Jawbone Announces UP Platform API, Partnerships, and Acquisition of BodyMedia

Between occasional swaps during the initial run of Jawbone UP wristbands, I wore the original device for a year and continued as Jawbone’s refreshed model hit the marketplace. With UP 2.0 came an updated iPhone app, and Jawbone finally seemed prepared to launch an overdue API that developers could extrapolate data from. And while Jawbone’s bracelet was being refreshed, Nike parternered with Path for their Nike+ FuelBand for sharing their daily progress, something that was similarly suggested by TechCrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis for the UP just months before. I can’t help but admit the same thought crossed my mind as an early adopter.

This morning, Jawbone announced their new UP Platform, a closed API that’s currently available to developers per application and approval. Currently, Jawbone has said that ten partners have worked with the company to integrate their services with the UP app for iPhone (with Android support coming soon).

Beginning today, the UP app version 2.5 for iOS enables you to integrate any of these 10
best-in-class services: IFTTT, LoseIt!, Maxwell Health, MapMyFitness, MyFitnessPal, Notch, RunKeeper,
Sleepio™, Wello® and Withings.

Integration with these services is mostly inclusive to the UP app however, presenting additional workout data or weight trends alongside Jawbone’s regular sleep or activity goals. The clear differentiator and the service that has the most potential to do interesting things with UP data is IFTTT, as Lex Friedman from Macworld explains.

Kittredge sounded particularly enthusiastic regarding the IFTTT integration, suggesting several clever “recipes” that Up users could try with that service, such as: If I sleep too little, text me later in the day that I should go to bed earlier; if I log a certain number of steps, tweet about it; or each day, append my progress to a Google document.

Also announced by Jawbone today is an acquisition of BodyMedia, a company that specializes in weight and calorie management, overall activity, and sleep tracking with their Armband and accessories. In their press release, Jawbone says that BodyMedia has the only platform of its kind registered with the FDA as a Class II medical device and that is additionally clinically proven to enhance weight loss.

“Jawbone’s deep expertise with consumer technology, design, and building products that fit seamlessly
into people’s lives is the best way to carry forward many of the innovations that BodyMedia has
developed over the past 14 years,” said Christine Robins, CEO of BodyMedia. “We are eager to pair our
depth of insight and IP with Jawbone’s expertise so that together, we can make an even bigger impact
on people’s health and help them achieve their goals.”

Jawbone launched the UP in 2011 and unfortunately, the band came under intense scrutiny as manufacturing issues resulted in problems such as the bracelets losing their charge after a couple of weeks. Hosain Rahman, CEO of Jawbone, offered early adopters the chance to get a full refund to rectify the issue and examine the problem. With the launch of UP 2.0, Jawbone didn’t just fix the issue, but reengineered the device to make it even more durable and water resistant.

The single-most thing that has me excited about the UP Platform is not only Jawbone’s commitment to making a better product, but also the opportunity for breaking data out of Jawbone’s mobile app. Unlike FitBit for example, there isn’t a web front where someone can log in and access their data — the UP band has to be plugged into an iPhone or Android phone first, and that phone becomes the sole gateway to your information. People wearing the UP band are probably using the device in different ways: for example I don’t track what I consume with Jawbone’s app for calorie tracking, but I do run and track steps. There’s potential for a developer to come behind and complement the data that I actually use and hide what I don’t need or want to see, personalizing my Jawbone dashboard from generalized data to something that shows me improved workout statistics. With any luck and a good developer, I’m also hoping that the UP Platform also lets developers use the band in more interesting ways, such as tracking pushups or body workouts instead of just steps. Integration with a partner like Wello gives me confidence that Jawbone is stepping in that direction.

[via Macworld]

Feed Wrangler: A New RSS Reader With Smart Streams, Filters, Read Later Integration

Feed Wrangler

Feed Wrangler

“I wanted to take a slightly different take on the concept of what an RSS platform should do”, David Smith, independent developer and podcaster, told me about his new product, Feed Wrangler.

Soon after Google revealed they would discontinue their RSS service Reader this July, a slew of companies were quick to announce their existing news reading apps would either support “importing” features to let Google Reader users quickly migrate or, in some cases, be updated with APIs cloning the unofficial Reader one, allowing other developers to tweak their RSS clients for new API endpoints. This is what apps and services like Flipboard, Zite, Digg, and Feedly are doing. Instead, David Smith did something different: he announced he’d be launching an entirely new RSS syncing service, called Feed Wrangler, for an annual fee:

I believe the reason that Google turned its back on Reader and left its users hanging is that they were users not customers. I’m not interested in building a platform designed to attract as many users as possible and then work out how to sustain it later. I want to instead build something that is sustainable from Day 1. I want my customers to feel confident that they can expect this to be around long into the future. I want to build a relationship with them and make something they really, really love.

