04 June 2010

Share your whereabouts with Foursquare, Cotchin! and the N900


I've had some problems with Barriosquare where I've not been able to get a GPS fix which made the app more or less useless. Therefore I've for a while been using the FourSquare mobile website, but that has not been a very good solution since it is not very well optimized for touch and the N900. Then the other day I found Cotchin! which is a web based FourSquare client that works brilliant for the N900 because it's fast and very finger friendly. The only complaint I have about Cotchin! is that it's ugly the colour and the icons some work, but apart from that I really like it. If you want to try Cotchin! go to Cotchin! mobile website.










Get fit with eCoach and HeiaHeia.com


I have not been posting for a very long time but I've been very busy with my studies. I'm planning to start running again this summer and today I went for my first run. When I used my N82 I was using Nokia Sports Tracker to record and share my workouts but since the N900 is not supported by Nokia Sports Tracker I had to find another way to do that.

The solution was eCoach and HeiaHeia.com. eCoach works, like the Nokia Sports Tracker app for Symbian, by recording your workout using the GPS. While you are recording you can see you progress on a map or data showing your speed, time and the distance.

After you finish the workout you can view a graph showing speed vs time and altitude vs time. eCoach also have support for using a heart monitor (FRWD B600 and Zephyr HxM) but unfortunately I do not have such one. The latest version of eCoach supports upload to HeiaHeia.com. HeiaHeia.com got its name from the Norwegian Heia! Heia! chant for their cross-country skiers and other athletes, and it is a service that combines training diaries and social networking. The reason why I like HeiaHeia.com is that I can share my workouts via Twitter or the HeiaHeia app on Facebook.

Although I like to be able to record and share my workouts with eCoach and HeiaHeia.com, I still find that some features missing. When I upload my workout to HeiaHeia.com it does not contain any of the GPS information that eCoach gathered, I would love to be able to show of the route of the workout online. Also I do not seem to be able to share my workout to my wall on Facebook only to the HeiaHeia Facebook app and I can't seem to figure out how to change the language of the HeiaHeia Facebook app from Finnish.All in all eCoach and HeiaHeia.com is enough for my basic needs, but I do hope that we'll see some development especially on the HeiaHeia.com side so that this will be able to compete with Nokia Sports Tracker.

I have for years now been using iTunes on my PC because in my opinion it's the best music-player for PC. But because iTunes is an Apple product it does not work with any other device then the iPhone and iPod and that is very annoying. So what do you do when you want to sync you Nokia N900 with iTunes, well you could do like me and use Salling Media Sync. With Salling Media Sync you can sync music, podcasts and photos. When syncing music you can choose to sync all you music or just specific playlists. Salling Media Sync is free in the unregistered version, the only drawback when using that version is that whenever you want to sync you music to the N900 Salling Media Sync will delete all the music and re-transfer it making sync time longer then when using the registered version where Salling Media Sync only transfer the new music to the N900.