I’ve been using a Fitbit for a few years now. My previous device was the the original clip-on Fitbit. I liked it because I could drop it in my pocket and keep track of my steps everyday. I’m geeky enough to know that stat tracking will actually increase the likelihood of me parking extra far from my destination and walking the stairs instead of riding the elevator. 

A few months ago, my Fitbit went missing. I actually know exactly where I lost it but that is a long, sad story. Instead, I’m going to tell you about my new Fitbit Force. The FitBit Force is Fitbit’s newest device. Instead of going in your pocket or on your belt, this one straps on your wrist with an unassuming rubber/plastic band. I’d always avoided wrist based step trackers in the past because I spend a lot of time at the day job in dress clothing and they never seemed to quite fit in. This new Fitbit however, works just fine. I’ve been wearing it to work for a few months and nobody has asked me about it or paid particular attention to it. I think this is a combination of the subtle design and the fact more people are wearing fitness trackers these days.

There isn’t much to the Fitbit Force it has a rubber strap and no discernible body like a traditional watch. The device is always tracking your activities but does not light up its tiny OLED screen until you push its only button (located on its left side). The Fitbit Force then gives you the time. Subsequent button pushes provide your total steps, total distance walked, calories burned, stairs climbed, and number of high activity minutes. If you set an alarm, that shows up too.

The Force gets about a week on a charge and recharges with a USB cable attached to a proprietary connection on the back of the device. I plug it in once in awhile while sitting at my desk and it a few hours to charge. 

There are some definite advantages to having my Fitbit on my wrist. For one thing, I don’t have to move it between clothes. It is always just … on. With the prior device I would occasionally leave it in yesterday’s pants and lose a day of stat tracking. That’s never happened since I bought the Force. I even keep it on while I sleep since it also does a pretty good job of tracking sleep. 

Another advantage is that it doubles as a watch. You can change the watch faces, sort of. There is no actual watch face. It is just a line of text. You can, however, change how it displays that text slightly. Because it is on my wrist it also acts as a silent alarm clock, buzzing away at the designated time.
 
My biggest concern is the clasp. Most watches have an interlocking clasp that requires a failure of the watch strap material before the watch falls off your wrist. The clasp on this gadget isn’t nearly so secure. Instead it works with a series of semi-rectangular holes on one piece and a plastic bit on the other piece that presses through the holes and is supposed to hold it together with friction. I call it the “plastic bit” because it doesn’t feel nearly secure enough to justify the word “buckle”. At first it was actually quite difficult getting the plastic bit through through the rubber bit to strap the Fitbit on. Over time, however, this has become increasingly easier. That is the part that scares me. The easier it gets to press the plastic bit through the rubber bit, the easier it would seem for the plastic bit to come loose from the rubber bit and my $130 fitness tracker falls off without me realizing it. So far it is holding up but something tells me that if I gave this to Dr. Drang for a few days, he could predict with scientific accuracy when the rubber will no longer hold the plastic bit. It did come off once when I was putting my hand my jacket pocket and the fabric slid between the rubber and the plastic bit. The force of my hand going in the pocket then popped the clip loose from the strap. The Fitbit then slid off my wrist into my pocket. That’s not good. If you get one of these, hang onto the receipt. You may need to have a conversation with Fitbit about bad clasp design and a replacement one day.

Despite my concerns about the clasp, this new Fitbit is a definite improvement over my prior device. Now having a wrist based stat tracker, I don’t see myself going back to a clip-on model. It is more convenient and useful on my wrist.

I’ve been fiddling a lot lately with the resolution settings on my 15″ Retina MacBook Pro. As it ships the machine is set at a virtualized 1440 x 900. The native screen resolution is actually double that at 2880 x 1800 so where before you got one pixel, now you get four.

This is all over-simplified and Apple explains it better but the end result is that this display is wicked sharp and text looks amazing. It is so good that I recommend you not look at one of these if you are not willing to go buy one because your old screen will never look the same after you spend any time on a retina screen. It wrecks you.

Another benefit of this fancy screen is that because the pixels are so small, scaling them doesn’t make the screen look terrible. With past screens, the pixels were large enough that if you scaled the screen to anything other than its native reolution, it looked like garbage. Don’t believe me? Take your standard resolution Mac right now and try a few different resolutions. You’ll immediately recognize the sharpness of the native resolution and type on all of the others will look like a jaggy mess.

With the retina screen, the jaggy mess is so small that you just don’t see it. As a result you can use one of several resolutions other than the native resolution and get away with it.

This brings me to point of this post. I’ve been playing with the non-native resolutions as of late. Particularly I’ve been trying the virtualized 1920 x 1200 and 1680 x 1050. You can set these in the displays preference pane with the two screen icons to the right of the “Best” setting, which does use the native resolution.

Having spent a few months at this I’ve come to two conclusions:

1. Using non-native resolutions on the retina display is an option when I need more screen real estate. It looks fine and very nearly as sharp as the native resolution. I say “nearly” because if I really focus in, it is not quite as sharp. However, the difference is so small that I don’t notice it while working.
    
2. I don’t need anything bigger than the native resolution often. The more I spend time in the “bigger” resolutions, the more I appreciate the native resolution. For me it is the perfect fit of point size and mouse targets. At this point I’ve reverted to using the “Best” 1400 x 900 most of the time but will bump up the resolution when I’m doing something that requires multipble big apps. That is probably about once a week. I think part of the reason why I’m not using the big resolution full time is that even though this is a 15″ machine, I like using full screen mode. The freedom from other apps distracting me and not having to dig through windows makes me faster. I use the Spaces gesture (four fingers swiping up on the trackpad) and find I’m able to app switch between spaces quickly. If I wasn’t such a big Spaces user, I may be more inclined to leave the resolution higher.

