Despite the slightly dismissive attitude in my previous essay on health and fitness, I do care about getting into shape and losing weight. I’ve enlisted technology to give me the first push (and second, and third…), based on my experience of shedding thirty pounds through calorie counting and increased movement. Never a fan of systematic exercise, my main approach is making sure I get in a good amount of walking, and trying to maintain a calorie deficit. Living in New York City, I do a lot of walking, so it’s not difficult to reach my 10,000 step goal. Being mindful about what I eat, on the other hand, that’s a lot harder.

I use the Jawbone UP Move to track my walking throughout the day. I know that fitness trackers aren’t accurate, and possibly not even effective. I don’t care. Having one, and getting a general sense of the amount I move in a day is motivating. I’ve dallied with using my smartphone and a Pebble for my fitness tracking, but both have issues that get in the way. The Pebble doesn’t work well as a fitness tracker at all, and I’d like the option to go for a walk and have it count without dragging my phone along. While I’ve tried using my smartphone to track sleep, that’s a recipe for me hitting snooze. Instead, I keep the phone in another room, and use my Jawbone UP Move, clipped to a dumbwatch, to track sleep. [1] And, after my iOS 8 HealthKit woes, I’ll stick with dedicated hardware for fitness tracking.

On the software side, the two main apps in my quiver are Jawbone UP [2], and MyFitnessPal. There’s no app that does everything I want in one package, so I stick with both. MyFitnessPal is where I log my food, my weight, and get my calorie burn estimates. Jawbone UP handles my activity, and by linking my Jawbone account with MyFitnessPal, it’s able to pull my meal data in and score it for its Smart Coach feature. Two slices of dollar pizza from the store around the corner from the office might be under my calorie goal, but it won’t be a healthy lunch. MyFitnessPal keeps me honest, UP keeps me eating right.

That’s the heart of my digital fitness system in two apps and a dongle, but there’s a little more to it. I also use Jawbone’s UP Coffee to log my caffeine consumption—useful for seeing if having too much coffee during the day affects my sleep. (It does.) I also use the excellent FitPort as a replacement dashboard for Health.App. It’s much easier on the eyes, and easier to understand. The hard part is making sure all the data is in sync.

And that’s where things get frustrating. Since iOS 8 was released, I’ve struggled to find ways to keep all the health data I’m collecting together in a way that’s useful. I don’t plan to run any analysis on it, I just want to  see trends. After fighting with various apps and app settings—including turning off my phone’s ability to write step data to Health.app—I seem to have found a way to keep everything in order, especially since Jawbone’s fixed their HealthKit bugs in a recent update to their tracking apps. But Jawbone UP doesn’t synchronize all the data it has on me to HealthKit. For that, I rely on Health Sync for Jawbone UP by Jaiyo. This app synchronizes my active calories, BMI, and other useful data with HealthKit, giving me a better picture of my progress. I just wish I didn’t have to spend an extra $2 on an app to do what the Jawbone UP apps should do out of the box. That someone is selling an app to fill the hole in Jawbone’s HealthKit sync is a sign that someone’s laying down on the job over there.

The last app in my portfolio is FitStar, which provides short video workouts. FitStar syncs with Jawbone UP, so when I do a workout, it logs the calories burned and adds a workout to my daily activity. It’s a great app, and Federico Viticci uses it as part of his regimen. Unfortunately, I’m inconsistent at doing the workouts… or to put it more accurately, I’m very consistent at not doing the workouts. I just need to make time in my day and do it, and stop worrying about my downstairs neighbor who probably has more important things to complain about than me doing jumping jacks.

And that’s the thing: none of these apps and tools will drop the pounds for me. They’re aids to mindfulness and pushes to activity that I need if I value my long-term health. This is all a work in progress, and I can see any aspect of my tracking and fitness system being disrupted if I get, say, a smartwatch with top-notch OS-level integration, heart rate monitoring, and its own fitness tracking application. That seems a long way off, however. The weakest link in all of this is still the human one, and I’m working on that.

Last night, I put my Pebble in a drawer for good, or at least until the 3.0 firmware comes out. Yes, I said that I’d stopped using my Pebble back in March, but I came back to use the Pebble as a fitness tracker along with its smartwatch functionality. With the Jawbone UP watch face and Morpheuz for sleep tracking, I replicated the functionality of my clip-on fitness tracker, and had one less thing to worry about losing. While it wasn’t perfect, it was functional enough, and I got all the benefits of notification triage on my wrist to boot.

Then it stopped working. The Jawbone UP Pebble app isn’t known for being the most reliable piece of software, but having a day where it erronously reported 12,000 steps from a little after midnight when I was sound asleep was a bad sign. Another day, I forgot to reactivate the Pebble’s tracker after waking up and quitting Morpheus, losing step counts. As the numbers on my wrist became increasingly divergent from to the numbers in the App, I decided to go back to the clip-on tracker. This was the first nail in the Pebble’s coffin.

