FitBit will not be integrating with Apple HealthKit and it’s Health App

Well it seems that FitBit will not be integrating it’s Fitness data with the newly released Apple Health App via HealthKit.

You can see this very commented post at Fitbit’s Forums, where FitBit gives the following statment:

 Status: Reviewed By Moderator

We do not currently have plans to integrate with HealthKit.

It is an interesting new platform and we will watch as it matures, looking for opportunities to improve the Fitbit experience. At the moment, we’re working on other exciting projects that we think will be valuable to users. The question we want you to keep in mind when providing feedback is: What do you imagine a HealthKit integration would entail and what do you expect to get out of it?
Your voices are being heard. We’re actively reviewing your responses and providing feedback to our product development team.

Now they say they are listening and want to your feedback, but there are already 32 pages of feedback of people wanting this integration, and they do say they have no plans to integrate with HealthKit.

FitBit does have a $49.99 a year premium service called Benchmark to get better info on your fitness data, so they want to make money off of your data, but they already offer free integration with Microsoft’s Health Vault, which negates any argument about having to pay to access your data how you want to.

Health and HealthKit are one of the most exciting new features of the recently released iOS 8. It is a new central repository for your health data, that eventually will even be able to pass information to your doctor if something changes with your health. It is meant to not only work with the new Apple Watch, but with other fitness trackers and devices. And Apple even showed the FitBit app in their presentation, hoping that Fitbit would integrate.

Now I have been a FitBit user from the beginning, with an original, a One and a Force (which I returned because it was giving me a rash) and an Aria for weight, and got a FitBit for my mom as well. So I have been a very good customer. And I have even been saving my refund check for my Force to see what FitBit would be replacing it with, but this makes me think I would be better off putting that money into an Apple Watch.

I have been quite excited by the Apple Watch as it is a Fitness tracker and also a replacement for my Pebble Watch, but the one day battery life and lack of waterproofing has me quite nervous, but the Fitibt Force was not WaterProof and neither is the One.

So maybe it is time to start thinking about moving away from Fitbit. I could sell my One and my Aria and get an Apple Watch and either an iHealth Lite or iHealth Body Analysis Scale (iHealth already has HealthKit intergation from their 4 apps and 9 devices!).

FitBit really needs to get on the ball here or they are going to lose a lot of customers who don’t want to be stuck only within their ecosystem.

Adobe Updated and added to it’s iOS Mobile Apps

Adobe has completely updated it’s line up of Mobile Apps. Including Adobe Premiere Clip for Editing and Adobe Voice for creating animated videos from Lightroom, and Adobe Illustrator Draw and Line apps. And the new Adobe Shape to create custom Vector Shapes.

Very cool. If only their pen and ruler were less than $200. I still wish I had the Wacom tablet, though really it needs a new version, but maybe the Wacom pen would be great.

LastPass for iOS 8 Announced

iOS8_Reveal

LastPass has announced LastPass as a Safari Plug In for iOS 8. So you can access your vault and fill in passwords right from within Safari in iOS 8! AWESOME!

So about my Password Managers question. The $12 a year LastPass will now work within iOS browsers!

Still want to see what SplashiD does, though I am still considering moving everything over to 1Password as I can keep all my passwords away from the cloud that way. Just don’t trust internet security at all anymore, though at least I do use 2 step authentication where I can.

iCloud iOS bookmarks are messed up again

Well it seems to have happened again. My iOS Bookmarks are totally screwed up again, and I can’t seem to get them to clear up.

I will explain my situation again, which has changed slightly. I run Firefox as my primary browser (used to be Chrome, but I am starting to not feel comfortable with Google having dominion over everything I do on the web), but I still use Chrome for some things. To keep my Bookmarks in sync I run Xmarks, and to get my bookmarks on iOS I run Xmarks for Safari, but it doesn’t seem to do the trick.

Even though my bookmarks on my Mac in Safari match my bookmarks in both Firefox and Chrome, this doesn’t seem to make it over to my iOS devices.

In the past I have run Chrome in Windows 8.1 in Parallels. I would download the latest bookmarks with Xmarks, and the Chrome iCloud plug in seemed to overwrite the iCloud bookmarks with clean ones, but this doesn’t seem to be working currently.

I just wish Apple would go back to allowing direct bookmark overwrite via iTunes. They used to allow this, and have gone back to allowing it for Contacts and Calendars, but not for Bookmarks! If they aren’t going to give you settings to overwrite things on iCloud, they need to at least let you just overwrite from your computer!

PLEASE APPLE, LET ME OVERWRITE BOOKMARKS WITH MY COMPUTER! PLEASE!!!!

Macrumors is reporting that the next version of iTunes restores local contact and calendar syncing, and my iCloud Bookmark solution.

