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RFLKT and Runmeter: It's basically Pebble for your bike
People love the idea of the Pebble watch. It's an iOS-compatible display that sits on your wrist, so your iPhone can stay in your backpack, purse, or pocket. It's a great way to keep light track of your notifications, and what's going on in your life. It is, however, not a particularly good match to bike riding, where constantly checking your watch for fine detail might end up with a bad case of road rash, small screaming children who you just hit as you checked your inbox, or even the less dramatic wobblewobbleohdear. For years, bikers have used small handle-bar mounted computer systems to keep track of their speed, cadence, heart rates, and distance -- among other OCD-friendly metrics. In the more recent past, vendors have produced iPhone mounts, so you can watch all this data directly as you bike. This also has several negative side effects. First, keeping the screen on and well lit kills your battery quicker than Steve Sande goes through nachos at a Rockies game. Second, when your bike goes down, your iPhone goes crash, and there are few insurance policies generous enough to cover the case of "Oh, I stuck my multi-hundred-dollar-phone onto my bike handlebars" with good humor. Enter the Wahoo RFLKT. It's a Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE) display that mounts to your bike and keeps your iPhone out of the way. It offers a way for your favorite apps to keep you supplied with data while you ride. Tuck your phone in your sleeve, your back pocket, or your pannier, and you're ready to go. I assumed the RFLKT would blow my cheap Avenir bike system out of the water. Turns out the reality is much more nuanced. Let me start with the hardware. The RFLKT is about a quarter of the size of an iPhone 5, so it's about double or more the size of most bike computers. It can be mounted to stem or handlebars. It has a low-energy screen, runs off a coin battery and in theory can be removed from that mount every six months or so to change that battery. (In practice, I completely stripped the pop-out section and could not, for the life of me, get that darned thing off my bike. I basically ended up destroying the back, using the manufacturer-supplied metal pry bar.) I first ran the RFLKT using the free Wahoo-supplied app. In my preliminary outing, I quickly realized how much I wanted to go back to my standard exercise app of choice, Runmeter. That's because of several things. First, none of the output selections really appealed to me. I like to see current speed, max speed, elapsed time, current time and I couldn't get that on one screen. Second, the app kept making rookie mistakes -- and I knew they were rookie mistakes because I've written GPS apps. These are things that Abvio's Runmeter has long long since figured out and fixed. By rookie mistake, let me give you an example: max speed. When working with GPS, you often lose sync. The quality of the data you receive can vary all over the place, from accuracy within miles to within tens of meters. You have to keep this in mind as you calculate the current speed. When you bike, you earn your max speed. You "walk" that bike up the big hill using your granny gear and you soar down like an eagle. (In my case, that eagle is fat, slow, and middle aged, but it's still an eagle, damnit.) Your max speed should reflect that. With the Wahoo software, I was doing 43 MPH while trudging along on the flat. I may be a persistent cyclist, but I am not a good one and there's no way I live in Lance Armstrong territory, even in my most addled cold medicine dreams. While Wahoo was delivering the right hardware, it wasn't giving me what I needed in terms of software. The second I returned from my initial test ride, I started googling to see if I could use Runmeter with the hardware. Fortunately, I was within days of Runmeter's releasing their new RFLKT support. I contacted Abvio and they set me up with their latest version, complete with RFLKT integration. This is just a $4.99 in-app purchase for Runmeter Pro (which is what I use), Cyclemeter, and Walkmeter owners. I should warn you that Runmeter is clearly an app written by engineers instead of artists, but it's one that has served me well for years and one I'm wildly enthusiastic about. It does everything I need in terms of tracking my exercise. With RFLKT, it let me select one of about a dozen pre-designed templates and customize it to show exactly the statistics I wanted to see. Sure, the menus to do this tweaking