A while back I had been thinking of getting the Fit Bit, but I was completely put off by the price. The Fit Bit is a gadget which you wear on your body and records your every move. The idea is that you record how many steps you take during the day and you use it to record your physical activity during the day. One of the problems that people have that use the Fit Bit, is that quite often they lose the object, or it gets put into the wash or generally trashed in some way or other. When they cost so much, this is rather inconvenient and expensive. So when I was listening to the podcast from the British Tech Network, I heard Don McAllister say that he was going to recommend an application called Moves. Basically what you have is an application that will take the place of the Fit Bit and what’s so good about it, is that it is much less likely that you will lose your iPhone5 and you don’t need an extra piece of tech to make it work.

I installed the application straightaway on to my iPhone

So while I was still listing to the podcast with Ewan Rankin and his crew I got my hands on this free application. I had the thing turned on and because I was at work it was able to have something to actually record. I do quite a lot of walking when I am at work and it recorded me walking for 20 minutes. Then I finished work, I got into my car and went to the supermarket and it recorded me for six minutes walking around the shop getting my bits and pieces.

Now for some reason it didn’t do the recording following another seven minutes of driving, when I did a small amount of walking from the car to the bank and back again to the car. The application now has me placed at my home address and I will see if it starts to do so more recording when I go and take the dog out for a walk. Walking for less than 30 seconds is nor recorded.

Will the Moves application kill my iPhone battery?

For sure, the application Moves will have an effect of draining the battery on my iPhone a little bit faster. Any of the applications which use the GPS sensors to track your positioning will do this. It seems though, that is the developer has worked out that it is possible to minimise the battery drain by having it detect when it is completely still and it is not needed to track your movements. I am still in the early stages of using this so I can’t comment on how this will work out on a long-term basis, but so far I like what the application does and I’m willing to risk running out of juice if I have to.

Using the application Moves in the real world

It is not necessary for you to do anything to tell the application whether you’re walking, cycling or travelling in a fast moving vehicle such as a car. I didn’t touch any of the settings and it seemed to know when I was doing what I was doing. The application tells me that so far I have taken 2,164 steps and it also gives me a time line. The left part of the timeline has an icon which shows you a map symbol, tap on that to see where it was when that part of the recording was created. I just tapped on the icon and I was able to add a name to the first place and to the supermarket. It even came up with the suggestion of the name of the supermarket that I went into.

At the top of the screen is the button for Today, if I tap on that it takes me to a rudimentary calendar. You can choose to view either days or weeks. It is also possible to share your physical activity as recorded by the application Moves, through Twitter, Facebook, Mail or to your Camera Roll. Within the settings of the application you get a Frequently Asked Questions section which tells you all about how the application works and what it will record. For instance it doesn’t record walks which are less than 30 seconds. It says that it will even work if you’re walking on a treadmill, although it is likely that the distance calculation will not be very accurate.

Privacy of your data

There is quite a long section in the settings about your privacy concerning your physical movements. Obviously the application has to collect data about where you are and then use that data so that it can give you feedback. Judging by the amount of information put into their privacy policy, I get the impression that they are good guys and unlikely to do anything bad with your data.

The NoStylus verdict on Moves

I think I can safely say that this is a marvellous application, it is especially good because it is free. I haven’t had the benefit of being able to use a Fit Bit, so I can’t make a direct comparison and perhaps I don’t need to. I like what this application does and I think it is brilliant and it is going to save me from the expense of getting other tech devices to work with my iPhone or latest iPod Touch. If you are interested in capturing the data of your physical movements during the day so that you can use it as part of a get fit regime, then the Moves application will be an enormous benefit to you. Did I mention already that you can get it for free? Time for me to go and walk the dog. I can notch up soome more steps…

Over the last couple of days I feel like I have been banging my head against a brick wall, in relation to having my photos geo-tagged. The reason that it is a little bit problematic is that I am using iPhoto and I really don’t think that the Places feature is the best that it can be yet. I don’t have a camera which has geo-tagging included. Well that is not strictly true, I do have my iPhone and even my iPad that will add location data to my pictures. So really it is just the DSLR, my Canon Rebel T3i that is lacking the feature, but that is where I want to have my photos Geo tagged.

