1. Get the right tunes

Whatever music source you use, get in the groove during your workouts. My favorite right now is Pandora radio, since I find variety an excellent motivator when working out.
A good set of Bluetooth headphones is also probably a wise investment, since they prevent cords from getting caught during activity. My favorite right now is the Jabra Sport. Not only does it do audio and voice, but it also does FM so I can tune into the TV audio at the gym.

I also recommend Yurbuds. You send Yurbuds a picture of your ear and they match a product for a near perfect fit. The plastic molding is grippy and stays in your ears even while sweating. They also channel the sound directly into your ear and block out some of the background noise.

2. Track what you eat

Start with small steps tracking what you eat simply by taking a picture. Mealsnap is great for this. Being aware of what you eat and making it a habit is a great place to start.

When you’ve got that habit and want to start counting calories, the Lose It! app is a good choice. While I’m still a big fan of Livestrong’s calorie tracker, the excessive ads and upsells on their website became a turn off. Lose It! is free and has a clean, simple interface. It also can give you reminders if you don’t log meals.

Another key feature of Lose It! is that it can interact with other devices, such as the Withings WiFi Body scale and the Fitbit (more about that later).

3. Track what you do

Eating is only one side of the weight loss equation. How much you burn (or don’t burn) in a given day is the reason why the person next to you eats so much and stays slim, while you just even look at a bagel and gain three pounds. Both Lose It! and Livestrong Calorie Tracker will allow you to enter exercises, but don’t take into account more passive daily activities. While a pedometer will help, why use analog when digital is more fun?

The FitBit tracker ($99) is at heart a pedometer, but with added features. It tracks how many steps you take and uses your basal metabolic rate to determine how many calories you’re burning. The FitBit also uses gamification techniques, such as badge rewards you can tweet and share on Facebook, to keep you motivated. It can also be used as a clock and a stopwatch to track your workout routines.

I also like the fact you can get instant readouts to check your goals with the Fitbit; when you see you’re a few steps short of your daily goal you might decide to take that far away parking spot, or take the stairs instead of the elevator. Best of all, FitBit integrates with Lose It! so that way your activities and food log are shared between the two programs, giving you much more accurate results.

4. Break through the plateau with monitoring

Often, people attempting weight loss will hit a plateau. I faced that simply because my body adapted to the changes in my routine. The way to break through is not to look simply at your level of activity, but also at how hard your body is working.

The new Garmin ANT+ adapter for the iPhone along with the Garmin Fit App is a great way to do that. ANT+ is a widely adopted standard for monitoring devices, and in particular heart monitors. Some trainers have them, or you can purchase them independently. With a heart monitor you can determine exactly how hard your exercises are, and set accurate goals regarding heart rate and calories burned. That digital readout on the treadmill or elliptical is only an estimate, while a heart monitor combined with data you provide it can give you a much more accurate accounting of how hard you’re working.

The Garmin iPhone app keeps data for each session so you can compare. Some days I focus on distance, or pace on others, and always try to keep my heart rate in the zone. As I became more physically fit, I had to push myself harder to keep the same results. Gamification of weight loss through statistics helped me quickly punch through the plateau by changing my workouts.

5. Get a good night’s sleep

Let’s face it, if you don’t get a good night’s sleep, you don’t feel like tracking your food and you don’t feel like working out. Your Mac can help with that.

The free program F.Lux will dim your Mac’s monitor to match sundown and sunrise, thereby giving you visual clues it’s evening. Bright light says “wake up” while gentle reduction in brightness says “it’s time for bed.” I also wrote about how to use parental controls to keep you on task, and force you to stop working at a specified period of time. If you really want to focus yourself, turn off the Internet on your Mac at a scheduled hour.

For tracking your sleep, you can see my round-up of hardware devices here. The FitBit also tracks sleep. You can then use the sleep data to help you focus on why you had a “good” or a “bad” day.You can then modify your eating habits and workout schedule to achieve better sleep results.

You can also use apps like Pzizz to help you feel mor restful. The software generates unique “sound journeys” to help you transition from hectic day to gentle night.

If your sleeping partner doesn’t want to hear these sounds, there’s a solution. First you need some SleepPhones. This soft headband includes a set of integrated speakers and can plug directly into a headphone jack. Then attach a BlueBridge mini-jack RX to the SleepPhones. Now you’ve got an effective wireless solution for nighttime audio that won’t endanger your partner’s rest or your Apple gear.

Got any tips of your own for using your Apple devices to meet your fitness goals? Let us know in the comments.

