Happiness for the iPhone is designed to be simple, stress-free, and easy to use on the go. It requires that you regularly update it with your current level of happiness (+5: on top of the world; -5: down in the dumps) and your current context. The app collects the data  over time and displays it graphically, showing how the different contexts affect your happiness.

Its design is minimalist, which is both its strength and weakness. If you have a busy schedule and no time for inputing huge amounts of data (or can’t be bothered) then the app is perfect for a quick, effective visualization of which factors impact your happiness and how significant this impact is. However its use doesn’t extend much beyond this. Its output is pretty much limited to graphs made up of green and red rectangles that are labelled with “tags”. You can also browse through the different tags and review how often these positively and/or negatively influence your day.

Happiness works best if you have a small number of tags that you enter regularly (say 4 to 8). I tried at first to enter a different reason each day and the data I got from it wasn’t particularly helpful. The problem with frequently using the same tags, though, is that you rarely find out something that you didn’t already know. So although the app works well, you’re unlikely to find earth-shattering revelations about your inner happiness. Also, the tags can only be compared to each other, and if you have too many they overflow onto different charts, which can get confusing, and prevents you from making a clear comparison. Actually, it would be more helpful to view everything on an iPad, and apparently a version is on the way.

You can set multiple tags for each entry, though I avoid this as it doesn’t help you find out which tags have more or less impact. I’ll give you an example: say I set my happiness rating to +3. I have three tags listed, two of which are positive and one which is negative. Overall my day came to +3, taking into account the good and the bad. The app lists all of these tags as being positive, ignoring the negative aspects. It can only be fixed by creating separate entries for each different factor, which is what I ended up doing.

So what’s Happiness (the app) like overall? It’s great for quickly and easily updating your mood, especially on the fly, and seeing how different factors influence your happiness. However, some of the resulting data can be hard to interpret, and some people may find it doesn’t help them to discover much.

Pros:

• Quick and simple to use
• Provides a way to see which factors influence your day the most
• Regular reminders help you to regularly update your data
• Great for people with busy schedules

Cons:

• May be too simple or limited for some people
• Does not provide an especially comprehensive analysis of your mood over time

Stewart’s Rating: 4/5

Gratitude and Happiness Tracker is a free iPhone and iPad app that helps you to track happiness levels, and specifically three daily practices: expressing gratitude, staying in touch with friends, and doing acts of kindness.

The app is extremely basic and simple to use. It’s nothing fancy when it comes to looks, but it gets the job done. On the graph page, you will be able to see the graphing of your happiness and practices at a glance. You’ll be able to see the percent of your goal in a quick, easy-to-read red and green layout that can graph through the last six hours, the last six days, the last six weeks, or the last six months – giving you an idea of your happiness and gratitude over a selected period of time.

The track screen is where you actually track your levels. You select the practice, enter in whether or not you completed it, and if you like jot down a quick note. Hit save and it records your responses.

In the Gratitude and Happiness Tracker app you can share your daily statistics via email, although I don’t really see why this would be necessary. I think of it is more of a self-help app that is quite personal and I’m not so sure that the feature is needed.

If you want to keep your information private, you can set a passcode for the app, but unless you’re jotting down your deep, dark secrets, you may as well save yourself the extra step of logging into the app.

The app is just a basic way to keep track of your daily happiness level and encourage you to express gratitude, take time for friends, and commit one random act of kindness every day. Who knows? It could be a great app for moving closer to the person you aim to be!

Sara’s Rating: 3/5

Running any length of distance for a race requires a little bit of prep work. People who have never run before don’t wake up saying, “I think I’m going to go run a half-marathon this next weekend.” It just doesn’t happen. If you’re a runner, then you already know that training for even the shortest race requires a little bit of preparation, as well as some endurance-building. Training too hard and too fast can result in injury, and can set you back considerably more than if you just take it slow from the start.

Jeff Galloway is a running phenomenon, known for his Run-Walk-Run method of training. By breaking up runs into periods of running and walking, runners can train and reduce their likelihood for injury by switching the muscle groups required for both forms of movement. Running for too long can put too much stress on the knees, shins, and other parts of the leg, which can result in stress fractures, shin splints, or extreme fatigue. By training with the Run-Walk-Run method, participants will notice that they can improve their time and endurance without opening themselves up to the risks and problems associated with fatigue and injury.

When you combine Jeff Galloway’s Run-Walk-Run method with a helpful iPhone app, you know from the start that you’ve got a winning combination. There are so many apps out there that can help motivate runners, but when you combine the science and methods behind Jeff Galloway’s training program, you know the app is going to rock your socks off.