Using the iPhone to geo-tag photos

There are two ways of going about this, both with advantages and disadvantages. What you can do is to make sure that your iPhone has the settings for the photos set to apply the Geo tag. To set this up you have to go into the privacy settings To switch on location services for photos. It took me quite a long time to find this in iOS 6 and I was even surprised to find out that on my phone, it was actually set to off. No wonder I had been having some problems in iPhoto, trying to get it to show the location of photos on the map! So what you can do is to every time you take a photo with your DSLR camera, also take a photo at the same time and place with your iPhone. This could work out a little bit tedious if you’re moving around a lot and I could see that I would quite easily forget to take the iPhone shot on some occasions. Using the same sort of technique you could just take one photograph in the region of where you’re taking your pictures that day or session. So in this situation, you would take one iPhone shot in the town where you’re visiting and use that to give the general whereabouts of all of the photographs that you take all around the town.

Whichever of those two methods that you use, per photo accuracy or a general location for a set of photos, you can set up the geo-tagging of the DSLR shots back in iPhoto. The iPhone shot will be back in iPhoto as soon as you’re back home if you’re using Photo Stream and all you have to do is to match up the iPhone shot with the DSLR shots. Click on the iPhone image and press command C to copy to clipboard, then click on the DSLR shot that you want to have Geo located and in the edit menu you will find Paste Location. So you can see why it could be quite tedious if you’re going for the accurate method with one shot per exact location and photo. If you’re on a walk around a town or if you’re out in the countryside you could have quite a lot of matching up to do.

Using third-party software for geolocation

I have found some third-party photo software called myTracks which will help you automate the process of adding geolocation to your DSLR photos. It has taken me a little while to work out how to use it, as the help files and manual are written by a person that is using English as a second language. It is not that bad actually, in terms of the language, it is probably more that it is describing the software more than it is showing you how to use it. There are a couple of how to videos, but without a voice-over track to explain what is actually happening. I will be remedying that, with some YouTube tutorial videos that you will be able to use to find out how to use this software.

How to use myTracks

You can use the myTracks application with either an extra GPS unit that will export the recorded track of your wanderings. You can also use an iPhone application that will very accurately record your movements. The iPhone myTracks application is a free app on the iTunes App Store. Then what you will need, is to use the myTracks Mac OS X application to use with your recorded GPS data along with your photos. It is possible to synchronise the GPS data from the iPhone into the Mac application. A couple of times the Mac application didn’t see the iPhone to be able to synchronise, so I switched off the synchronisation service on the iPhone and switched it back on again. Hey presto, it worked.

The way that the application works is to match the time settings on your camera with the time settings as recorded with the GPS data. This means that you have to make sure that your camera and iPhone are set to more or less the same time. There are also some settings that you can use to offset the time one way or the other so that it will better match.

Step-by-step using myTracks

1. When you’re ready to start taking photographs start the application or the GPS device recording your waypoints.
2. Take all of your photos as you go and when you’re finished, turn off your GPS recording.
3. Download your photos to your computer, into either iPhoto or Aperture.
4. Synchronise the GPS data into the myTracks software.
5. Click on the GPS Track that you want to use.
6. Select the photos in iPhoto/Aperture then drag them and drop them into the myTracks application. You will see a window pop-up to say that the photos are being imported.
7. Have the photos selected that you have just imported and click on the button to write the EXIF data.
8. Go Back into iPhoto and in the Photos menu choose the menu item to Rescan for Location.

Other features of myTracks

There are other features that are available within the myTracks software that I will look at in another article and video. It is possible to do things such as create a track from a pool of photos. Obviously for that to happen you have to have photos that already have location tagging applied. So you could do that with a set of photos you take with your iPhone, for example.

One of the photos I Geo Located with myTracks

I did use the application on the iPhone and took photos from within the application. Those photos stayed inside the application and didn’t go to the Photo Roll automatically. I was able to get those photos into my computer by other means, I think I did it through iTunes. You get to see little thumbnails of your photos on small pointers within the map in the iOS application.