were a bit antidiluvian, but if you're a tech geek to start off with, you shouldn't have too much trouble picking and customizing one of the choices shown here. I had to reset the RFLKT (there are instructions right inside the settings of Runmeter on how to do this), enable Bluetooth Sensors, and upload my custom screens. It wasn't particularly painful, although it did take some time to figure my way through the menus. Using a RFLKT display isn't exactly like using a bike computer. You gain some things, you lose others. Take speed for example. Because of the GPS sync problem, your Runmeter speed will always lag unless you use an external sensor. That means you can be flying down that mountain and still register 7.7 MPH for a while. For speed and distance measures to be accurate, they need a wider range of sampling time. Side by side, my Avenir bike computer knew my speed changes as they happened. I found myself referring to that much more often for MPH versus the RFLKT monitor. You can, however, integrate other sensors into the Runmeter/RFLKT experience to fix that. If the Runmeter app can integrate with the sensor (they have posted a list here), you can add it to the RFLKT display -- this includes digital speed and cadence from Garmin and Bontrager, negating any issues of GPS sampling. You can also add heart monitors, giving you some extra performance feedback. Regardless of speed, the distance portion of the solution was wicked accurate. There's no need to measure your tire or estimate its pressure and multiply the circumference to calculate how far you've gone. Need to go 3.7 miles? The RFLKT/Runmeter combination gets exactly that. It's brilliant. Other measures like date and time and max speed are also super-precise. I have no intention of buying new sensors so I found that I liked having both displays -- traditional and RFLKT on my bike, even though I had to sacrifice one of my night-riding lights to fit it there. I have small girlygirl handlebars, which don't offer a lot of real estate. I also had to pad the RFLKT with not one but THREE layers to get it to fit the bar and stay firmly mounted. Speaking of displays, I really do wish the RFLKT offered a lip the way my Avenir does, giving a little shade and offering glare protection. The RFLKT is pretty obviously a 1st gen device, and I expect it to evolve to be a little cleaner, and less boxy over time, but even as is, I really fell in love with it. On Monday, I had a chance to sit down and talk with Steve Kusmer of Abvio, the man behind Runmeter to talk about RFLKT, its technology and how the app has integrated itself with display. The relationship is longstanding. "Wahoo has provided the technology we've used for over two years to access Bluetooth devices. With the RFLKT, Wahoo provided the hardware, a wonderful design point, and we built from there. We've been demoing the RFLKT since September and just now released support in our software." The RFLKT took a lot of its design influence from the Palm Pilot. "It had to run on a simple battery and last forever. The RFLKT works with a coin cell battery, can be alive for months if not a year, and powers down on idle, when nothing is being used. Plus, it uses BTLE with minimal bandwidth. It has buttons and it's programmable. It's very simple but effective." Kusmer talked about integrating the device into riding. "Once I put the RFLKT on my bike, it becomes a different experience. It's providing a lot of value that enhances my experience." Making Runmeter work with the device helped leverage the app's underlying features. "We've been spent more than four years deployed -- started back in 2008, and we have spent a lot of time on the underlying data architecture for storing and displaying application data. It's very hard to do this right. One spike of data and your Max Speed is toast. We went through a year or more of iterations on trying to figure out the heuristic so bad GPS data doesn't whack your data. "We love RFLKT because we could take our data architecture and match up with anything you want to do on RFLKT. We can display 148 different statistics -- from your current speed to your previous interval average heart rate --- all readily accessible during your rides on the RFLKT." What you get in the end is a terrific combination of software (from Abvio) and hardware (from Wahoo) and one that I was really happy using. You can pick up a RFLKT for $130 at Wahoo. Runmeter is free with a $4.99 in-app upgrade to Pro, and another $4.99 in-app upgrade for RFLKT support. Cyclemeter and Walkmeter are $4.99 each.