The Jeff Galloway Easy 5K iPhone app was created by Lolofit, a company that specializes in creating fitness-related apps for those who want to live healthier, more fit lifestyles. From cycling to ab work, Lolofit has some nice quality apps for fitness nuts. This Jeff Galloway app is one of the first ones that they released, and definitely one of the most extensive and intuitive.

When starting up the app, you have to set up your initial details. Enter in your physical information, as well as your running goals. The app will set up an appropriate Run-Walk-Run schedule for you that requires three workouts a week. The intervals between workouts is also a key to eliminating the risk of injury.

During your workouts, Jeff Galloway himself walks you through when you need to speed up and slow down. The app uses GPS location services on the iPhone, which allows it to better track your pace. You can use this app on a treadmill if you’d like, but I tested it out on the open road and not at the gym. Jeff Galloway will let you know when it’s time to run, walk, slow down, or speed up, and will guide you through the entire workout – just like having your own personal trainer and private coaching lesson!

The coolest part of the app, however, is the Beat Sync technology. The app comes with fifteen music tracks, and the Beat Sync will allow the music beat to match your pace. If you’re anything like me, a good fast beat will get me running faster without even realizing it, and the Beat Sync technology feeds off this psychological behavior. The beat will speed up in order to help you go faster, and will slow down when you need to pace yourself. You can even use music from your own library on your iPhone if you’d like, but I was unable to enjoy this due to the fact that all my music comes from a subscription service and is not saved onto my phone. However, the packaged music was perfect for getting me going!

This is a wonderful app for anyone who wants to get started running 5K, or for anyone who wants to improve their 5K pace. Lolofit also has a Jeff Galloway Easy 10K app, so there is a logical next step, and I hope they end up creating even more to encompass longer training runs, such as those necessary to complete a half marathon or a full marathon.

All in all, I give this app five stars, for being intuitive, well-designed, and easy to use. It’s a no-brainer app with amazing technology built into it to make it more than just a run tracker. The personal coaching and tips from Jeff Galloway throughout the workout makes time speed by, and the Beat Sync music abilities make this an all-around pretty awesome iPhone app.

Sara’s rating: 5/5!

N.B. This is a review of the iPhone app, but there are iPad and Android versions as well.

The Daily Burn Tracker combines everything you need to lose weight and manage your nutritional intake each day. You can track your diet with the food diary, track a workout, and track your weight, all in the one place. Then as you’re going through the motions you can view your progress with some handy visual graphs. Some of us are just more visual and need to “see” our progress in order to continue to motivate ourselves!

To start using Daily Burn, you will want to go through the “get started” section and set up your account. It’ll ask you for the usual 411, including height, weight, and health goals. With this information, it will determine how many calories a day you will want to consume.

Once you’re set up and ready to go, you can do three things – track your nutrition, track your workouts, and track your weight. Tracking nutrition through the Daily Burn app is pretty simple. You do a quick search of their database and bring up whatever it is that you ate. If you upgrade to the Pro version, you’ll also be able to use the iPhone’s camera to scan bar codes and add foods that way.

Tracking your workouts is simple as well – you enter in what you did and for how long, and the app will automatically calculate the calories burned by using your current weight and height. This will provide a more accurate calorie count than the generic ones found in most fitness apps. Additionally, what’s nice about the Daily Burn app is that you can select from some preset workout routines. You select how often you want to do the workout, and then let Daily Burn guide you through the routine. Easy peasy!

Every now and then, weigh in and enter it in on the app. Over time, you’ll be able to see your progress in the graphing section. This is one of the most inspirational parts of any fitness app – seeing how far you’ve come!?

The Daily Burn Tracker is an easy-to-use, foolproof way to keep track of your food intake and workouts. It is simple to navigate, easy on the eyes, and definitely a great way to get started living a better lifestyle. And being a free app, there are truly no excuses!

Sara’s rating: 4/5

My Pocket Coach is an iPhone app created by 2Morrow Mobile, to help motivate individuals to make or break habits. Whether you want to stop smoking or start walking everyday, My Pocket Coach can help you track your progress in achieving (or breaking!) habits and goals.

When you first load up the app, you will be greeted with a simple, easy tour of the program. It will show you how to set up habits, how to find graphs and reports of your past history of compliance, and it will give you some tips as to how to make the app work best for you. The tour doesn’t take long, and it helps you get the gist of how the app functions.

Then it’s time to start adding the habits you want to make or break. The app has a variety of preset goals; it splits them between coach-recommended, physical, emotional (mental well-being), and time management goals. You can add your own custom goals if you can’t find what you’re looking for. From balancing your checkbook every day to making sure you’re headed to bed at a decent time, all of these habits are good for most individuals to consider adding to the “make or break” list.

The app isn’t glaringly beautiful, but it’s fully functional with a few ways to customize the look and feel. You can change icons and images, and some other settings to make the app your own. You can also set up push notifications, including motivational messages. Reminders can be sent as a mass push or set up separately for each goal or habit.