Overview of geo-locating photographs

I did get quite frustrated with setting it up in the first instance, but once I got going it wasn’t too bad. If you want to do it for free, then you can just use the method of taking an iPhone picture at each point you use your DSLR camera. If you only need a more or less correct location, then you could use one iOS photo to get the data for a whole day’s worth of photos.

There are benefits to having exact locations for every single photo and using the third-party myTracks apps, is without doubt a very good solution. As I said, it is necessary to dive in there and really work out exactly how to use the software. On the other hand, another solution would be to go and buy a camera has already has GPS tracking included within its features.

Now to go back to playing games with my iPad .

The amazing iPhone and I am late to the party

The iPhone 4S has been available for some time now and the iPhone 5 rumours have already started. And yet I’ve only just upgraded from an iPhone 3G to the iPhone 4. Strictly speaking, I haven’t even done that. The iPhone 4 that I have just bought from Apple is not actually for me, but for my wife. She has been in need of a dose of iPhone goodness for some time now. When she bought her last phone, a crappy feature phone, I did suggest at the time that she should get an iPhone. I wasn’t listened to, nothing new there then.

So my plan has been to get a new iPad, so that I can do the Wizardgold YouTube videos showing how to use applications for iOS. On top of that, my iPhone 3G was getting rather long in the tooth and I could do with a new iPhone for myself. Then again, for most of the year I don’t really need an iPhone, as I don’t make many phone calls at all. I could be better off with an iPod Touch and a cheap old phone that just makes phone calls. So what happened, that made me change my plans, was that I was offered a reasonable amount of money for my iPhone 3G. So after much gnashing of teeth and cogitating, I decided that I would sell it and put the money towards a newer model of iPhone.

Which model of iPhone to buy and what about an Apple iPhone 4 case?

I did consider the iPhone 3GS, as my mother and sister have both recently got one of these. As they live in England, they were able to get one of these 3GS iPhones, without having to pay any money and just £20 a month for the contract. A very good deal, indeed. Here in Spain though, I would have to buy one of those outright and it would cost €350. The only thing against buying a 3GS would be that it is old technology now and has less value in terms of longevity, than getting one with the number four in its name. The present version of the iPhone 4S that was out of my price range, would cost to much to buy at €600. At only €100 more than the iPhone 4, the extra amount would be worth it in terms of the better processor, better camera and for Siri, but as I say not in my price range.

So the model to get was the iPhone 4, even though there is only one size available at 8 GB. When setting the new iPhone up, I found I had to do a certain amount of pruning after being used to a phone with 16 GB of space. Not a huge problem really, as I was able to take off most of the music, to leave plenty of space for the applications and enough for some iPhone photography. So after selling the old iPhone, I gathered up some available cash to place an order with Apple for the iPhone 4. The order was placed early Monday afternoon and I was amazed that the delivery date was going to be the following day.

A new iPhone 4 winding its way from Italy to Catalonia

The iPhone had to come from Italy and it was fun to watch it on the UPS tracking website, move from the original warehouse to the UPS hub, onto Cologne in Germany, before heading to Barcelona. Quite amusing really that it took the long route to get here and was still able to do it in just over 24 hours. We were quite exciting to get the delivery and proceed to the un-boxing stage. It was only after getting the phone out that I remembered that I would need a smaller SIM card in order to activate the iPhone. It was going to be impossible to wait long enough to get a mini SIM card from the mobile phone company. So I decided to do a Google search for instructions to cut one down manually. In the end it turned out to be very easy to do and I soon had the SIM card in the slot and the activation in progress.

The plans for the use of the new iPhone

On account of the fact that I don’t make many phone calls and that my wife uses her phone quite a lot, I decided that it would be better for her to have the iPhone 4. For the moment though, I am working at a campsite and presently I am able to make better use of the phone than she is. So the plan is for me to use this new phone until August 20th when the job finishes and to pass the phone on. My priority is for the new iPad third-generation, so that I can dive into making the you Tube videos showing how to use iPad applications. I plan to use the application Reflections on my Mac and stream the video from the iPad to the iMac and record it using ScreenFlow. I was a little surprised to find that it isn’t possible to do the same thing using Airplay or Reflections with this new iPhone 4. Another reason why the iPhone 4S would have better value for me.

