges is you can add them to your profile and work towards doing something cool. One challenge may be walking a mile a day or another may be take as many steps as it would take to walk across the United States. The idea is nice but for me personally it doesn’t work. Perhaps the primary reason it doesn’t work for me is that I’d have to manually go through and create the goals inside of the app because I’m not a fan of the goals provided by company sponsors. The company sponsor challenges also gives me a sour taste in my mouth and makes me feel like they are trying to make money off of me instead of being interested in improving my life. Either way most of it is my user laziness in my desire to create my own goals. That being said, if I’m an early adopter and have no motivation to use the challenges feature then there is a decent chance others who are not as quick to adopt new technologies might not use it as well. Personally I’d prefer Jawbone to adopt a FourSquare model of badges. I think it would be really fun to incorporate badges (both secret and public) and have the ability to post those badges to Facebook or Twitter. As I sit here and write this I can think of several badges that would be fun to have and earn. The difference I would have with the FourSquare model is the ability to earn a badge more than once. Just because I made it 5 nights in a row with a sleep quality above 90, for example, doesn’t mean that I’ve mastered sleep. Healthy living is a constant battle and constantly receiving awards for living right would be a great way to motivate me and I believe motivate others.

The bottom line is I believe the Jawbone UP is a fantastic product and has a great future ahead of itself if Jawbone takes the right steps to improve upon what they’ve built. I can’t think of a better contribution to society as a whole than to help people to live a healthier life. It doesn’t mean everyone needs to be marathon runners or Olympic swimmers. It’s the little things that we can do every day that will make a difference in our overall health.

I welcome any comments or critiques. Have you tried the UP? What do you think of it?

#tumblr
I’m testing a recipe I created on ifttt.com to see if this will post to my tumblr as well.

from joshnicholls’s Zipl.us Google+ Feed http://bit.ly/w8Ob15

I’m still teaching myself Objective C programming but there are so many things that tend to get in the way. The first of which is my real job. Once I get home from my real job I tend to want to spend time with my family. Despite the obstacles I am determined to learn and as evidence I’m sharing a few more things I have learned about programming.

Data Types

I’ve taken programming classes in the past and am familiar with data types. In Objective C however there is a small difference. Like in other languages, Objective C has the int, float (or double), and char data types. These are found in other languages and are not new. An int data type deals with integers, any number without a decimal point. Float is a similar data type but deals with any number with a decimal point. When I say any number I mean the relatively normal ones. If we’re talking about massive numbers with decimals there is a different data type. Lastly the char data type is for one character.

The interesting thing I found while reading and watching tutorials is no mention of a string data type. In all other programming languages I’ve seen the string data type to handle a string of characters. I thought this was a crucial omission in Objective C until I realized what they did to replace the string data type. They decided to turn text data into a string object called NSString.

Objects

Objects are used to represent things. Sometimes these things are essentially digital representations of real life objects and sometimes they are not. Either way objects contain data and actions can be performed on objects. These actions that are performed on objects are called methods. Usually when dealing with any program that has text in it you want to be able to perform actions on that text. There may be a case where you want just the first few characters of a string. Maybe you want the last few characters. Perhaps you’re searching for a specific set of characters and want to pick that out of a specific string. This would be quite tricky if you were dealing with the string as a data type.

If you wanted to accomplish any of the above scenarios you as the programmer would have to write a method (an action) that could be performed on the data type string and get the desired result. While this may be good for students learning a new language, it’s silly for someone who understand programming. Some one else has already figured out how to do what you want to do and you essentially are recreating the proverbial wheel by writing a method to accomplish the actions as described above.

Now comes the reason why the string data type is silly in Objective C. There are methods that you can call on an NSString object that can do all the above and much much more. Objective C has lots of built in objects and you as the programmer have the ability to create your own object with variables or different specific parts.

Classes

A class is the definition of an object. What can this object hold? What can this object do? This is exactly what a class tells us.

Classes contain the instructions for the methods. You can say what you want the object to do and then inside the class you’ll need the instructions to perform that method or action. Objects are the building blocks of any program and classes are what define these objects. I don’t pretend to understand everything that has to do with classes but wrapping my head around the big picture of programming excites me and helps motivate me to work hard to understand the nuances of Objective C.

In Closing

Right now I have a book and I’m using several online resources to learn Objective C and more specifically iPhone programming. My favorite right now is http://www.thenewboston.com 

It is an incredible resource and has hundreds of programming tutorials for many languages. Bucky has been very helpful to me in learning the different aspects of Objective C and iPhone programming. Go to his site and check it out.

I wrote this post on Google+ and thought it would be a good idea to share here as well.

How To Differentiate Your Mobile App From The Other 425,000+ Apps
(warning - long post)

The iPhone was announced by Steve Jobs January 9th 2007 and it changed the way consumers interact with the world. Business men (and women) could pull down their email and attachments and forward on proposals. The casual movie watcher could get movie times and order tickets with only a few taps on the screen. Before the iPhone people had smart phones that could do these things. What was the difference? What changed? 