Runmeter takes to the cloud with version 9, boasts one million paid users
Runmeter is my personal favorite running app -- it's a great, in-depth way to track your runs, or any other cardio exercise you might do. Today, the company behind it, Abvio, announced Runmeter version 9, which will add both iPad support and support for iCloud, meaning that user data will now be stored on Apple's backup service. Runmeter's latest version will also support Facebook's new Open Graph, and workouts can be shared via the company's website as well. And finally, the app adds lots of support for power meters, which cyclists can use to track their workouts and then share that information with others as well. It sounds like a great update to a fine app, and it should be available on the App Store soon. Runmeter (or Cyclemeter or Walkmeter, which are all essentially the same app, though are targeted at different types of exercises) is available on the App Store for $4.99 right now, and the update will be free to current users. In addition to revealing the update, Abvio also shared that Runmeter has reached a full million paid users, which makes Runmeter one of the most popular apps on the App Store, in the health and fitness category, or anywhere else. Abvio also usually makes an appearance at Macworld every year, so we'll look forward to chatting with them about Runmeter when that show starts in San Francisco next week. Stay tuned!
Daily iPhone App: 5K Runmeter impresses with options and functionality
We did make a mention of the 5K training version of Runmeter when it first arrived on the App Store a little while ago, but it's worth yet another mention, I think, if only because this is the best running app I've ever used. 5K Runmeter, as it's called on my iPhone's home screen, offers all of the functionality of the standard Runmeter app (and that's quite a bit), with the addition of full training plans for 5K, 10K, half-marathon and even marathon runs. I've been using it for the last 11 weeks to train for my very first half-marathon next month, and I've been nothing but impressed at how well this app works to provide feedback, motivation and running insight for those who like to beat feet. You'd have to pick up the app and look through it to see just how much functionality there is here, but as an example, here's how I use it. I am on the half-marathon plan, so every week on any given day, the app has a set distance or speed run for me to do, and I simply press start and then follow the app's directions in my headset as I run. I've set up the app so that I get split times and pace information through voice every mile, and I just recently also set up the app to let me know when I hit every 30 minutes (as my runs have gotten longer, it's nice to have that perspective injected into the music I listen to as I go). The app of course tracks my GPS movement as I run (and that map can be exported out into email or shared to Facebook or Twitter if I want), and because I've put my pertinent fitness info into the app, I also get full calories spent, pace, timing and distance information when I'm done. In short, this is an excellent all-in-one way to monitor and track your running, and while the app is compatible with any number of fitness sensors, I haven't even needed those. If you're an expert runner, you can take advantage of interval training or even track your shoe usage (and like the standard Runmeter, the app even works for other exercise like biking). And if you're a beginner runner, you can't go wrong with the Couch to 5k plan -- it's exactly how I started running as a couch potato a few years ago, and ended up losing almost half my body weight and finding a new and exceptionally healthy passion. I did that just by following the plan on a treadmill, but the Runmeter app will guide you through that very same plan. In short, no matter what your level of running experience, 5K Runmeter is the best running solution I've seen. I can't recommend it highly enough.
Abvio Runmeter 5K enters Couch to 5K arena
I've been using Runmeter GPS for years as my primary walking and biking tracking tool. Today, Abvio announced its new 5K to Marathon Runmeter GPS (US$2.99), which adds run/walk training to this popular app. Training options include 5K, 10K, half-marathon, and full-marathon plans. The app is a build-on to the existing Runmeter GPS app, and will offer all the same features shipped in the original Runmeter. Your three dollars buys you all that plus the 5K training on top. The 5K version installs as a new app. Will data transfer? An Abvio spokesperson stated, "You could transfer your database between apps, it's not a limitation, it's just that you don't need to. Once you have one of our apps, you don't need another." Runmeter stores all your workout data, plus it can interface with biometric sensors. Audio alerts and announcements help you pace yourself; sharing options let you send your workout info to friends, and import tools allow you to bring in routes. If you're looking to get off the couch and get on the track, give the new Runmeter a go.