iPhone 5 release date – Apple Rumours Bloody Rumours

There is a possibility that Apple will release the iPhone 5 in the autumn of this year. That could be sometime around October or November, so what I might do is to start a fund for a new iPhone for myself. I wonder if the Apple iPhone 4 case will fit the iPhone 5? I will be able to possibly take advantage of lower prices on an iPhone 4S after the iPhone 5 has been released. Youtube videos about iPhone apps and Siri for some fun too. There were some comments made about the iPhone 4S Battery and iOS 5

Taking note of the differences between the old iPhone 3G and the iPhone 4

Setting up the new iPhone 4 was pretty easy after I cut down the Sim card and was able to activate the phone. I restored the phone from a backup, during the setup process. That made it easy to have all of my data on the new phone. No worries about doing a factory reset in August and setting up the iPhone one more time. I get the feeling that the iPhone 4 is better built and of higher quality than my old iPhone. The screen looks great with it being a Retina Display, so I will be looking forward to seeing the Retina Display on the third-generation iPad when I get it.

Shiny and new on the outside with the iPhone 4 – Better operating system on the inside

With the iPhone 3G, I have been stuck with the iOS 4.2.1 for quite some time now. Even though I have iOS version 5 on the amazing iPad, it is still rather nice to see up-to-date software on an iPhone. I am enjoying the much better quality cameras and the ability to use PhotoStream. I have also been looking forward to being able to use the new features in iPhoto for iOS, in particular the Journal feature. Really, I think it is about time that the Journal tool was included in iPhoto for the Mac. Definitely I should spend some time finding out, what else I can do with the taking of photos and movie clips with the iPhone 4. I will also be able to install iOS 6 on this phone.

It is certainly very nice to have a much faster processor and to benefit from a little bit of speed. I like that there is the Compass application on the iPhone. Didn’t have that on the previous phone. Another application that could be useful to get, now that I have a iOS device that will do magical video, could be iMovie for iOS. Another thing that this iPhone will be useful for, is the scanning of QR codes. Sometimes you find these codes in tourist information places. All you have to do is to take a quick picture to gather up extra information, about whatever it is you are looking at. My wife is going to particularly love that feature and make great use of it. All in all, an excellent purchase and I would expect this iPhone to last 2 to 3 years and still be highly useful, even then. There are plenty of Apple iPhone 4 cases to choose from and they also fit the Apple iPhone 4s

Today after checking some iPhone 4S news I thought I would try out the Dragon Dictation iOS application for iOS. It works well but doesn’t really give iPhone 4 voice control, aside from letting me post my words to Twitter and Facebook. Do you know of any apps that supply voice control iPhone 4? Maybe I should hold out for the iPhone 4S for myself. I will have to save up the cash, that’s all.

Having your music videos and photos streamed around the house using Apple TV

Apple airplay came to us with the iOS 4.2 and basically what it is, is a way to stream our content over Wi-Fi from one device to another. What Apple boasts is that you can have the whole of your iTunes library, that is all of the songs and all of the playlists, in all the rooms around your house. What you can do, is to have speakers set up all around the house, maybe have some in the bedroom and some in the living room and then you can stream your music to more than one room at the same time. All you have to do to get set this up is to select multiple speakers from the pull down menu for speakers. Then in iTunes you can choose where you want to send the music. So I opened up my iTunes to checkout iPhone Air play and wasn’t able to find a pulldown menu for speakers, so obviously this is only available if you have the hardware connected up. So you do need to have speakers that are Wi-Fi enabled, so that they can be seen on your network.

The Airplay wireless is integrated into some speaker docks, AV receivers and stereo systems from various manufacturers. One nice detail about Airplay is that when it is working, it will stream information about your music at the same time. So if you have a speaker dock that has a graphical display of some sort, you will see the name of the singer, the song titles and the album names. So when you are in the other room you will see all of the information about the music and will not be playing it blind. Of the manufacturers that do Airplay, you will find famous makes like Marantz and Bowers and Wilkins.

iPhone air play or iPad airplay set up

If you want to stream content from an iPhone, it has to be a iPhone 3GS or later. With an iPod Touch, it is from the second-generation models of the iPod Touch that you can do this. You are also required to have iOS 4.3 or later to stream from third-party applications or from websites that have opted in to the use of . If you want to stream content that is DRM protected so it will play to the Apple TV, then you also need an active Internet connection for it to actually work. What it all comes down to, is that you will need to have the hardware to be able to take advantage of the iPhone airplay mode and the iPhone airplay apps.