Disclaimer: This isn’t medical advice, just one Apple enthusiast’s perspective and vendors mentioned provided items for review. Always check with your medical professional before starting an exercise program.

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Apple would like to respond to the questions we have recently received about the gathering and use of location information by our devices.

1. Why is Apple tracking the location of my iPhone?
Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so.

2. Then why is everyone so concerned about this?
Providing mobile users with fast and accurate location information while preserving their security and privacy has raised some very complex technical issues which are hard to communicate in a soundbite. Users are confused, partly because the creators of this new technology (including Apple) have not provided enough education about these issues to date.

3. Why is my iPhone logging my location?
The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple.

4. Is this crowd-sourced database stored on the iPhone?
The entire crowd-sourced database is too big to store on an iPhone, so we download an appropriate subset (cache) onto each iPhone. This cache is protected but not encrypted, and is backed up in iTunes whenever you back up your iPhone. The backup is encrypted or not, depending on the user settings in iTunes. The location data that researchers are seeing on the iPhone is not the past or present location of the iPhone, but rather the locations of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone. We plan to cease backing up this cache in a software update coming soon (see Software Update section below).

5. Can Apple locate me based on my geo-tagged Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
No. This data is sent to Apple in an anonymous and encrypted form. Apple cannot identify the source of this data.

6. People have identified up to a year’s worth of location data being stored on the iPhone. Why does my iPhone need so much data in order to assist it in finding my location today?
This data is not the iPhone’s location data—it is a subset (cache) of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database which is downloaded from Apple into the iPhone to assist the iPhone in rapidly and accurately calculating location. The reason the iPhone stores so much data is a bug we uncovered and plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below). We don’t think the iPhone needs to store more than seven days of this data.

7. When I turn off Location Services, why does my iPhone sometimes continue updating its Wi-Fi and cell tower data from Apple’s crowd-sourced database?
It shouldn’t. This is a bug, which we plan to fix shortly (see Software Update section below).

8. What other location data is Apple collecting from the iPhone besides crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data?
Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database with the goal of providing iPhone users an improved traffic service in the next couple of years.

9. Does Apple currently provide any data collected from iPhones to third parties?
We provide anonymous crash logs from users that have opted in to third-party developers to help them debug their apps. Our iAds advertising system can use location as a factor in targeting ads. Location is not shared with any third party or ad unless the user explicitly approves giving the current location to the current ad (for example, to request the ad locate the Target store nearest them).

10. Does Apple believe that personal information security and privacy are important?
Yes, we strongly do. For example, iPhone was the first to ask users to give their permission for each and every app that wanted to use location. Apple will continue to be one of the leaders in strengthening personal information security and privacy.

Software Update

Sometime in the next few weeks Apple will release a free iOS software update that:

• reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,
• ceases backing up this cache, and
• deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

In the next major iOS software release the cache will also be encrypted on the iPhone.

The “discovery” of the file actually just publicized to a much wider audience what infosec professionals already know, which is that iPhones gather and store device location logs. Nonetheless, the announcement sparked questions from U.S. and international lawmakers, and investigations by the Wall Street Journal  and other media entities.

But as Apple’s answers above indicate, the info appearing on your iPhone isn’t necessarily data gathered by your phone itself at all. It’s a selection of anonymous, crowd-sourced data that provides the location of cell towers in your immediate area. That explains why many users were seeing the odd location pinpoint in locations where they hadn’t been or which appeared to be inaccessible (in the middle of a river, etc.). Of course, the end result is still that your phone provides a rough record of where you’ve been.

Apple does admit that location info shouldn’t continue to be gathered for its crowd-sourced database when you have location services turned off, and promises a fix for that bug. It also promises changes to how the data is stored, gathered, and used in backups that should greatly reduce or eliminate any privacy concerns.

Apple answered at length regarding this issue, which was clearly beginning to become a sore spot for the company and the subject of inquiries by lawmakers. Does the answer Cupertino provided put your doubts and fears to rest?

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Oh the sheer horror of it! I’m feeling uneasy at the very thought of my iPhone getting half inched. At the moment, my strongest defense against thieves seems to be keeping my iPhone within a 1-foot radius at all times.

Beyond simply keeping a keen eye on one’s iPhone, it would be much more appropriate to leverage some of the device’s actual technology in an effort to ensure its safety and, at the very least, assuage the owner’s simmering worry.

Caught You! is the first app to hit the store that has awoken the tiny gadget-loving Bond inside of me: the app utilizes the iPhone’s raft of connectivity features — specifically 3G/Edge and GPS — in a bid to combat theft.

