And today something we don’t get to do nearly enough around here; play with a new toy! Specifically, soon as we found out that there was such a thing as a wifi-enabled weight scale with an iPhone app — no, seriously, a wifi-enabled weight scale, with an iPhone app, you read that right –
– well hey, we just had to order that sucker immediately. So you get it in a couple days, the Withings people are good with their shipping, and — ooh! It’s shiny! — snap in the batteries and connect it up with the USB cable and go to their website, and it downloads a little native application that fixes your shiny new scale all up for you:
There’s just something intrinsically hilarious about a dialog that reads “Restarting the scale…” isn’t there now? Ah, the marvelous cognitive dissonance of our increasingly wired world. Oops, we mean, “wireless”, because the included USB cable mentioned above is only for the initial setup apparently, once you’ve sorted it out with the target wifi network apparently you don’t need it again. Surfing around the web we saw some complaints from people who claimed it wasn’t so good at connecting, but certainly we haven’t had any trouble getting started; found a place for it, hopped on, waited a few seconds for the little fat-measuring bar to dance across, and yeppers by the time we got back to the computer there it was on their web dashboard. You can even have it tweet every measurement, if you’re like extra narcissistic or something; but we figure that for pretty much everybody in the world except ourselves knowing the exact fat content of a troll would be way way into the TMI category.
And, of course, the defensible motivation for getting this shiny toy was to check out the iPhone app integration,
which is quite nicely done indeed. About the same information as in the web browser interface, but very dextrously adapted to the iPhone, particularly the very natural feeling way they use swiping and orientation changing to get the various graphs displayed. Nice job all around, and worth taking a gander at if you’re designing any kind of horizontally charted data displaying application, we’d say.
So there you go. If you’re really obsessed about tracking your weight/fat composition comprehensively, or if you just dig cool toys, we quite thoroughly recommend picking one of these up! At least judging by our exactly one weighing so far; but hey, how cool is it to say “there’s an app for that” about your weight scale?
