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.

Apple launches iCloud 4 for Windows, but still no access to iCloud Drive for Mac!

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Yes, Apple has released iCloud version 4 for Windows, which allows access to the new iCloud Drive. iCloud Drive will let you actually see a file system on iCloud and let you access documents from other apps, instead of having every app in it’s own little world.

You can activate it when you install iOS 8 on any of your devices, but if you do you lose access to iCloud from your Mac, but no longer from Windows! I know this will be integrated with Mac OS Yosemite, but if they can so easily add it to Windows, they could add it to Mavericks, especially since it is on in iOS 8!

This is just like Apple releasing a plug in for windows to sync iCloud bookmarks with Chrome and Firefox and Internet Explorer, but not giving the same thing for Mac! I know there is no Safari for Windows anymore, but many Mac users hate Safari on Mac and use Chrome or Firefox, so this would be very useful. Especially since always have issues with X-Marks messing up my Safari bookmarks (or at least causing the iCloud version of bookmarks to get messed up).

Come Apple lets see iCloud Drive and iCloud Bookmarks for Mavericks right now!

The Apple Watch has been Announced along with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus

Apple has announced the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, the bigger and biggest versions and with more storage coming out September 19th (with iOS 8 on September 18th), moving the iPhone 5S to the low end, and the iPhone 5C 8 GB for Free! Love the 1080 diplay on the big one, but think it is going to be way too big. Apple Pay sounds great, but I won’t have a new iPhone for a while, so I am excited it works with the Apple Watch.

And even more exciting is the Apple Watch. As a Pebble and FitBit user I am very excited. It has a digital crown to help navigate without covering the display. As well as the inductive charging to leave this waterproof (my biggest FitBit complaint). And I love the changeable watch bands! And 2 Watch sizes and 3 types, the Watch in Stainless, The Sport in stronger aluminum or the Watch Edition in gold for the high end. And having siri on watch is pretty cool.

I am most excited for fitness and workout apps. Actually the workout seems more exciting, as it does your specific workouts, vs just overall daily activity. The integration with healthkit will be great though, especially if it also works with fitbit or other health trackers, so you can see your friends on other devices (as I love seeing how my mom does on fitbit, which is usually much better than me). And having the heartbeat monitor is also very exciting.

And Apple TV control is very cool, since it will be on your wrist already.

Expensive though at $349 to start in early 2015.

•••

Too bad apple screwed up the stream so much! Couldn’t watch it on my Apple TV, and it started with Chinese translation overlayed, and it keeps stopping and starting! Bad job Apple.

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.

The BBC has adopted Final Cut Pro X for News Gathering

FCP.CO has the story. And Big news for Apple and Final Cut Pro X to have moved the entire BBC News Pipeline to Final Cut Pro X.

Still pretty surprising to me, as I know Final Cut Pro X has really grown as a program, but things like Adobe Anywhere seem perfect for news, as you can edit remotely without having the media locally, which seems huge for news organizations, but I guess they like the Speed and Power of FCP X.

I still don’t like it, mainly because of it’s timeline, because I do graphics heavy shows and I like to have my timeline very organized so things are easy to swap out or turn on and off with ease, but it isn’t like you are going back and doing different versions of pieces for news, so the organization might not be quite as important for that.

Larry Jordan on why Final Cut Pro 7 editors should consider Adobe Premiere Pro CC and some of my thoughts

Larry Jordan has a very informative and in depth article on why Final Cut Pro 7 Editors should consider Premiere Pro.

I long ago made the switch on my personal system, and am starting to see companies move away from Final Cut Pro 7.

I know that Trailer Park made the move fully to AVID Media Composer for all of it’s bays, but they have graphics departments, so you basically are only cutting graphics into your edit there. And I have heard rumored that it is the studios forcing many companies to move to AVID. I actually wonder if they are getting kickbacks or if it is just older people more familiar with AVID? It is a rock solid system, but it seems so dated compared to Premiere Pro which I would say is a much more modern editing software.

As for Direct Response Beach Body made the move to Premiere Pro, which to me only makes sense for Graphics Heavy projects. Especially with a fast video card.

An argument against Xeon Processors, QuickSync and H.264 Compression

Mac Performance Guide has a new test showing a MacBook Pro vs a MacPro doing h.264 encoding. The MacPro has a consumer CPU which has QuickSync. Now you have to do specific encoder settings to get this result, but it clearly shows the MacPro being thoroughly beat by the MacBookPro!

It is pretty idiotic that Intel would actual have better features in their consumer chips than their much more expensive professional Xeon chips! Really for most uses the Xeon is really best because you can have more cores and you can have dual processors, but since you can get higher core i7 chips now, maybe a hackintosh with a Core i7 would be better in many circumstances!

Apple kills Aperture, really getting out of Pro Apps

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The Loop has the story.
Since iPhoto is being replaced with Photos in Yosemite, they are killing Aperture. Looks like Adobe Lightroom (always the better program) is the only solution, but it loses the great integration that iPhoto had with Aperture.
Seems pros have less to trust in Apple. Is Logic next to go? Will Apple kill FCP X after that? I wouldn’t mind that, but for a company that has killed so many great Pro Apps, they are making less trust for Pro users. They already killed Shake and Final Cut Pro 7. What is next?
I love Apple computers and OS X, but I don’t trust them. The new MacPro is powerful, but not expandable enough. Are they pushing pros to Windows? Or do they want us to make Hackintoshes?

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!!!!