The Gamification of Fitness, on the iPhone

Since this is Practical iStuff, I don't really talk about games much. However, the concept of gamification, applying gaming techniques for real-world uses, is an interesting one. Using gaming motivators like accumulating points, earning achievements, and "leveling up" are greatly practical when applied to things like fitness. If you are like me, a person for whom exercise can be a tedious, er..."exercise", any additional motivation is good.

I was looking for a workout tracker for my iPhone that worked well for weight-lifting and tried several before discovering Fitocracy, an app that advertises itself as a "fitness social network. I have yet to tap into it's social potential, mostly because no one I know is on it yet, but I have been using it's game-like aspects as a motivator. Scoring points, leveling up, and completing quests help me want to do more. If nothing else, it encourages me to take the time to track my exercises.

The Best Bible for iPhone and iPad...By Far

I've had three Bible apps on my iPhone for quite a while: YouVersion, ESV Bible, and The Blue Letter Bible.  All have had their strengths. YouVersion is great for Bible reading plans and I still use it for that. ESV Bible had page navigation, opting for scrolling instead of a book-like page turning. (I prefer the scrolling for passage placement.) The Blue Letter Bible had a lot of resources like commentaries but was a less satisfying user experience, where the screen controls would never get out of the way of reading.

Although these were all good, they still lacked something. If I was going to a Bible on an iOS device, I needed one that worked really well for serious Study, with better ways of marking up passages and taking notes. The others I had used only allowed me to highlight or make notes on a verse at a time, not part of a verse.

I found one by accident in Olive Tree's BibleReader. I knew of it but had looked at the prices of Bibles for it and found them to be expensive. When they put the ESV Bible (the actual Bible version, not to be confused with the app) on sale for free for Easter, I downloaded it and tried it.  I was immediately impressed.

Buying Apps (and Music) for Cash

I am a big proponent of apps for expanding the capabilities of your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.  Most apps are less than the price of lunch at your favorite fast food restaurant and many are less than the price of a bag of chips. In fact, if you paid $199 or $299 for an iPhone and won't pay $0.99 or $1.99 for an app, you are probably missing out on a lot of capabilities for a small fraction of what your phone costs.  The same can be said for the iPad, which you likely paid even more for if you have one.

Given all that, I know that a $0.99 app here and a $0.99 there can soon add up to real money. If you're using your credit card or PayPal account to pay for it, it's easy to lose track and find out later that you spent a lot in a relatively short amount of time. I'm an app junkie and I've found that to better control my spending, I need to pay cash.

Create Motivational Posters on Your iPhone

You're probably familiar with those motivational posters you often see in office settings. You may even be familiar with their funny counterparts sold by Despair.  If you're like me, you've always thought it would be fun to create your own. An iPhone app called Motivational Poster makes that easy.

The app is simply. You choose a photo from the photos on your iPhone, adjust image levels if necessary, add your own caption and sub-caption, and you've made your very own motivational (or demotivational) poster in just a few minutes. I created the poster on the left in about a minute from a photo I had already taken at the Georgia Aquarium.

If you decide to use Motivational Poster to create your own works of inspiration, comment and link to your photo.

Monitoring Severe Weather on Your iPhone or iPad

Today the Southeast U.S. is experiencing severe weather and several tornados have touched down in the region already. If you have an iPhone or an iPad, keep it charged and use it to help you monitor the severe weather. For those of you who haven't my past weather posts, here are a few informative one for keeping an eye out for the bad stuff:

• You Need a Weather Radio: Your iPhone Can Be That
• Tornado Safety Via Your iPhone
• Spotting Tornados on RadarScope
• Weather and iOS: Why Are You Still Using the Built-in Weather App?

Be careful and make sure you have your tornado plan ready.

Find My...Family [Remix]

A little over a year ago, I explained how to find your family members using the Find My iPhone app, assuming that you are using the same iTunes account for each phone. With Find My iPhone, you can see where each iPhone or iPod Touch for that iTunes account is on a Google Map.  While this is great for keeping up with kids or avoiding that "where are you now" call when your spouse is driving (a safety risk), it had its drawbacks.

Seek God for the City: Using Your iPhone or iPad as a Prayer Tool

Our church is using the Seek God for the City 2012 booklet as a guide to facilitate prayer for the church and for the world over a 40-day period ending on Palm Sunday. Your church may be doing the same. While most people may use the book, if you have an iPhone or an iPad, you can use the app that just came out as a more convenient guide for doing this.

I downloaded it and started looking at it tonight. Like the book, it leads you through a couple of Scripture-based prayers as well as guidance to pray specific things for the church, your city, the nation, and the world. However, unlike the book, the app has a number of extra useful tools:

• When praying for the nations, it will link you to the Operation World information for each nation that you pray for. This is invaluable in being able to pray specifically for a country.
• It has a great reminder system, one that other apps would do well to follow. It allows you to add a number of independent reminders to pray throughout the week but still makes it possible to add a reminder for every day at the same time without a lot of effort. You can have more than one reminder a day and the app will alert you when it's time to pray.
• You can mark favorites and pray them later, even after the 40-day period is up.
• Before or after the 40 days, you can pick a particular day's prayers or let it pick a day from random.