MacRumors has the news that iTunes 11.1.6 Beta has returned local iTunes Contact and Calendar sync to your iOS devices. I have railed about this because iCloud syncing is very very broken, especially without the ability to easily overwrite the iCloud information from your computer. Now if only they would add back Bookmark syncing so I could forget about the damn iCloud which seems to constantly screw up my bookmarks! Honestly I have now figured the only solution which seems to get clean bookmarks to my iOS devices. I use x-marks to sync my bookmarks, as I use Chrome as my primary browser with Mozilla as my secondary browser. Since I am not a PC (which has the great iCloud Sync extension for Windows) I have to get my bookmarks into Safari on my mac to be able to sync bookmarks to my iOS devices, so I use X-marks, but while my Safari seems to then have good clean bookmarks, it does not follow that my iCloud bookmarks are at all the same. Instead I seem to end up with many duplicate folders, but most of which are empty in random orders. In order to fix this, I have found that the aforementioned iCloud plug in for Safari only available on PC’s seems to actually overwrite the iCloud bookmarks, which I can’t seem to manage from my Mac. So I boot up Windows 8.1 in Parallels (can also be done in BootCamp) and launch Chrome for PC. Then I download clean bookmarks from Xmarks and wait for iCloud to sync, and that seems to clean up my bookmarks for a little while at least. Why Apple can’t add a control to iCloud to control overwrite, like they used to have for syncing, or like x-marks has I will never know. I mean if there weren’t issues they wouldn’t have brought back local syncing in any for. Lets hope they bring back local syncing of bookmarks soon, so I can forget about the broken iCloud bookmark syncing!!!

iOS 7 Mavericks and Bookmarks!

I just had to get my iPad 3 replaced as the home button was broken, and not only did I lose Gmail Push (as it has been discontinued except for Apps and there is no way to upgrade a normal GMAIL account to apps), but I have also lost all my bookmarks on my iPad as they no longer allow direct syncing from iTunes, you can only get bookmarks from iCloud.

That would be fine if iCloud bookmark syncing worked, especially with LastPass, which I use to sync my Chrome and Firefox bookmarks with Safarl. The problem is that ages ago my iCloud bookmarks became corrupted, and I could never get them to work right again, and now they seem to be empty. As even with iCloud bookmark sync on, I get no bookmarks on my iPad whatsoever! THIS REALLY SUCKS!!

If only apple would allow you to have basic controls over iCloud, like overwrite iCloud with this computers bookmarks (like they used to have), but now it is so dumbed down that my bookmarks are screwed up and I can’t fix them, and I can’t just sync my bookmarks with iTunes like I always did previously!

APPLE YOU HAVE REALLY FUCKED THIS UP! I don’t want to have to go into the Apple Store to try and fix this either, but it might be the only method since there is no phone support. I just want my Bookmarks reset on iCloud. Why can’t I do this?

How crappy is Apple’s new Lightning Adapter

So with the iPhone 5 Apple updated and downgraded it’s connector to the new lightning connector. The good news is it is smaller, and will work in either direction. The bad news is it is the same speed as the old adapter, sends less data, so many old accessories won’t work, and for those that do it requires an adapter at $28 for a direct or $39 for a cable.

Youch! Honestly i would rather have had the old adapter still so all my old devices would work. Especially since Apple said they won’t make docks for the iPhone 5, and i prefer my iPhone and iPods in docks!

Anyone else lament the loss of development of hard drive based music players like the iPod Classic?

Sure I have an iPhone and an iPad, but even with the largest models of their generations and a bunch of apps 64 GB doesn’t leave much room for music. Not only that but I rip all my CD’s at Apple Lossless, which is about half the size of CD quality with no loss of quality. That leaves me with my venerable iPod Classic with 120 GB harddrive (there was once a bigger model, but it is no more). Still not huge, especially with hard drives growing every year, but sans a plethora of apps it can store quite a bit of music. And there is nothing else that matches it’s size. Sure eventually static memory will get larger, but so does app size as screens get better. And don’t even get me started in how much space large photos take up on the new iPad!?!?!

And streaming music doesn’t work for me as long as data plans have caps. And even most unlimited plans are not even close to unlimited! As streaming could be the future, but only if it can be all your songs just as they are in your computer!

I know it will never happen, but i would love a new hard drive based ipod, say 320GB, with an updated interface. It can still be scroll wheel, but playlists needs a fast scroll like artists have! It could store most of my music and mean i can just worry about apps on my iOS devices!

Apple WWDC News

So far there is a new MacBook Air which is faster and faster MacBook Pro 13 and 15″ models and the 15″ gets an NVIDIA GeForce 650M, so say hello to Mercury playback from Adobe, nice.