The Honeypot

Once installed, Caught You! masquerades as a standard iPhone app called Bank Details. The idea is that when your phone is pilfered, the thief — unethical and prone to stealing things as they are — will be sifting through your apps, spy Bank Details and decide to load it up in a bid to access your precious savings.

The Bank Details app invites Mr. Thief to enter a pin number. The thing is, there is no pin number, and so while Mr. Thief is excitedly trying various combinations, the app is covertly mailing its location back to you.

It’s an ingenious concept, executed in an efficient way, putting the iPhone’s Q-esque feature-set to potentially good use. And it’s exciting to think you might catch the thieves at their own game, should that fateful day ever come.

Preparing The Ruse

The setup process is simple — it requests your email address — this initial configuration screen will, the app warns, never be seen again. After this, you simply have to close and open the app a few times — each time agreeing that the app is allowed to use your current location — in order to initialize it.

A tip though: the address you use will be the one that future covert messages are sent to, so it’s best to set that to a rarely used email account, certainly not the email account that you have synced to your iPhone’s mail application.

After this quick setup process, the app will never again ask for permission to use your current location. To all intents and purposes it seems like an iPhone app designed for holding various bank details, account numbers and such.

The developer’s instructions don’t mention this, but if you manage to botch the setup process, by entering the wrong email address, simply delete the app and re-install it. Once freshly re-installed, the app is ready to be initialized.

In The Wild

After the setup period, I took to the streets of central London and tested out the Bank Details app several times. I was looking for speed and accuracy, in terms of the app locating me and firing off an email as fast as possible.

While the app’s performance wasn’t perfect, it was admirable — locating me down to the nearest block. The alert email hit my account seconds after opening the app. The message itself containing activation time, latitude and longitude, plus a very handy Google Maps link.

Now there are of course some unmentioned caveats that may not be obvious to the average user. As discussed, the app needs to be initialized before use. In practice, when the app is activated, the iPhone will need to be able to locate itself quickly and it’ll need a data-connection signal in order to fire off the covert email.

Furthermore, standard practice once your mobile phone is stolen is to call your carrier to de-activate the SIM, contact the police to report the crime and call the insurance company. Delaying any of this might mean you’re ineligible for your insurance and will almost certainly give the individual who scampered off with your iPhone more time to rack up the bill.

Summing Up

Caught You! really does work, in so much as it accurately determines your location and consistently fires off emails to your chosen address. However, it’s unclear just how useful this app would really be. Where it shines is in its psychological comfort-value. It really feels good to know that there’s an extra degree of protection for such a valued possession.

Knowing which block, in which neighborhood, your kidnapped iPhone is on may not be so helpful in practice though. Furthermore, is this the kind of information the police could take seriously or act on? And, if not, surely it wouldn’t be advisable to go knocking on doors in a desperate bid to retrieve your stolen goods.

For worried iPhone-owners who fear that their device could be pinched at any moment, Caught You! is a worry-allaying app that you’ll hopefully never have to use. However, for the rest of us, the app’s prime-feature, while impressive, is vastly outweighed by its lack of practicality. As such, I just can’t see this being useful in a real-world iPhone-theft situation.

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Not to mention the advantage for developers. It can be time consuming and aggravating to keep tabs on potential competitors to your own app. There’s nothing more aggravating than releasing an app the day after one with identical functionality, but pricing yours twice as high.

You’re limited to three search terms per email address, and you can manager your terms and change them once you’ve set up your initial search criteria. The first email you receive will include a comprehensive list of all apps currently available in the iTunes store that contain your term, but afterward you’ll only receive an email when a new app is released. One Juicer is a free service.

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Because the theft of a laptop is a great deal less common than a failed hard drive, it can easily be overlooked by Mac users. Fortunately, there are a number of applications which can step in to help you locate a stolen or missing laptop. This article will provide an overview of several competing applications, comparing them on features and price.

MacTrak from GadgetTrak

MacTrak for OS X is heralded as “the most advanced theft recovery solution available for Apple systems”.

The software is activated by logging into your MacTrak.me account and clicking a button to activate tracking. The next time your Mac connects to the Internet the software will activate and start sending you emails with the specific location and network environment of the system, as well as use the camera to take a photo of who is using the system every 30 minutes.