Best free apps for iPhone

There is a shocking abundance of free apps to use with the iPhone and it is possible to go into the iTunes Store and grab a bundle of applications to play with and try out. Like always, when talking about the best free apps for iPhone, we have to take into consideration what is that you wish to do with your iPhone. It would be quite easy to create a complete post or article talking about free applications for photography, for example. And in the same way you could talk about which are the best free iPhone apps for Twitter. In this first of a series of best free apps, let’s have a look at general iPhone applications that although the free, are incredibly useful.

Where to get the best free apps for iPhone or iPad

The first port of call in a search for the best free apps for iPhone, is to go and have a look in the iTunes Store. You will see in there that there is a list of free iPhone apps and you can start by downloading a few of them. The first app that you have to put onto your iPhone is going to have to be Dropbox. The Dropbox application is going to be invaluable for moving files to the iPhone or copying files to the iPhone.

Being sociable with the iPhone

Seeing as we are all social animals these days on the Internet, then among the best free apps for iPhone has to be Facebook Messenger and also the official Twitter application. The official Twitter app is basic, or you might say simple in terms of facilities for tweeting and so on, but sometimes simple is best and you can send tweets no problem. You can see what’s happening in the Twitter world in your Twitter stream and be able to do the direct messages and replies that you need to do. Often for the basic Twitter user, that is all you need.

Free Facebook Apps

With regards Facebook there are two applications, one is called Facebook and the other is Facebook Messenger. Both of these are new official applications for Facebook and will give you a better experience for dealing with Facebook, than by trying to deal with it in a browser window. Facebook Messenger gives you a faster way to be able to send messages when you are mobile. So you would use this Facebook Messenger application when you’re more interested in sending messages instantly to other friends that are also using Facebook messenger, rather than seeing what is written on your wall. It could be one way to save money by not using up your SMS allowance that is part of your phone plan. You can get free push notifications when there are incoming messages and you can add a location and photos to the messages that you send out. If there are a bunch of you that are having a conversation, then you can use Facebook Messenger to do your plans for whatever it is that you are going to do, while you are out and about.

Now for a silly and fun application – Talking Tom and Ben News

For some time now I have been a great fan of talking Tom, not so much of Ben. As the tomcat will tell you, Ben the dog tends to suffer from rather too much flatulence. In this application the tomcat and the dog had become famous TV newsreaders. When you talk to them they will repeat back what you have just said, taking it in turns to speak. You can easily make some extremely funny conversations between the two talking animals and record those conversations. Whenever I am using the Talking Tom application, I am often in stitches splitting my sides laughing. You can do other things to the animals to create amusement, such as poking them, so that they fall off their chairs. If you swipe either of them, then their chair will swivel around. You can have them annoy each other during their conversation, just for fun. I highly recommend that you get this application, record some of their conversations and share those videos to YouTube or Facebook. I’m sure your friends will thank you for your funny videos.

QR Reader for iPhone

Just in case you don’t know what a QR code is – it is one of those square barcodes that you see in some places these days. I saw one stuck onto a lamppost today and I have recently seen QR codes used within a museum setting. When you point your iPhone camera at one of these QR codes and scan it, you will get either a message or more commonly you will get a URL to a webpage. This is particularly useful if you have a particularly long web address. In fact if you use bit.ly.com, then you get a new QR code when you create a short URL. With QR reader for iPhone you can create your own QR codes. What you could do is to have your QR code printed onto your T-shirt or onto a business card. It may seem to be a little bit of a gimmick but what it does do, is to encourage people that you meet to go and have a look at your website. It does save time having to remember exactly what the URL is. That is useful whether you are looking at is a long URL that you have to get perfectly right or a short URL, which can be difficult to remember even though it is shorter. There are other QR reader applications and a popular one is called Red Laser. Some of the code reader applications will read other types of barcodes for you also.