And a new MacBook Pro, which is super thin, but not like an Air and has a Retina Display. Only .71 inches thick and only 4.46 pounds, lighter than current 13″ MacBook Pro, and it has a 15.4 inch screen, with a 200 ppi pixel density or 5,184,00 pixels! No Optical drive in this model of course. And an updated version of lion with Safari, iMovie, iPhoto made for Retina, as well the pro-apps including Aperature and Final Cut Pro X (yipee fucking do), though being able to see full 1080p in the viewing window is pretty cool, but must take a serious video card! And Photoshop has been updated (or will be soon). Yup it has a GeForce GT 650M with 1 GB of Video Ram. Nice! And up to 768GB of internal flash storage. And up to 7 hours of battery life (that screen has to be a major draw on power). For ports it has SD card, HDMI, USB3 and 2, Magsafe 2, 2 thunderbolt ports and headphone.

It seems the magsafe has been made thinner, nice!

And Firewire 800 and gigabit ethernet adapters for thunderbolt, though I would rather have the ports!

And no word on the 17″ MacBook Pro so it is likely EOL.

Uh Oh, now OS X, does that mean no MacPro. I sure hope not!

Onto Mountain Lion. And 8 new features.

•iCloud built in. With Apps updated for iCloud, so your documents can live in the cloud (hurray can we use Pages docs with iPad and Pages on the Mac? Looks like it ). And a final version of messages for the Mac, which will also send SMS (How does that work, do you pay via your phone?).

•Notification Center, banners are top right (just like Growl) or can slide notification center our from right. And can support from other services like Twitter.

•Dictation to the Mac. Probably need something to replace my old iSight though!

•Sharing, now built in to share to twitter from everywhere, and an SDK for any app to support it.

•New Safari, unified top search and url bar like Chrome. Share tabs across iCloud to mac and iOS, and can see what tabs you have open in what place. And Visual Tab View.

•Power Nap. Keeps Mac up to date while it sleeps, fetching e-mail and keeping track of calenders. Still backup to time capsule, download from app store and automatic software updates, and doesn’t spin up fans and goes easy on battery.

•Airplay mirroring, display your mac onto your TV with an Apple TV and up to 1080 content (how does that work with the new retina display?).

•Game Center makes it to the Mac. Can even play Mac to iOS on certain games.

And Mountain Lion is released next Month for only $19.99! WOW! And that is from Lion and Snow Leopard! And one purchase will do all your personal macs! That rocks!

Now iOS 6. 200 New Features.

•Significant enhancements to Siri, including partnering with Open Table and Yelp. And working with car manufactures to add a siri button to cars! Now that is cool! BMW, GM, Jaguar Mercedes, Honda, Land Rover, Audi, Toyota!

•Integrated Facebook like Twitter before it with public API.

•Phone App enhancements. Can reply with message or add reminder to call back later!

•Do Not distrub, to get no notifications, or allow it to ring for only certain numbers. Or let a second call from someone though.

•Facetime has been enable over cellular. And unifiying phone number and apple iD, so it will work with mac or iPad and the same with iMessage.

•You can upload photos in Safari

•Smart App Banners to let people know of native apps in App Store

•Photo Stream adds sharing and can comment on photos of friends

•Mail adds VIP, really important people, want to be notified, new mailbox, and a flagged mailbox.

•Mail can add photos from compose window.

•Passbook, looks like a replacement for SplashID and 1Password. Also has location based allerts and can load things like your movie ticket on the window. Airline tickets, Fandago Tickets, Store Card from Starbucks, coupons for Target, express hotel check in and all integrated with Lock Screen. Sounds very cool.

•Accessiblity. There is guided access, lets you lock out controls you don’t want kids to be able to access. Single App Mode. Can lock things up so students can’t leave the app to get answers.

•Maps. Yup, rumors were right, they are doing it all themselves, no more Google Maps. What does this mean for traffic? Adding local search. Ah, new traffic view added, shows incidents. All crowd sourced traffic from other iOS phones. Built in turn by turn navigation. With an ETA based on traffic. Integrated with siri and works on lock screen. Siri can give time estimates.

•Flyovers for Maps with 3D photographic models. Maps are all vector based. Can rotate and zoom labels, zoom in far enough buildings appear. And satellite view in 3D. Can change camera angles. Adaptive cinematic camera angles.

•Maps, siri can read out directions and give an eta.

•Maps get an overview at any time and just tap to resume turn by turn directions.

•Mail has per account signatures! Nice!

•Lost Mode where you can send a phone number to that phone and someone who finds it can tap it and call you back.

•iOS 6 will ship this fall and goes to beta developers today.

NO NEW MACPRO! WTF! Either the rumors were wrong or they didn’t bother announcing it.