I kept using Morpheuz to track sleep, especially since I like having the Pebble vibrate to wake me. Then, the iOS 8.3 update broke the already fairly janky method by which Morpheuz syncs sleep data with HealthKit, by way of the Smartwatch Pro iOS app. Since my Jawbone UP Move tracks sleep too, I went back to using it for that too. I could have clipped it on to my Pebble’s watch band—I had before—but I hated the whole idea of clipping a fitness tracker to a fitness tracker to make up for the other’s software failings. The Pebble had to go.

Before I made the final decision, I spent some time trying to find a new role for my Pebble beyond just notifications. I tore through the Pebble App store and searched for guides to the best Pebble apps for iOS… only to give up, rip the device from my wrist, run a factory reset, shut it off, and shove it into a drawer. I might pull it back out once the new Timeline interface is available, but it would be more for curiosity’s sake than any interest in using the Pebble full-time again.

Back in March, I finished up my original Pebble experiment with the following conclusion:

The goal of my experiment was to see if my skepticism on smartwatches was justified. That such a limited device was enough to prove me wrong is success enough. Itís a shame the Pebble doesnít succeed for me as an iOS user, but thatís the risk I took.

I’m still glad that I tried the Pebble. There’s a ton of potential in the smartwatch form factor that I didn’t even think about before trying one. That alone was worth $99, plus a couple bucks for a replacement strap. When I can afford an Apple Watch, I’ll pick one up with no hesitation, and I’m eyeing the possibility of Android Wear coming to iOS, I might try a LG G Watch for a while in a similar experiment. So much of the doubt about smartwatches from otherwise really smart people comes from the difficulty of understanding it without using it first. If you’re not dead set on being a skeptic, the orignal Pebble is a good way to find out if you’re right.

A lot of people I follow in tech gush over high-end cameras. When I see a piece on cameras, I just zone out, and it all becomes a sea of meaningless technical terms: mirrorless micro four-thirds full-frame DSLR with pancake lens at f/32 aperture… whatever. The camera on my iPhone 5S is more than good enough for the few photos I take of my life. I have to wonder if the geek obsession with high-end cameras is, in part, because point-and-shoot digital and smartphone cameras have become good enough for the average person. When I read articles defending the purchase of fancy cameras, there’s a recurring mantra of “you’ll regret it when your kids grow up and all you have are cell phone pictures.” I don’t know about other people in my age group, but I remember growing up with albums of badly exposed 35mm prints from point-and-shoot film cameras. My parents didn’t mind, and I doubt the parents of most other people my age minded either.

As the baseline quality of various goods increases, there’s always going to be an audience that demands something “better” for whatever reason. The criteria of “better” varies, but among the geeky, tech-savvy population, “better” has a specific meaning. “Better” used to mean higher specs: more memory, more disk space, faster graphics, but specs in consumer tech have become almost meaningless in the last few years. We’re at a point where you can buy a computer that’ll do all the things the average person needs to do for pocket change, comparatively. It’s not good for corporate profit margins, but you can find a machine, even one that isn’t crawling with privacy-invading, performance destroying crapware, for less than half the price of a base 11-inch MacBook Air. Hell, there’s a perfectly serviceable Windows 8 tablet you can buy for $80. You don’t have to spend four figures on a new computer, if you don’t want to, let alone a smartphone or other device.

In response, for geeks “better” is about less quantifiable things, like taste. While I’m probably the last person who would recommend a Samsung phone, I’m not about to bash the taste of a Samsung owner. [1] When certain tech pundits—Jim Dalrymple and John Gruber especially—start calling people who buy certain products idiots, or claiming a covered micro-USB port on the back of a smartwatch is a mark of bad taste, they’re losing the thread. It’s not that Samsung customers are idiots, or the designer of the Sony Smartwatch has no taste, it’s that their priorities are in a different place. Maybe the person on the subway with a Samsung phone just needed a smartphone, and that’s the one the sales guy at the carrier store got a SPIFF for flogging, and they were in no mood to comparison shop? For some people, a phone is a phone. It’s not a question of “taste.”

It’s not hard to extend this to other geeky obsessions with quality: fussy coffee prepared fussily, artisanal notebooks and fountain pens, perfectly clear ice cubes for your cocktails [2], high-end audio equipment, and fancy bags for carrying all your fancy shit around. And I’m not immune to this phenomenon either. Though I don’t drink fussy coffee, or use a fountain pen, I have a fancy, artisanal pocket notebook I keep in an equally artisanally crafted leather cover. I collect records, and listen to them on a fancy turntable, on audiophile headphones with a “flat frequency response” through a tube amp. Why? I like the sound and the experience of listening to music on vinyl. A dollar store notebook, or a stack of index cards would serve my writing fine. I’m sure that I wouldn’t notice any difference if I was running my turntable’s audio through a solid state, digital amplifier, but I went with the tube amp. Despite vinyl being an inferior format for replicating audio.

There’s nothing wrong with liking the crazy, fancy stuff us geeks like. We can’t control our obsessions, but we can control how we communicate them to others. Smug superiority gets us nowhere. The elitism that too often creeps into any discussion of our obsessions is maddening to hear, even by some of us who share the obsession. It behooves all of us who talk about technology to get a little more perspective about the people who buy it, people who aren’t as obsessive about it for the same reasons we are. Let’s recommend the stuff we like, and be honest as to why. Let’s not assume that our reasons are the only valid ones, and stop impugning those who think different.

