There’s a reason the Apple logo has a bite taken out of it. It’s a reference to the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. Once you take a bite out of that apple, you are transformed –and more importantly you can’t go back to how you were before.

I just restored a Macintosh from a Time Machine backup and my transformation is complete. I am now a fanboy. For those of you that don’t know what that is, it’s a fan who lets his passion override his social graces.

It was so easy! I was upgrading a Mac – which meant I wanted to take everything on my old Mac and move it to my new Mac. One of the easiest ways to do this is take the Time Machine backup (which happens hourly if you have it set up), and  copy everything over to the new Mac.

However, I’ve worked with computers now for over 30 years and things rarely turn out the way they are supposed to. There’s usually some small thing that turns into a large headache, and something you think will be hard that turns out to be easy.

This was so smooth. I set the restore in motion and walked away from the machine for a couple of hours. When I came back it rebooted and every single thing was there. And every single thing worked. It was unbelievable. I will put flowers on Steve Jobs’ tombstone.

Ok, I’m exaggerating slightly. Some of the cloud drives, like OneDrive, had to be set up again. I had to sign into Adobe Creative Cloud to get my licenses in order – which was an easy experience with all my account info all in one place. (Thanks Adobe!) Microsoft was the biggest pain in the ass. My MS Office license had slipped away. I keep very good records of license numbers, but somehow I couldn’t locate the string of upgrades I bought that got me to Office Mac 2011. I spent 20 minutes chatting with Microsoft trying to get the license numbers squared away and finally ended up springing $10 for a home use program just to make the problem go away. It’s really pitiful that Microsoft can’t link licenses back to a single user the way Adobe can. But, I will say their tech support was patient and helpful.

Notice how these were not Apple issues. Everything Apple-related came back in a few clicks. I don’t dislike Windows. I use Quicken on Windows several times a week.  Excel on Windows feels much crisper and there are great Windows utilities like Notepad++ that don’t have any Mac equivalent. But the user experience of this upgrade was remarkable.

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Not long after last month’s Healthkit post, Jawbone updated their Blue app so it would connect directly with HealhtKit. So instead of data being transmitted from Blue Jawbone to Purple Jawbone to HealthKit, it now goes from Blue Jawbone to HealthKit directly. They did it quietly, with any communication to band owners. One day the app updated in the background and it was there. (Customer management, anybody?) So, the data flow got a lot simpler and the way it should be.

However, I haven’t been returning to the health app very often. There’s not much to look at, just a couple of charts. It’s an interchange platform. If I wasn’t in the health industry I would barely know about it.

When elephants dance it’s the ants that get crushed, the saying goes. This is very true in tech, particularly when an elephant like Apple makes a big move. In this case, Apple created HealthKit – a nascent healthcare interchange platform. There was already a very interesting interchange platform in early rollout called TicTrac. TicTrac is a platform the connects all of the leading wearables out there, keeping everything in one place. It also allows you to create goals and projects using your data, and provides strong visualizations. You can contract with TicTrack to develop you own branded health programs integrating all theses sources. In a lot of ways it’s what HealthKit could become.

TicTrac is a fine platform but it’s hard to compete against an emerging standard like HealthKit backed by a company like Apple. I recently saw the founders at an Ad Week conference, Health, Wellness & Wearables. They were optimistic about the future, but they will have to find a niche to thrive in.

In spite of HealthKit’s rather basic current state, the future looks bright. Mobile Health News just did a terrific rundown of 137 mobile apps with HealthKit connectivity. Here’s the article.

Based on MobiHealthNews’ analysis, here’s a quick breakdown of the top 10 most popular data types pushed to HealthKit and the top 10 most pulled:

Number of apps pushing various kinds of data (or “writing”) to Apple HealthKit.

• 34 percent of HealthKit apps (46) are pushing active calories data.
• 20 percent of HealthKit apps (28) are pushing weight data.
• 18 percent of HealthKit apps (25) are writing heart rate data.
• 18 percent (24) are pushing workouts data to HealthKit, even though the Apple Health app doesn’t have such a field.
• 15 percent of HealthKit apps (21) are feeding step count data into the platform.
• 15 percent (20) are sharing walking and running distance data with HealthKit.
• 10 percent of HealthKit apps (14) are pushing out sleep analysis data.
• 9 percent (12) are sharing nutrition data with the HealthKit ecosystem.
• 8 percent (11) are pushing out blood pressure data with HealthKit.
• 7 percent of HealthKit apps (9) are writing cycling distance data.

Number of apps pulling various kinds of data (or “reading”) from Apple HealthKit.