The way I see it, the iPhone caused two major changes that affected consumer behavior. First, Apple sold an idea and image. They sold a device that made you look cool and feel cool. Even if you weren’t a “tech guy”, you could have a top of the line phone and do all the cool things you heard was possible to do on a phone and didn’t know how to do it. Jobs created a device that “just worked” for the most simple of consumers. It was brilliant. Apple sold the idea that mobile computing was not complicated and you could handle it and look cool doing it.

The second thing that changed is the way we consume information. The App Store is what made it all possible. Now that regular Joes of the world have an iPhone they need to access information. It’s far too complicated to have one single place to access all of your information so each app has a specific function with the idea that it does one thing and does that one thing really well. If you want to check the weather you don’t Google it, now you tap on your weather app of choice and you get exactly what you’re looking for, weather where you are right now. It’s like magic. Tap an app and boom you have exactly what you need in that moment. It reinforces what Apple is selling and Apple doesn’t have to do a thing. You now feel cool tapping on your app and getting the information you want relevant to you in the moment you need it.

If a developer released an app early in the existence of the App Store they had a chance of pulling down a bunch of downloads and making some good money. Now there are more and more apps each with their own value proposition. What is the best app? How can you get the exact information you want when you want it? What are the reasons one app succeeds over another app?

I believe the same pattern Apple used to launch the iPhone and hit a home run is the same pattern a developer must take to succeed in the App Store. Sell and idea or an image. Don’t sell what an app does but how it makes you feel. There are several apps that have done this beautifully. Instagram has done this. They “sell” their app by helping you feel like you’ve created beautiful photograph out of something seemingly normal. There are lots of applications that have photo filters and can dowhat Instagram does but no one has been able to make you feel like Instagram does.

With the medium available in the iPhone how do you make consumersfeel things? I believe it is done with well designed applications. A good design can evoke feelings. Google+ has a clean and simple design, many believe superior to Facebook’s design, and has caused people to feel emotion towards the product. Design can powerfully effect emotions and can be make or break when it comes to hitting a home run like Apple did with the iPhone. All of Apple’s native applications are well designed and intuitive.

A well designed application is not enough to hit it out of the park. Value needs to be provided to the consumer. When you open an application what do you expect? If you open an application and it’s pretty and unusable you’ll never open it again. Those apps that have success are those that provide value and reinforce the feeling they are selling. Instagram opens up to the feed. You can be inspired by other people’s photos and be encouraged to continue to take your own photos and create more works of art.

If you want to set yourself apart from the rest of the crowd in terms of mobile applications. Create an app that is beautiful, sexy even, that is simple to use and reinforces what you’re “selling”. Hopefully you’re “selling” a feeling or an idea that empowers and inspires.

I’m teaching a seminary class every week day morning at 6 am and I need to be prepare to teach the kids something each day. Needless to say this takes some time and has slowed down my study of Objective C programming. I still am itching to learn and am trying real hard to squeeze in a little reading time between family, work and church responsibilities.

Here is what I understand about the most recent things I’ve read about.

Encapsulation:

The idea behind encapsulation is that you “encapsulate” something in order to hide the “insides” from everything that will interact with it. An example would be a . A normal person can browse the Internet, write on a blog or post to their favorite social network but they most likely don’t understand the inner workings of a smart phone. The “insides” are encapsulated from everything that it interacts with. Whether or not the body of the smart phone changes, the behavior of the smart phone is the same. A person with fat fingers or tiny skinny fingers can operate a smart phone just the same. Encapsulation allows different parts to be swapped out or changed and leave the the behavior the same.

To continue the example of a smart phone, the phone can be updated with a new top of the line camera and the software is able to know it’s a camera (it doesn’t know or care what kind) and operate the standard function of a camera. Take a picture. Encapsulation makes it easier to expand or improve upon an application. Each “capsule” has it’s own function.

Polymorphism:

Polymorphism is about adding to or improving upon an already created object. An electric razor can serve as our example in this case. The object is the razor and we know that pushing the button will turn on the blades and running it across our face will cut the whiskers on our face (for those of us who are men). This is how all electric razors work. Some electric razors have additional features that may improve upon the object of a razor. For example some razors have a gel that is supposed to act as an after shave and is applied while shaving. Other razors have a self cleaning base station. Others still have special rotating heads.

Objects in programming have certain methods that you have created. A polymorphic object would then be an object with additional methods that add “features” to the object. The object still behaves the same. In the case of the razor, whether or not it has a self cleaning base station or rotating heads, it still cuts the whiskers on your face. This way you can add new features to your program without breaking the whole thing and having to code a new program.

I’ve yet to write a single line of code in Objective C. I’m trying really hard (and it really is hard) to read and come to understand and know the programming principles first so I can be in the proper paradigm when it comes time to sit down and code my own applications. So far I’m grateful. Coming to know encapsulation and polymorphism I think will definitely help me to build sweet and robust applications.