Macworld | iWorld 2012: Abvio reveals new features for Runmeter 7.0
There are a lot of Runmeter users on the TUAW staff, and when Abvio invited us to take a look at the upcoming Runmeter 7.0 (along with Cyclemeter and Walkmeter, which are the same app geared toward different users) at Macworld | iWorld 2012, we gladly took the chance to see what's in store. The app update, coming later this quarter, has an updated stopwatch that shows more than 150 data items, a new history navigation, social media interaction and more. My favorite feature was the ability to use the remote on Apple headphones to stop and start the app as needed. It's great for pausing at red lights or to take a quick break. CEO Steve Kusmer also showed me the Wahoo Fitness Blue HR Heart Rate Strap, which the app now supports for capturing heart rate data via Bluetooth. Check out the video below to see Kusmer demonstrate the new features. Runmeter is $4.99 in the App Store.
Why can't navigation apps be fun?
With all the holidays, many of us TUAWians spent more time on the road over the past few weeks than we normally do. And when it comes to tech-savvy bloggers, more time on the road means more time with navigation apps. And more time with navigation apps made us ever more aware of our lingering frustrations with the most popular apps. Sure Navigon and TomTom will get us from here to there, but they represent not just the lower end of design possibility, but the most Windows NT-like user experience. (We say that as an insult. We're Apple bloggers.) We're talking Soviet-era usability. On a platform that sports such shining examples of beauty and design, including Omni's suite of tools, Apple's brilliant in-house offerings, and so forth, why does utilitarian nonsense dominate the navigation market? So we huddled around the 8-bit fire in the center of the TUAW backchannel chat room (we're retro like that) and brainstormed about what we wanted to see nav apps evolve to, and what better apps are out there already. Steve Sande highly recommended the new Waze GPS & Traffic app. Powered by live community-sourced traffic data, it provides turn-by-turn guidance as you drive as well as social integration for carpooling and checking in. The app passively allows you to contribute traffic and road data, just by leaving it open as you drive. You can also share road reports about accidents and speed traps, although we recommend that you only do so as a passenger or when stopped at traffic lights. Some of us focused more on data. I personally felt that we needed more features like those currently available in popular running apps. Take Runmeter, which is my sports-tracking app of choice these days. It logs all your stats for walks, runs, bike rides, and more. You can monitor your efficiency, discover how long you were stopped, how far you went, how much you improved. In other words, it provides a full suite of analysis for after you've arrived at your destination. That's the kind of data I'd want to see integrated into turn-by-turn navigation apps. For each trip, I'd love to know how many miles I went, how efficient my gas usage was, what my high speed was, compare stretches to past runs of the same route, and so forth. I contacted Abvio, makers of Runmeter, to see whether this was an area they might eventually explore. A company spokesperson politely responded that "Turn by turn isn't something on [our] immediate road map, but [we] do get requests for it on occasion." And what about weather? Why don't current navigation apps offer real-time weather updates displayed on the route? With some apps, like Navigon, you can get a destination forecast, but as you're driving it's far more important that you know about the weather where you are, or when you're just about to be there. Road Trip Weather, which offers on-route weather updates, was our recent daily iPhone app. It is not, however a navigation app itself. On a side note, it would also be great if we could automatically pause navigation. Nothing more embarrassing than having your pocket announce that you should turn right in 1.5 miles -- as you're sitting at a table at Burger King. The final item on our wishlist was more game-like challenges for real-life chores. We'd love to see navigation apps integrate more tightly with GTD apps, schedules, and calendars, but do so in a way that's fun and light. Why not unlock achievements or earn points when stopping by the market, or remembering the dentist appointment? After all, a lot of our day in the modern world centers around travel. Shouldn't navigation apps better integrate with that? Sure, we'd probably skip @baobab68's suggestion of achievements like "15 Stop Lights Missed" or "Avoided Slow School Bus", or @andyflisher's hint that users should be able to finish the game despite no mirrors, bumpers, or windscreen. But why shouldn't navigation apps be more like games, with charts, records, scores, check-ins, and achievements? How would you like to see navigation apps evolve? Did we miss your favorite app? Drop a note into the comments and let us know where you see nav apps going in the future.