Some of the extra features offered by MacTrak are:

• Wi-Fi Positioning: The ability to accurately pinpoint the location of your Mac through analyzing Wi-Fi networks
• Flickr Integration: Social media at its best. Photos taken every 30 minutes are uploaded to Flickr with location details
• Network Information: It also collects network information to provide to authorities

It is priced at $60 — a one off payment which doesn’t need renewing every year. It’s transferrable between computers.

iAlertU

iAlertU doesn’t take the form of a laptop tracking application, rather aiming to warn you at the point when someone is attempting to run off with your precious Mac. The software is ‘armed’ either through a menu bar button, or via the Apple Remote Control (think similar to a remote control car alarm).

Through the use of either the laptop motion sensor or trackpad/keyboard inputs, iAlertU is able to determine when someone is using or moving your laptop without permission. An audible alarm is sounded — it makes quite a racket — and a photo is taken using the iSight camera before being emailed to a pre-defined address. The alarm will continue to sound even after the laptop has closed, making a silent escape fairly difficult!

The problem with this software is that once your laptop is gone, the software doesn’t include any tracking facilities. The upside is that iAlertU is completely free.

Adeona

Adeona is an open source application and doesn’t rely on a proprietary, central service. Very strong encryption is used for storing and sending location information, and emphasis in placed on ensuring that you are the only person able to track the laptop (which is good, as it would be somewhat disconcerting if someone else was tracking your every move).

Three features are pushed as the main reasons to use Adeona:

• Private: Adeona uses state-of-the-art cryptographic mechanisms to ensure that the owner is the only party that can use the system to reveal the locations visited by a device.
• Reliable: Adeona uses a community-based remote storage facility, ensuring retrievability of recent location updates.
• Open source and free: A big advantage over more expensive competing applications

As with other competitors, the OS X version has the ability to take photos using the built in iSight camera. Location information is stored at OpenDHT, and remains accessible for one week after capture. The information sent includes the internal IP address, external IP address, nearby routers, a photo and the wireless access point name.

As the software is completely free, it’s worth taking a look at.

LoJack

The final piece of software to be considered is LoJack. While possibly having the best name of the bunch, it also offers a good range of functionality. They also claim that LoJack is able to recover 3 out of 4 laptops stolen with the software installed. Impressive!

The premium version is priced the same as MacTrak, at $60, but this is a yearly rather than one-off cost. The difference here is that, rather than just offering a software service, LoJack also has a dedicated theft recovery team who will assist in tracking down your stolen machine. It is staffed by former police officers and security professionals and carries a private investigation agency license.

Other services included are ‘data delete’ — a tool to remotely wipe your laptop — and a $1000 service guarantee if they’re unable to track down your laptop (with a few conditions). These extra two features are included in the $60 package, but are not with the cheaper, $40 standard edition.

While this doesn’t apply to OS X, it’s worth noting that LoJack has an agreement with several laptop manufacturers to build their software into the compute BIOS, ensuring that it survives a re-install of the operating system.

Conclusion

Many people do not use a security service/software package for their laptop and may simply extend their house insurance to cover a loss or theft. If you would like to be able to locate a missing Mac, along with potentially catching those responsible, using software such as LoJack or MacTrak would certainly be advisable. They offer a great range of services and have an impressive track record. $60 is not a great deal to pay for the peace of mind and added security.

Both the free iAlertU and Adeona are great tools, but aren’t backed up with quite the same support and service network as the commercial software.

Do you use a piece of security software, or do you think it’s unnecessary caution? I’d be interested to hear your opinion.

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The iPhone is consistently being used in other areas besides simple phone calling and messaging.

Web-based health and fitness tracking website, Gyminee, has adapted their web application’s interface to work perfectly with the iPhone.

Now when you go to the gym you can take your iPhone with you to help keep track of your work out along with some other snazzy features:

• Exercise demonstration – Watch short videos that cover how to do certain excercises
• Weigh-ins – Quickly enter your weight for the application to track
• Cardio Progress – Record details such as distance, time, and calories burned
• Excercise Library – If you’re getting bored with the same exercises, fire up the Exercise Library to access a slew of new things to try out

Right now Gyminee is in a private beta but is constantly adding new users and will be opening up for the public soon.

Andy from Gyminee was kind enough to give me 10 30 invites to hand out to folks, so if you would like an invite in to the private beta just let me know in the comments area. The first 10 30 people to respond that they want one will get one.

UPDATE: Andy from Gyminee is hooking us up even more. We now have a total of 30 invites to hand out. :)

UPDATE: I’m now officially out of invites. Each person that got one of the invites will also have their own invites to give out (I think they’ll have 5 or 10)…so if you got an invite feel free to post in the comments about sending more to others here.

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