• 23 percent of HealthKit apps (32) are pulling weight data.
• 16 percent (22) are integrating step count data from HealthKit.
• 12 percent (17) are using active calories data from the platform.
• 10 percent of HealthKit apps (14) are using heart rate data pulled from the system.
• 10 percent (14) are pulling down blood pressure data from HealthKit.
• 9 percent (13) make use of walking and running distance data retrieved from HealthKit.
• 9 percent (13) are pulling nutrition data from HealthKit.
• 9 percent of HealthKit apps (12) are using sleep analysis data from the platform.
• 7 percent of HealthKit-connected apps are using the platform to pull in a user’s height.
• 7 percent (9) are pulling in a user’s birthdate from HealthKit.

Nearly half of Americans are extremely or very interested in being able to check their blood pressure (48%) or their heart and heartbeat for irregularities (47%) on their smartphone or tablet, with an additional 23% and 22%, respectively, saying they’re somewhat interested. Perhaps the most common health application for mobile devices right now is the variety of apps and peripherals which can be used to track physical activity, and 43% of Americans say they’re extremely or very interested in this (with an additional 25% somewhat interested).

Add to this the transformation that will likely take place with the Apple Watch next Spring, and wearables are going to have an interesting year in 2015.

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For the health geeks, one of the subtle announcements of the big Apple keynote last month was HealthKit. HealthKit allows apps that provide health and fitness services to share their data with the new Health app and with each other. In a rare false start for Apple, HealthKit didn’t make the iOS 8 release, but was in the first update one a week later. Welcome to the complexities of healthcare, Apple, I hope you make it better for us all.

As a long-time user (such as is possible) of health and fitness apps and wearables,  I decided to check out HealthKit and its integration with a few top apps. I started with two popular and well-respected apps: MyFitnessPal (which in spite of its name is primarily a calorie counter) and Jawbone Up, the well known activity and sleep monitor.

These apps already connect with each other. If you log a workout in Jawbone Up, it gives you a calorie count in MyFtinessPal. So, what does HealthKit add to the mix?

Jawbone Up was a puzzle at first. Right about the time HealthKit came out, Jawbone announced a new app compatible with HealthKit  The concept was interesting. The Purple Jawbone app uses the iPhone for step tracking – no band required! It then transmits those steps to Apple’s new ‘Health’ app. The Health app is essentially a dashboard for what’s going on in HealthKit.

I looked at every possible setting in vain on the original Blue Jawbone app for HealthKit connectivity. Nothing there! There was no HealthKit data exchange.Was Jawbone forcing loyal band owners into installing 2 apps to get to HealthKit? I reached out to Jawbone and got no response.  So, I ended up with a very odd setup where data was being transmitted from the original Blue Jawbone app to the Purple Jawbone app and then to HealthKit. Interestingly, the data for steps walked collected independently by the band and by the iPhone was almost identical, indicating that at least if you keep it in a pants pocket, the iPhone makes a pretty good pedometer. So, I guess you don’t need a Jawbone Up as a pedometer now, but you will need it to capture sleep data. I will give a shout-out here to Jawbone for their beautiful iPhone app. It’s very well designed, fun to use, and offers interesting insight. Without a doubt this data flow was weird, but it did work.

So what about the much anticipated Apple Health app and HealthKit? It was a bit of a meh. The display pretty much looks like an oscilloscope. I had succeeded in working in MyFitnessPal and Blue Jawbone -> Purple Jawbone as sources. The Health app now shows calories and steps. The displays are scientific and clean, but that’s about it. It’s essentially a database, there are no insights provided. The Jawbone app provides much more insight into activity and provides recommendations. MyFitnessPal provides better nutrition tracking and can already integrate the Jawbone activity.

Right now HealthKit and the Health app are nothing more than a foundation for other more important apps and capabilities that are yet to come. It’s like looking at the basement of a new house under construction. Yes, the basement is there and looks solid, but someone needs to build an interesting house on top to make it worthwhile.

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Credit: www.jamierubin.net

One of the biggest boons to your productively on the web can be the Read-it-Later apps. These apps enable you to skim articles, blogs, tweets, or YouTube videos and grab them for later review. Not only do the apps bookmark the articles, they also clean them up into simple text and graphics, stripping out the ads and other crap so you can concentrate on the message. They allow articles to be read offline and are available for phones and tablets, making it easy to consume this content anywhere.

With the release of iOS8, Pocket has taken the read-it-later experience to an orgasmic level. It has done this using two new OS features, Extensibility and Handoff.

Pocket Share Out

On the new Pocket iPhone app, when you read an article (beautifully presented and just right for reading) and you press the share icon at the bottom, you are presented with customizable options to send the article to Evernote, Twitter, Buffer, etc. Pocket has its own sharing list, but tapping “More” gives you choices of any app that is building a share option for iOS 8. Facebook and Twitter were there in the past, but now other apps have the ability to be added to this list. To get the same before, you might have had to open the article in Safari and used a bookmarklet to get it shared where you wanted. The new approach cuts out several steps.