Enter to run away with a free copy of Runmeter from TUAW
I just wrote about Runmeter after meeting creator Steve Kusmer at Macworld 2011 a little while back, and as a runner myself, I've used it a couple of times to track and monitor my performance during and after runs. It's very feature-rich, even compared to other running apps on the App Store, with plenty of connections to social media and great UI features. The recent 5.0 update brought in a ton of new features, and the latest update, 5.0.1, smoothed those over with some extra options, performance updates and bug fixes. Runmeter is US$4.99 on the App Store, but if you're a runner who hasn't picked it up yet, it's your lucky day. We're giving 10 copies away to lucky readers. Just enter a comment below telling us your favorite time of day to go running, and we'll choose 10 comments at random to get a promo code for the app. One note: The app sells special voices for in-app purchase, and this code doesn't include those. But you don't need them -- they're just extra add-ons that provide a little more text-to-speech functionality. Here are the rules: Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older. To enter leave a comment on this post letting us know your favorite time of day to run. The comment must be left before Tuesday, February 29, 11:59 PM Eastern Daylight Time. You may enter only once. Ten winners will be selected in a random drawing. Prize: App Store promo code for Runmeter (US$4.99 value). Click Here for complete Official Rules. Good luck and good running to everyone who enters!
Macworld Expo 2011: Runmeter runs on
There are a lot of running apps available on the App Store, but Runmeter is a favorite of ours. It's incredibly full featured, and at US$4.99, it's also one of the most generously priced apps of this type. We got to meet up with Abvio CEO Steve Kusmer, a former executive who's translated his business knowledge and passion for running into a strong fitness app business, to talk about version 5 of Runmeter (already submitted and due out soon) and what's in store for Runmeter and the other Abvio titles. The app has been really popular so far, and the new version makes an already impressive list of features even longer. Voices is probably one of the biggest new features; the app now has a number of different text-to-speech voices that will read out almost anything to you as you run, from your times to average speed or distance. There are even social "cheers" -- if you post your run to Facebook or Twitter and get a comment back, the app will read it out to you live. The app will also connect up to DailyMile; while Kusmer says he wants to keep all of your running data on the phone, users who want a more cloud-based experience will be able to do so with that service. You can also email your runs out in real time now. Kusmer said the feature was often used to keep friends and family updated on your run as you go, but the email has another use: each email sent out contains a .GPX file that has a map and even timing data that can be imported back into Runmeter, meaning you can send and share any of your runs with anyone else. While you're running, you can not only see that file data (and race against that run), you are also tracked against your best, average and worst runs for a course.
Run app updates: News on the Nike+, Runkeeper, and Runmeter fronts
I admit it. I've always thought that the Nike+ shoe sensor thing was kind of lame. Even though I actually do own the right shoes, I never thought it worth while to pick up the optional pedometer sensor just so I could take advantage of the built-in iPhone feature. I know that there are people out there who really loved using the Nike+ features on their iPhone but I've much preferred using other tracking apps and skipping the shoe tie-in. Now, several years after GPS debuted on the iPhone 3G, Nike has finally made the move to shoe-less positioning. For $1.99, you can pick up a copy of Nike+ GPS. The reviews on the iTunes site have been generally positive, but it's clear that this is a slick yet limited application.
Road tested: Runkeeper, Runmeter, 321Run and Trailguru
Exercise apps are a highly personal decision. That's because there are so many ways apps can match -- or impede -- your style. Take Trailguru, for example. I've been using it for quite some time, happy with many little touches the application brings to the table. It's an application written by a person who obviously loves hiking and biking, and understands what tools need to be provided for the user. Unfortunately creator Tim Park has not updated Trailguru since January 2009, and its age is starting to show. White it's a free application, Trailguru could easily have been monetized. It offers a dedicated website/wiki, excellent onboard algorithms, and a highly usable (albeit ugly as sin) interface.
