We asked you earlier in the week which of this new breed of fitness gadget were the best at helping you get and stay in shape, which ones offered you the most valuable feedback on your activities, and which ones worked with the tools you prefer. You responded, and now we're back to highlight the top five.
Nike+ Fuelband
The Nike+ Fuelband ($149) is a bracelet you wear on your wrist that, quite simply, keeps an eye on all of your activity, including your steps walked, calories burned, and more, and turns it all into a score of sorts, called your "Fuel." You can keep track of your activity and your score on your computer or your iPhone, set daily activity goals, measure your progress, and get active feedback both through the apps and through the device itself on how well you're doing and whether you've beat your goal. The Fuelband even includes a mood tracker, so you can keep an eye on your performance and how it relates to your mindset on a given day. You also have the option to share (or not) your progress with your friends on Facebook or Twitter.
FitBit
If you're looking for an appliance that doesn't just track your activity, but can help you get a more restful night's sleep, the FitBit ($100) is the gadget for you. It's a tiny clip that attaches to your pocket, sleeve, or anywhere else on your person, and keeps an eye on your activity during the day—including your steps taken, stairs climbed, calories burned, and so on—and how much sleep you get and how often you toss and turn at night. The FitBit collects all of this information and then uploads it to the FitBit webapp so you can track your progress. If you like using your smartphone to monitor your activity, the FitBit even plays nice with popular iOS and Android fitness tracking apps like Endomondo and RunKeeper. Then, you can share as many or as few details as you like with friends, who can support you. You can even use the FitBit's webapp to track your meals and diet, offering a truly complete tool to manage and improve your health.
BodyMedia FIT
The BodyMedia FIT ($100-$200) is an armband appliance that wraps around your upper arm, and keeps an eye on your calories burned, your daily activity, and even your sleep quality and sleep patterns. As you wear the armband, it sends data to the BodyMedia webapp (which requires a subscription to access) and syncs with mobile apps for iOS and Android so you can keep an eye on how well you're doing working towards your daily activity goals, and how well you slept the previous night. You can also pick up optional displays for the armband so you can see the data it's collecting while you move around. Combine the armband with the BodyMedia meal and diet planner, and the combined package offers you a great way to improve your overall health and wellness. Plus, the service has different types of armbands depending on the features you'd like.
Striiv
We don't fault the folks behind the Striiv Smart Pedometer ($100) for urging their community to cast their nominations. Those of you who own a Striiv really love it, and while the gadget is part touch-screen pedometer, it also has a number of built-in mini apps that motivate you to walk more often, monitor your progress either on the device or through the Striiv webapp, share your progress with friends (and even compete with them towards daily activity challenges), and even participate in charity walks where donations are made based on how many people reach a certain activity level. As you progress towards your walking goals, you can share it with friends on Twitter and Facebook, and interact with others who also use the Striiv to stay in shape. The Stiiv even has a built-in game that challenges you to rescue animals on an enchanted island, but to do so you have to get active. The game rewards you for walking, running, and taking the stairs instead of elevators.
Your Smartphone
Many of you pointed out that you didn't need an appliance to help you get and stay in shape. With the help of a smartphone and a few well placed apps, you just slide your phone in your pocket before your workout, and let the app track your speed, movement, and activity. Other apps allow you to log your workout with their own active communities who will encourage you to push harder towards your goals, cheer you on, and offer instant feedback either on the device or on the web. We discussed a number of these types of apps when we showed you how to turn your Android phone or your iPhone or iPad into your personal trainer, if you want to go that route. Photo by Johan Larsson.
There you have it! The top five fitness appliances you can wear with you while you work out. Now it's time to vote for the all time champ.
What's The Best Fitness Tracking Appliance?
The Garmin Forerunner line of GPS sports watches gets this week's honorable mention. The line fell just a vote or two shy of the top five, but those of you who use them love them—it doesn't hurt that they're essentially watches that help you keep track of your activity, so they pull double duty, and come in different models and types depending on the features you're looking for.
Also worth mentioning is the Jawbone Up, which didn't get enough nominations to break the top, but made waves for being a pioneer in this market, even if the product suffered from serious problems after release—so much so that Jawbone issued refunds to everyone who bought one.
Have something to say about the nominees that we missed? Did your favorite phone not get enough nominations to be included? Remember, the top five are based on your most popular nominations from the call for contenders thread from earlier in the week. Share your thoughts in the comments below.
The Hive Five is based on reader nominations. As with most Hive Five posts, if your favorite was left out, it's not because we hate it—it's because it didn't get the nominations required in the call for contenders post to make the top five. We understand it's a bit of a popularity contest, but if you have a favorite, we want to hear about it. Have a suggestion for the Hive Five? Send us an email at tips+hivefive@lifehacker.com!
Photo by Yusuke Kawasaki.
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Wouldn't it be awesome if you could just drop a PDF in a folder and it would automatically show up on your Kindle? Or if imported photos automatically scaled themselves down to a smaller size? Or if your PDF documents automatically signed themselves? These are just a couple of examples of what Wappwolf can do along with your Dropbox or Google Drive account. Here's how to make the magic happen.
When you have no active Wappwolf actions, signing in will take you directly to the Choose a Folder step. If you already have an action (which, presumably, you do not since you're new to this) you'll just need to click the "Create a new automation" button. This will present you with a list of all the folders in your Dropbox/Google Drive. You can select one, or click on its name to go inside of it and select one of its folders instead. Once you've selected the folder you want, click the radio button next to its name and click the "Next" button at the bottom of the page.
After you've chosen a folder, Wappwolf will present you with a list of actions that are sorted by file type. Before you can choose an action you'll need to decide what type of file you're going to work with. Feel free to pick whatever you'd like, but if you'd like to follow along for practice let's set up a Document-based action. Let's convert any document dropped into this folder to a PDF. You can do this by clicking the radio button next to the "Convert it to PDF" option. When you do, a big list will appear of supported file formats so you know what you can and can't use. Most standard file formats from Word to Rich Text to HTML will work fine, but you won't be able to use documents created in less-widely used apps like Apple's Pages, for example. Make sure you take note of the supported formats before you start saving unsupported documents in this folder. They'll just be ignored. If this all looks good, go ahead and click the "Add Action" button underneath the supported file formats list.
By far, my favorite automation on Wappwolf is audio conversion. While it isn't exactly difficult to convert an audio file every time you need to, it takes time to figure out the settings (or remove the old copy if you're converting within a music player like iTunes). It's much easier to just drop a file in a folder and let Wappwolf do the work for you. What's really great is that you can use any of the following formats: MP3, AIFF, FLAC, M4A, OGG, WAV, or WMA. You can let Wappwolf pick the settings for you, or you can click on an "Advanced Settings" link to set the bit rate, frequency, number of channels, and other settings. This action is really useful if you need to automatically convert a lossless file to one you can easily share online or batch convert a bunch of lossless audio files you have lying around to a lossy format for your MP3 player. Perhaps you just need to use this just one time to convert a ton of audio files to another format and you don't want to deal with it manually. With the audio conversion action, you can make this all happen automatically while you're away from the computer.
Chances are you don't use every photo sharing site on the web, but you do use more than one. For example, I post all my photos on Flickr but I like them to go to Facebook as well. With Wappwolf, you can create an automation with multiple actions that takes your photos and uploads them to services like Facebook, Flickr, and Picasa. You can even have Wappwolf downscale the images before posting and add text or a watermark. However you go about it, you can save yourself the time of uploading to multiple services by just configuring a folder to do it all for you.
