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As a personal trainer, I understand the importance of exercise. However, how we exercise, the equipment we use, what we eat, and how we live play equally important parts in maintaining a healthy, balanced lifestyle. This site shares my experience in what makes 'healthy' healthy! If I like some piece of sports equipment, I'll let you know. If I find a great article relating to the health and fitness industry, that gets shared too. And most of all, I have added forums to each blog, because I like to hear what others have to say. Sometimes there is no ONE right way! So feel free to post your views and opinions!
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iPhone App Store gets a Workout Category
From a usability perspective, the Apple app-store has always been a bit on the difficult side.
Sort-order is suspect, user scores dubious and load times on the iPhone far too slow.
Apple are aware of these issues, but (pardon the pun) the store seems bad to its very core, and therefore virtually impossible for them to improve on, without starting from scratch again.
One way of apparently circumventing the larger issues at hand, is by introducing categories, which goes some way to improving the sort order fiasco.
These categories run along the lines of "Apps for Cooks", "Apps for Music" and so on, with of course my focus being on "Apps for Working Out".
Within this "Apps for Working Out", there is a top 10 of Paid and Free Applications, which at the time of publishing this blog, are as below:
| Top 10 Paid Health & Fitness Apps 1. iFitness 2. Tap & Track -Calorie, Weight & Exercise Tracker 3. Calorie Tracker by LIVESTRONG.COM 4. Men's Health Workouts 5. Hundred PushUps 6. White Noise 7. iPeriod (Period Calendar) 8. Women's Health Workouts 9. iTreadmill: Ultra Pedometer w/ PocketStep™ 10. Couch to 5k |
Top 10 Free Health & Fitness Apps 1. Lose It! 2. SixPack App FREE 3. WebMD Mobile 4. Weight Watchers Mobile 5. Restaurant Nutrition 6. Free Menstrual Calendar 7. Sex-Facts 8. Vibrating Massager FREE 9. DailyBurn 10. Natural Cures |
Is it just me, or did you notice a few entries that seem somewhat out of place????
"iPeriod"? "Vibrating Massager FREE"? "White Noise"?
Just to focus on one app: White Noise ($1:59), the blurb from the developer's site states "White Noise provides 40 ambient sounds of the environment to help you relax or sleep. Includes high quality looping noises such as waves crashing on a beach, crickets chirping at night, and the soothing sound of rain fall. Includes a sound timer,LCD clock, alarm, favorites toolbar, and numerous playback options.".
While this all sounds lovely, is this really a top 10 paid app?
If so, then there are a lot of stressed out iPhone-junkies out there.
However, I believe that yet again, we see that Apple have created a piece-of-turd application recommendation engine, which seems to use the broadest terms to categorise its applications.
Or they pluck them from thin air.
Avoid at all costs.
Much more realistic results can be seen on independent review sites, such as Gizmodo, which bizarrely does a far more thorough job of rating iPhone Applications than the manufacturers themselves.
iPhone Apps
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