Edit:

There’s been a couple really great rebuttals to my camera comments at the start. Álvaro Serrano talks about his passion for photography, and Casey Liss (yes, that one) chimed in as well. You’d do well to read both replies.

April 8th, a date that will live in infamy as the day the initial Apple Watch review embargo ended. There’s too many reviews to link here, so I’ll just link to this post linking to all the other reviews. The general consensus seems to be that it’s like most version 1 Apple products: pretty, with a lot of potential, but it still has a way to go. Reading the reviews, particularly from those new to smartwatches reminds me a lot of my Pebble experience, if a little more positive overall. And while I like my Pebble, if the opportunity arose to swap my Pebble for an Apple Watch tomorrow, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

One running theme I noticed in the reviews I bothered reading [1] is the problem of notification overload. I was under the assumption, possibly mistaken, that the Apple Watch setup process required users to winnow down the notifications they get. Either that’s the case and those complaining didn’t bother, or they get way more notifications in a day than I get in a week, even after paring down. Maybe both. That said, it wasn’t Apple who promulgated the idea that the Watch would be the panacea for notification overload.

As someone who’s been cautiously bullish on the smartwatch, at least since trying one, it’s hard to not be a little disappointed by the initial reaction. Most of the issues unrelated to an excess of wrist-tapping: apps not loading and general pokiness seem to be the sort that can be remedied with software updates on the phone and watch alike. Time will have to tell, not only if that’s the case, but if ordinary people will be using Apple Watches the way the reviewers did. Technology journalists don’t live entirely in the same world as everyone else.

Certain folks on the technology commentary beat don’t like the idea of talking about a product based on future potential. When you’re talking about a new category of device, you have nothing else you can judge it on, especially when going by a week of use (or someone’s subjective opinion on their week of use). I’ll repeat the same mantra I have whenever I write about this topic, at least since trying the Pebble: there is a lot of potential in the smartwatch. We just haven’t figured out how to tap into it yet.

I’m excited by what’s happening in this space. If Google can bring Android Wear to iOS, I’d like to try it, and put my Pebble aside for a while. When Pebble OS 3.0 finally arrives for the older hardware, I’m curious to see if the timeline idea—the one Apple rejected—is a better interface for wrist mounted technology. The potential is incredible for this to be more than a shiny, vibrating wrist-bauble.

Wearable technology has been in the Neolithic Age for the past few years. I think Apple Watch is the dividing line that marks the Bronze Age of wearables—or maybe the 18-Karat Rose Gold Age. The only way to know for sure, however, is to wait it out and see. And for those still skeptical of the whole category, if you have $99, just buy a damn Pebble and try it for a couple weeks. You’ve probably spent more on stupider stuff.

I’m not proud of it, but I have an Instagram account. I had one before Facebook bought them, rage-deleted the account after the acquisition, and came crawling back when I realized none of my friends were seeing the cool pictures I posted on competing services. I’m not proud, but I want to be loved.

Lately, Instagram has been bugging me to turn on notifications, so that I’ll know if someone likes, comments, tags, or sends me an Instagram Direct message. It’s bugged me when I launch the app, and it’s bugger me on the activity screen. The latter was particularly egregious, as it had a teeny-tiny dismissal button, 1/4th the size of any reasonable tap target on an iPhone. It took me ten tries to make it go away, and I came very close to hitting the large, green, Fitts’s Law compliant button to turn notifications on.

There’s a frustrating trend among too many apps to let them have access to me at all times. Push notifications are a useful way to get people to open your app and do things, but too many apps abuse the privilege. As we move towards a context-based model of computing, and possibly to getting notifications on our wrists, control over what demands our limited attention is only going to become more important. I think about Google Now, and its model of the “right notification” at the “right time” makes sense, even though it’s failed to work for me as advertised. Google Now isn’t perfect, and the out-of-the box setup has too many irrelevant options that benefit their advertisers, instead of me, but they’re still light years ahead of anyone else in this space.

But, Instagram notifications aren’t contextually relevant. Facebook just wants my eyeballs to see more content, more ads, get more info about what I like, and sell that info to advertisers. That they need to be so aggressive and needy with their push notification… push… tells me that they’re having trouble getting the numbers they want. If they want to suck up more of my time, they should fix their broken content feed, get better at dealing with spambots, and stop forcing workarounds for sharing URLs in comments. Make the platform better, not more needy, and the eyeballs will come… though perhaps they ran the numbers and think push notifications are more effective. In which case, I’ll grumble and deal with it.

I get enough out of Instagram to suck it up and fight to use the app in peace. I don’t get enough out of most other apps that needfully beg for the opportunity to interrupt. I’m sure I’m not the only frustrated one. It’s easier to turn notifications off on a per-app basis in iOS 8, but I’ve long maintained that changing settings is a power user move. Instead, an overwhelmed and frustrated user is going to delete your needy app… and once you’ve lost them, they’re not coming back.