As you meet each goal for the day you can check it off. As time goes by, you are able to view graphs and reports to show you how much you’ve accomplished, how long you’re streaks are, and any other patterns you can find. For many of us, visualizing our improvements helps to motivate us even more in getting the new habits into daily life. My Pocket Coach focuses on this visual stimulation to boost self-confidence and help you gather the energy to push onwards and upwards.

There is so much to this app to learn, and taking a little time to navigate around will help you better understand everything it will do for you. You can integrate it with Facebook and Twitter, and back it up to your DropBox account in the event of data loss. You can even set a password to lock your account – noone can spy on your goals.

For anyone looking for a way to track their goals and “make or break” some personal habits for good, My Pocket Coach will do the trick. This free app is a great way to get started in busting through old habits and work on a more positive lifestyle.

Sara’s rating: 3.5

If you want to watch what you eat and lose a little weight, you may be interested in Livestrong’s MyPlate Calorie Tracker.

MyPlate is available on the web and iPhone, for Blackberry and Windows Phone 7 (whatever that is). You set up your profile on their website, including some basics like how much you weigh, how tall you are, what your activity level is, and what your weight goal is (gain, maintain, or lose). Based on this information, the program gives you a daily calorie allowance for meeting your weight goal over time.

During the day you can quickly and easily add the foods you eat into the food diary. When you exercise you can track your activity and the program will automatically figure out the equivalent calories for the workout and add it to your outstanding calorie balance. So if you’re cutting it close come the end of the day but can’t resist a McDonald’s sundae, bust a move and burn some calories. It’ll free up the calories you need for the sundae and you can stay within your daily goal!

The site and apps have a wide variety of exercises and levels, in contrast to most other offerings that give you a flat calorie count for each exercise. If you add yoga for example, it offers Hatha, power & bikram – you can narrow down the exercise to get a count that is more realistic to what you’re doing.

You can track breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks and water with the app, and it syncs with the website so it’s independent of where you are. No more trying to remember what you had and entering it all in at once. Real time calorie counting is the way to go!

Of course, every few days or so, it doesn’t hurt to weigh yourself and add it into the chart. The site and app will then graph your progress so you can see where you’re at with your goal, and you can link weight loss with your food diary to see what works best.

This app is the best calorie tracking app / website that I’ve used. Hands down. Why?

First off, pretty much every food item you could ever eat is in the database, and it’s continually being updated by users. On other sites I’ve found it’s not always possible to be precise, and I’ve had to substitute other brands or products. With Livestrong I haven’t failed to find what I want once. If you’re munching on a new product and have the box handy, you can always add the food to the system by punching in all the nutritional information yourself. Then that product is available for others to add to their own food diaries. Nothing like making a contribution to the site to help make it bigger and better!??

The best part of this app is that you can add in your own recipes. Say I have a recipe for family lasagna. Sure, you could go in and add a random lasagna to your food diary, but you wouldn’t have accurate nutritional information. With the Livestrong MyPlate Calorie Counter, you can actually construct a recipe. For lasagna, I would add in my pound of ground beef, my jar of tomato sauce, the noodles, etc. Then I would create the recipe and name it whatever I want, say, “Family Lasagna.” Then, if I ate a tenth of the lasagna, I could add the item to my food diary and punch in .10 to record the exact nutritional totals for my dinner. This is one of the things that sold me on the app; I make a lot of meals at home from scratch.

If you’re serious about eating right, working out, and watching your water intake, I would highly recommend the MyPlate Calorie Tracker. Whether you’re hitting the fast food restaurants or making all your meals from home, you will be able to track anything and everything. You can’t go wrong with such an intuitive, thorough service!

Sara’s rating: 5/5!

Think you know your healthy foods?  Think again.

I consider myself a pretty healthy eater, but the Fooducate iPhone app has definitely educated me  about what I keep in my kitchen cupboards.  Sure, we all know that candy and potato chips are unwelcome in a healthy diet, but even the things I thought were healthy have hidden additives, trans-fat (even when not on the label!) and other intriguing bi-products that I never imagined were in my food.  Thanks to the Fooducate app, I now better understand what it is I’m bringing in the house -even when I’m at the grocery store!

Fooducate is an iPhone app that lets you scan the bar codes of foods and learn more about their contents, how good they are for you, and even offer  alternatives that may be healthier.  The process is simple – use your iPhone’s camera to scan the UPC bar code on the package, and  you’re presented with a screen that gives you a rundown of everything you need to know about the food.  Fooducate gives you at-a-glance information, including a “grade” and helpful notes and warnings.

