Category Archives: Software

App Review: Charity Miles

Charity Miles Home Screen
The applications main screen is a listing of different charities that you can select to donate your exercise to.

Do you walk, run or ride a bike? If so, why not help out different charities for each mile that you go? That’s the idea behind Charity Miles. Walking and running donates 25 cents per mile while biking donates 10 cents per mile.

Once you select the charity that you want to donate to, you select your activity by sliding the exercises at the top, walk, run or bike and then start your activity. As you move around the mile counter will automatically update based off the GPS data that your phone gets, so once you start you don’t need to worry about the application again until the end of your activity.

Continue reading App Review: Charity Miles

RunKeeper and Pebble

RunKeeper is currently having a promo with Pebble to give $25 off of a Pebble Smartwatch to the first 500k people who log an exercise with RunKeeper.  Luckily, I got one of the invite when I ran the Shamrock 15k yesterday.

From March 11th to this year’s Boston Marathon on April 21st, Pebble will be rewarding the RunKeeper community with exclusive discounts ($25) off any of their awesome smart watches, plus free shipping. To qualify you must meet the following criteria:

  • Track at least one GPS activity (running, walking, cycling…etc) with the RunKeeper iPhone or Android app. But act fast! Only the first 500,000 RunKeeper users who log that activity will get the discount!

Read more here:  http://blog.runkeeper.com/1145/were-teaming-up-with-pebble-to-give-you-some-awesome-goodies/

If the promotion is over, get your pebble smart watch here.

Smart Phones and Running

With the invention of the smart phone, running has become more entertaining and data mining friendly. I’ll be the first to admit that when I run, I go a little nuts on the apps that are gathering data and providing content for my run. I have four applications running. These applications are Runkeeper, Nike+ Running, Zombies, Run! and Charity Miles.

Runkeeper has most of my runs in it’s database and provides a lot of data that the other applications do not provide. RK also hooks up to my heart rate monitor, which is nice. This application is usually the app that has the focus.

Nike+ Running has some of my running data, I get “cheers” from Facebook and has stats on my friends to see how I am doing compared to them, distance-wise.

Zombies, Run! provides the content while I run. ZR  unravels  a thrilling story that is mixed in with the music on my phone while I train for the different obstacle course races. ZR makes the training way more entertaining and sometimes pushes me to go further so I can get more of the story.

Charity Miles is just a no brainier. Donate to charity while you walk, bike or run? Why wouldn’t you use this app?

In later posts I will review each of the applications.