Since the introduction of the iPhone 5s, we’ve seen several fitness related apps appear on the App Store. Most of these apps use the iPhone 5s’ M7 motion coprocessor to track your steps. Get Moving is an app that not only tracks your steps (using the M7 motion coprocessor) but also your inactivity. The app uses some beautiful colours and glyphs to display useful activity tracking information.
The main screen of the app has an attractive circular figure situated right in the center with little divisions around the circumference, each displaying information based on your daily activity. This information includes the number of calories burned, number of steps taken, total active time and total distance covered. The center of this wheel contains a timer called the ‘inactivity timer’. The concept of the inactivity timer is quite interesting. The idea is to remind you to get moving once every x minutes – x being the number of minutes you preset for the timer. So if you haven’t been active for an hour, the app will remind you at the end of the hour to get moving. The timer automatically resets if you start moving so its continuously running in the background. You can choose to have the timer repeat if you want as well. While the timer is running, the app also tracks your current location and collects information on the number of hours/minutes you were inactive in a particular location. As you might expect, this can have an adverse effect on your phone’s battery.
Swiping left on the main screen of the app takes you to a beautiful view that displays the past week’s activity information. I like the way the data is displayed here, especially the row on top that displays the weekly totals based on the app’s theme colours. One more swipe to the left takes you to ‘Weekly Inactivity’ screen which shows you where and on which day you were most inactive. Again, the summary row presented on top of the view is what I liked the most here. There’s a settings page in the app that lets you change the app’s colour theme, edit your vitals, change from imperial to metric system and some more options. The app does have some nice colour themes but I feel the default theme suits the app the best.
Get Moving is centered around a good idea – motivating you to be more active by showing you how inactive you’ve been. I have a couple of gripes with the app though. First, my phone’s battery seemed to die extremely fast after I gave the app permission to use my location data. I also found that the font size in some parts of the app, especially in the help screens, was too small. If you’re looking for an app to motivate you to get off that couch and get active, you might want to download Get Moving. The app is available for $0.99 on the App Store.