So…when I scanned my can of store brand pineapple slices, Fooducate graded it an B+ and let me know that it was naturally high in vitamin C, had no added sweeteners, and was a minimally processed food.  Of course, if I was looking for a food with a better grade than a B+ I could hit the “alternatives” button and be shown a screen of equally delicious products with higher ratings.  In this case the app suggested Dole Tropical Gold Pineapple Chunks (A- rating).

So then I decided to see exactly how “healthy” my bag of Frito Lay corn chips were!  Well, Fooducate rates it at a C.  When I clicked to find alternatives, it suggested a few different brands of corn and tortilla chips graded at C+, and threw in popcorn graded at an A-.  I’m sorry, but if I’m in the mood to eat corn chips, I’m definitely not going to popcorn.  Just sayin’.

Some of the items I scanned had lower scores than I expected.  Take for example Special K Chocolatey Delight cereal.  You’d think it’d be healthy, right?! Well, it’s graded C-.  The app lets me know that it has trans-fat (because it has traces that the FDA doesn’t require be on the nutrition label), 2.5 teaspoons of sugar per serving, has high fructose corn syrup, and BHT additive, which studies show to be carcinogenic and should be avoided. Huh. Who knew?  Even my loaf of Sara Lee whole wheat bread didn’t score nearly as high as I expected.  You’d think it would score an A, but it was actually a B and the app notified me of several additives.

Scan a food that isn’t in their database?  Happened to me, but I was a good citizen and helped expand it.  When you scan an item that they don’t have it gives you the option to  add it.  You take three photos – one of the front of the product, one of the nutrition label, and one of the ingredients list.  Then you can quickly and easily email the file to the company and they add it in their system.  Nice!

The app has several other features which are handy. It stores what you scanned in your history, and you can create a shopping list for the grocery store. It also has a quick link to their blog where you can read daily health news.

This is a great, in-depth app that is available through the App Store for free.  You can upgrade to the non-ad version, but I didn’t find the ads disruptive to the usability of this app.  It’s a great app for anyone that wants to be more aware of what they’re eating and what kinds of additives and ingredients are in their foods.

But who are we kidding?  We all know that the healthiest foods DON’T have a bar code!

Sara’s rating: 5/5!

We will shortly be releasing a new platform for clinicians, to help them collaborate closely with their clients who use Optimism. There will be a choice of plans for using this platform, including a free option for use with a small number of clients and paid options for a larger number.

The existing Optimism apps will now be free, regardless of whether they are used with a clinician. And despite being free, we are committed to their continual improvement and releasing new versions for other devices.

If you have purchased a license in the past, we want to express our gratitude again. Thank you! Your purchase has helped us reach the position where we can make this announcement today.

Home Page | Web App Demo | Web App Registration

Mac OS X Download | Windows Download | iPhone Download

 Please support the apps by forwarding this announcement to others who might benefit from them.

If you have a website, please consider pointing your readers to our home page.
Here is a snippet: <a href=”http://www.findingoptimism.com”>Optimism Mood Chart Apps</a>

]]> http://www.findingoptimism.com/blog/apps/special-announcement/feed/ 0 http://www.findingoptimism.com/blog/around-the-web/i-can-never-get-to-bed-on-time/ http://www.findingoptimism.com/blog/around-the-web/i-can-never-get-to-bed-on-time/#comments Thu, 08 Mar 2012 00:37:46 +0000 james http://www.findingoptimism.com/blog/?p=1985 The reason is I don’t have a bedtime. Between 12 and 2 is the norm, but any time 6 hours either side isn’t unusual.

Here’s a video by Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project, with a challenge to take bedtimes seriously.

She expands on the video at Psych Central, with 7 tips for getting to bed “on time”.

• Give yourself a specific bedtime (really, it’s the key)
• Don’t wait until you’re sleepy
• Stay away from the internet for at least an hour beforehand
• No caffeine for several hours beforehand (that’s 8 hrs for me)
• Remind yourself how great it feels to wake up naturally
• Get ready for bed well ahead of time
• Create a bedtime ritual that you do every night.

To read the reasoning for each visit the Psych Central post.

Why am I writing about this? Because getting enough sleep is just about the best thing you can do for your mental health.

I’m using reminders on my phone to tell me to go to bed – at the same time each night. 3 nights so far and it’s working.

Following on from the Happiness Advantage post, YES! Magazine has an article about the 10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy. In summary they are:

• Savor everyday moments
• Avoid comparisons with others
• Put money low on the list
• Have meaningful goals
• Take initiative at work
• Make friends and treasure family
• Smile even when you don’t feel like it
• Say thank you like you mean it
• Exercise
• Donate or spend money on others

Read the 10 Things post for the fleshed out details.

These things are easier said than done, even when you’re well, but I think it’s a good purposeful list of things for the mental health toolbox.