Capturing to Pocket

This integration has been added to Safari as well. Now when you are on a web page and your plane boards, or whatever interruption takes you away, you can use the native iOS share menu to save it to Pocket and even add tags to help you manage your content. It’s all very fluid and frictionless.

Now to Handoffs. Handoffs allows you to take a task you’re working on – editing a Pages document, for example – and seamlessly pick it up on the next device. Very cool unless you are working on porn and bring it up accidentally in a meeting. Pockets has enabled this so if you are reading an articles on your iPad, you can pick it up right at the same place on your iPhone later. It’s like gliding. Of course, you have to live in the Apple ecosystem to enjoy it and it’s still to come with the Yosemite OS update on Apple computers, but you can see the promise. Pocket is one of the first and smoothest implementations of both Extensibility and Handoffs. Bravo.

Several people who make me look casual and disorganized have integrated Pocket into complex workflows to manage their knowledge and capture it. Here’s an example that is driven by IFTTT which collects articles and then shares them. Here’s another using Pocket as a kind of intermediary clearing house for web research and clippings (credit here to the image at the top of this post). Personally, I’d prefer to be little more manual and selective about it, more like the second example.

What’s really interesting is that the best Pocket experience is on mobile now. That’s where you can grab the article, tag it, read it, and file it in Evernote (as one example). In more direct terms – the mobile experience has passed the browser experience. On the browser you can’t send to Evernote without using IFTTT or clumsily opening the webpage and then capturing it again. Pocket has knocked it out of the park on this update.

P.S. Let’s not forget Instapaper, an old favorite of mine. Instapaper has awesome type and display options and a an impressive new highlights feature. It’s got a stripped down UI that focuses cleanly on what it does. It has added Extensibility as well and may even have more integration options than Pocket, making it a strong alternative.

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Here it is – the Apple Watch. Sleek, stylish, and fashionable. It has an aluminum bezel that is attractive and, while techno-sheik, is not overly clunky. The watch has over 30 customizable faces ranging from classic early LED style, to refined analogue. The music player can hold 4,000 songs and integrates seamlessly with iTunes and the Apple music ecosystem. It’s health-related features include a pedometer with a daily step goal, voice prompts, and integration to Nike Plus. The band is infinitely adjustable and suitable for both men and women.

However, it’s from 2011. I had lunch with a friend of mine whose husband had recently become a software engineer at Kickstarter. I leaned that one of their first early successes had been a band designed to convert an Apple Nano into an attractive watch – the LunaTik Kickstarter sought $15K and almost broke $1MM. The 2010 Nano was a natural target to be hacked into a watch. It was just the right size and shape. It was designed to clip on to clothing and to be a wearable. Unlike it’s predecessor, which was all controls and no screen at all, it was all touchscreen.

I easily found the band online and picked up a silver Nano at an Apple store. It took less than 5 minutes to assemble the housing and setup the watch. The whole thing cost about $250. The watch immediately drew curiosity, comments, and praise. I used the watch with a pair of stereo Bluetooth headphones during my hour long train commute and it was very handy to have the music controls on my wrist instead of in my pocket.

Apple seemed to recognize the potential of the Nano as a watch. Apple stores stocked a couple of watch bands converters for a while, including my Kickstarter band. Though Apple originally only included a handful of watch faces in the Nano OS, a software upgrade in late 2011 included almost 30 digital clock faces. Then…silence.

In the meantime, the entire fitness tracker market emerged with Fitbit, Jawbone, and Nike coming out with models and getting wide retail distribution. Some interesting tech watches emerged, notably Samsung’s. The fitness bands and diet apps like MyFitnessPal started exchanging data, and platforms such as Tictrac emerged which could pull it all together and give you worthwhile guidance.

Over three years later, I’m still getting compliments on my watch. I’ve loved this (no so) little watch and I’ve never had a problem. But I’ve been developing watch envy. The Samsung Gear Fit nearly won me over. But, I’ve held off as rumors and conjecture of what the iWatch could bring to market emerged over the last six months. The money’s burning a hole in my pocket, ready to be spent on what Is supposed to be announced next month. Will I buy an Apple product, or will someone else build that perfect blend of style and functionality? Will it make me put my Jawbone Up in the drawer forever? Will it have been worth the wait? The overwhelming success of the LunaTik Kickstarter 3 years ago was just a hint at the demand potential for a well-designed smartwatch. Let’s hope Apple has been using its time well to make a watch as transformative as the iPhone was.

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