Feed Wrangler, open to the public today, comes with a website, a suite of native apps, and a $19 annual subscription. Read more

Happy Birthday iTunes Store→

Good roundup of iTunes Store numbers (with subsequent inferences) by Horace Dediu.

I meant to include the following chart in our Q2 2013 overview, but I didn’t have time to create it. Below, you can see how the 850,000 App Store apps Apple touted last week are divided across the iPhone and iPad after the launch of each device’s App Store (July 2008 for iPhone, April 2010 for iPad).

The increase you see after the iPad’s 30th month corresponds to October 2012 – when Apple unveiled the iPad mini.

(click for full size)

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Lessons From The Yahoo Weather App→

Dan Frommer:

“Do we really need another weather app?” Actually, if it’s better, we do. Imagine if they’d stopped making new search engines after HotBot or new smartphones after the Samsung BlackJack.

I couldn’t agree more.

For free/inexpensive apps, the traditional rules of market saturation allow consumers to more comfortably try new apps; at the same time, annual OS updates enable developers to constantly experiment with more powerful technologies to fix problems consumers didn’t even think they had.

Apps are not refrigerators. With software, the diffusion of innovations is cyclic, and that’s why, as far as the App Store is concerned, editorial curation, smart recommendations, and new discovery algorithms will be key areas of improvement. We should never stop thinking about tomorrow.

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Google Now Comes To iOS with Search App Update

Last month, it was rumored that Google would release Google Now for iOS through an update to its existing Search app for iPhone and iPad. Version 3.0 of the app, released today on the App Store, indeed adds Google Now functionality by displaying weather and traffic data, updates on sports teams and “breaking news”, and more directly within the iOS app. Read more

Why Are Calendar Apps Dumb?→

Smart piece by Jason Snell.

There are two key factors involved here: old interface patterns and constant data collection. New designs can be experimented with; parsing data introduces layers of complexity that go deeper than providing a new month view.

Google is working on this kind of technology with Now. It’s plausible to assume Apple is, too.

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Nebulous Notes 6.1 Gets MultiMarkdown Previews, Full Folder Sync

Nebulous Notes

Nebulous Notes

Nebulous Notes is, in my opinion, the most powerful iOS text editor the App Store has seen so far. Here’s what I wrote last August:

Combining Nebulous’ support for text substitution and cursor position macros has enabled me to achieve a powerful workflow when it comes to writing in Markdown. For instance, I can select words I want to turn into inline links, and have the app automatically wrap them between square brackets, and paste the contents of my clipboard (the link) to the right. To copy Markdown-ready links, I use my own bookmarklet. Or if I want to create a list, I can hit a button that inserts an asterisk and a space. Or again, if I need to create a text file with a format that OmniOutliner recognizes correctly, I can indent items with Nebulous’ $tab and $cursor macros.

I posted a follow-up in October showing the macros I use for faster Markdown editing, and then I noted in a separate post that Nebulous’s preview feature could use some work:

Nebulous Notes‘ own preview generator is far from ideal. You can use your custom CSS to make it prettier, but it still won’t handle footnotes (formatted as once suggested by John Gruber, though Markdown doesn’t officially support them) and the image isn’t centered.

Nebulous Notes 6.1, released today, brings a number of improvements focused on previews and sync with Dropbox. First and foremost, the app now comes with proper MultiMarkdown previews that render footnotes correctly: while images still won’t be resized and centered on screen (this, for me, is an issue on the iPhone’s smaller screen), this new version is undoubtedly a big step forward for those who rely on MultiMarkdown for their daily writing. With the addition of Avenir (in both regular and Next variations), Nebulous Notes previews are now MMD-ready and nice to look at.

The other noteworthy addition is full folder sync for Dropbox. It used to be that, per Nebulous’ own “syncing” mechanism, each text file would have to be manually refreshed to get the latest changes; in 6.1, an entire folder can be synced by tapping the refresh icon in the bottom toolbar. Nebulous Notes is still far from Byword’s no-manual-interaction-required sync, but the change is welcome.

There are other minor improvements and new features in Nebulous Notes 6.1. The iPhone app now has two new one-button toggles to lock the orientation and hide the macro bar; there are new $rline and $lline macros to jump to the end or start of a line; and last, you can now tag files with #hashtags, which I guess can come in handy if you want to search for specific groups of files in that way (I don’t).

Nebulous Notes still needs a complete overhaul in terms of search and sync (and an in-app browser for research purposes would be useful), but version 6.1 is a solid, much-needed update. You can get it now from the App Store.