Every year about this time I start prattling on about Macworld. The fact is that my trip to Macworld once a year feels more like attending a pilgrimage than a conference. It is probably because MacSparky is not my only gig that it really feels good once a year to go and bask in my MacSparky-ness. There is something to be said for spending time in a city full of Apple geeks and if you haven’t done it yet, you should really try this year.

Macworld/iWorld runs March 27 – 29, 2014 in San Francisco and you can get get all the details here. I’ll be speaking, as will Katie Floyd, and a big assortment of other talented people. There will be interesting vendors, plenty of parties, and other assorted geek culture you’ll enjoy. For any Mac Power Users fans who want to join the fun use coupon code TDDS14 at checkout to purchase Macworld/iWorld Expo Only Pass for $10 or get a full conference pass for only $149. (The full conference is totally worth it.) The discount code expires Noon Eastern on Wednesday,  January 29, 2014. That is a lot of savings so dont miss out.

Also, if you do decide to attend, please track me down and say hello.

There is a new Productive Macs Bundle. This one includes several gems including:

• Shortcat (Usually $24)
• iRip (Usually $24.95)
• ExpanDrive (Usually $39.95)
• Hands Off! (Usually $49.99)
• Raskin (Usually $24.99)
• MacSnapper (Usually $49)
• LilyView (Usually $4.99)
• Cocktail (Usually $19)

You can get all eight for 30 bucks.

I’ve used Cocktail quite often for sytem management. Hands Off looks like an interesting security tool that lets you monitor and control access to apps and the Internet on your Mac. I’m also interested in Shortcat, that lets you perform tasks normally requiring the mouse or trackpad from your keyboard. That’s just three of the eight apps. Get it here.

∞

I really like the way the Pixelmator team just doesn’t stop. Late last week they released version 3.1 Marble. The new version deliverers 16-bit per channel images on the new Mac Pro. I bet it screams. Both graphics cards work simultaneously to accelerate composition rendering and compute demanding tasks.

This new version also partners Pixelmator with MILK Print on Demand to offer a new Order Prints feature. You can now order prints right out of Pixelmator. You can get Pixelmator from the Mac App Store and learn more at the Pixelmator web site. 

With my recent upgrade to the iPad Air, I had to retire my Logitech Ultrathin keyboard. Because the new device has a different design, the old Logitech case didn’t work.

Looking into new keyboard cases for the fancy new iPad, I decided this time around I wanted something that would completely enclose my iPad. I don’t always keep my iPad in a keyboard case and, when I do, it is acting much more as a laptop replacement than usual. Therefore, it made sense for me to put it in a case that would protect the entire device.

This time around I decided to go with the Belkin QODE iPad Air keyboard case.

This new case is made from alluminum alloy and extremely light. The iPad air snaps in to the cover and, when closed, it offers full protection to my device. The case has cutouts for the speakers, Lightening port, headphone jack, camera lens, microphone, and iPad Air buttons so the device is fully functional while clipped in. I’ve been using it a month and it still stays in the device firmly but snaps out easily enough when I need it to.

The keyboard has a nice feel to it. The keys are definitely smaller and closer together than on a standard laptop. The keyboard “feel” however, is superior to my Logitech keyboard. There is a dedicated Siri buton and some other custom iOS commands. The keys are well-spaced (to the extent they can be) and responsive. I definitely am faster on this keyboard than I am on the iPad’s touchscreen. The keyboard also includes iPad specific shortcut keys letting me, for instance, play and pause music.

My biggest gripe with the keyboard is key placement. I learned to type with the semicolon under my right pinky and the quote key to its right and the return key to its further right. This keyboard (probably due to space constraints) moved the semicolon key to the bottom to the right of the space bar. This puts the quote key where my brain thinks the semicolon key is and the return key where my brain thinks the quote key is. As a result, my documents sometimes have seemingly random carriage returns at the beginning of very quote and single quotes where you’d expect semicolons. I know attempting to cram a full keyboard into the smaller footprint of the iPad Air can’t be easy but I still think they should have found a better way than moving some of the most commonly used keys. I’d personally have preferred they leave the keys as normal and just made the return key smaller. I’ve now grown used to this quirk and am using the keyboard often. 

The screen props up through the use of magnets to three possible viewing angles. The magnets stay attached and despite all of my bumping and jostling while typing on my lap, they’ve stayed firmly connected. One downside of the multiple viewing angles is a certain degree of bounce in the screen. It’s not locked in at one specific angle so when you tap the screen with your finger, it bounces a bit. I did not find this problem to be troublesome.

One of the most interesting features is the lack of a power button. The device turns off and on as needed. The manufacturer claims the device has 264 hours of active battery life and 4,300 hours of standby. I have not thouroughly tested this but I have been using the keyboard for a month with little respect for the charging cable and had no problems.

Belkin got a lot right with the materials, power management, and viewing angles on this keyboard. The big knock against this keyboard is the keyboard layout alteration. It works just fine on my lap, even without a desk in front of me. If they had found a way to keep the standard keyboard layout, I’d have no problem recommending this keyboard. With the strange layout, I’m more reserved in my recommendation, particularly if you are a touch typist.