Hands-on with Runmeter
New year, new you, and there are a host of location-based iPhone apps that can help you look a bit more lithe at Point B than you did at Point A. Runmeter [iTunes link] is one of them. Like almost all apps in its genre (Nike+ and RunKeeper Pro [iTunes link]), Runmeter's main purpose is to track the distance you run and provides you such niceties like your pace and time. It doesn't get any simpler than that. However, Runmeter is also equipped with some features that separate it from the crowd. While there exists a host of location-based running apps on the iPhone, in my experience RunKeeper Pro serves as the benchmark GPS-based running app on the iPhone. It strikes a nice balance between ease-of-use for those who just want to get out and run while also providing some advanced features for the more training-oriented runner. The most obvious difference between Runmeter and RunKeeper Pro is price. At USD $4.99, Runmeter's price is half that of RunKeeper Pro. But this lower price doesn't necessarily translate into a lower quality product. Rather, Runmeter just has a different focus. Compared to RunKeeper Pro, Runmeter is less interval-training focused. Rather than getting your splits at a set distance, or your distance given a specified time interval, Runmeter allows you to race against yourself and tells you if you were faster this time around. And if your overall run was faster or slower, it's indicated as such within the app's built-in calendar. Another differentiating feature is customized announcements. In other words, if you just want to hear your elevation and pace, you can do that. And if you want to hear your competitor time, pace, remaining time and calories, you can do that as well. And you can arrange them in whichever order you want to hear them. But my favorite feature in Runmeter is its integration with clicker-enabled iPhone earbuds. You can squeeze the clicker to trigger announcements, like the aforementioned customized arrangement. One thing that I like about running with the Nike+ kit on the iPod nano is that, whether it's in your pocket or strapped via an armband, you can feel your way to the center button and press it to get your distance, pace, and time. However, Runmeter is not without its quirks and annoyances. In particular, the app doesn't announce the beginning of a run. On most running apps I've used, starting a run will initiate a voice telling you that you're good to go -- something along the lines of "beginning run" or "activity started." But on Runmeter, there is no such audio cue or feedback; you have to look at the screen to see if it's tracking you. At its $4.99 price, Runmeter will likely get the attention of those who are a bit hesitant toward RunKeeper Pro because of its $9.99 price tag. Whether or not Runmeter is the right running app for you, however, will depend on the way you train. If you like to race against yourself and monitor your improvements on a specified course, then Runmeter will likely serve as a better option. For the more interval-minded (be it time or distance), however, I find RunKeeper Pro a better option.
Discover new running trails with the WalkJogRun app
There are many apps (like RunKeeper and RunMeter) that track where and how much you run, but not many to help you discover new places to run. Luckily, there's the WalkJogRun app [iTunes link] ($.99US), which gives you the ability to navigate through over 500,000 user-submitted map-based running trails. The iPhone app shares much in common with its desktop browser counterpart. Like WalkJogRun.net, the WalkJogRun app allows you to view specific running trails that you've created, as well as those created by others specific to a certain address, city or landmark (i.e., Golden Gate Bridge, MGM Grand Hotel, etc.). But iPhone technologies provide new layers of functionality and interaction lacking on the site, such as geolocation for finding nearby running routes, which I find very useful in areas I'm not familiar with, and the niceties that come with navigating a map with the iPhone's multitouch display. Nonetheless, the WalkJogRun app could use some improving. The most needed improvement is the ability to save or bookmark a running trail, which one can do via WalkJogRun.net but not on the iPhone app. My workaround for this is to take screenshots of running trails that I like in the event that I navigate away from the map and can't remember the name or location of the trail. Another improvement, though more of a "nice to have" than a "must have", is the ability to create a trail on the iPhone. These things aside, at its USD $.99 price tag, the WalkJogRun app serves as an ideal complement to GPS-based iPhone running and biking apps, as well as the Nike+ kit.
