review
- I pick a type of workout (like strength, core, or yoga) I’d like to try, and use the filter to choose a length of time I’d like to work out. I want to do strength training for 20 minutes? Here’s a list.
- From that list I choose a trainer. This is convenient if there’s one I like and I want to see more of their workouts, but not as helpful for choosing between them. The app makes the trainers’ biographies available but I was overwhelmed with choices the first time.
- Which exercises a workout includes. If my shoulder hurts, I might want to skip lateral raises.
- Which muscles groups it exercises. Sometimes I’d like to target specific areas like glutes or biceps or shoulders or quads.
- Get the ID of the active item in the app, like the
omnifocus:///task/...link of the selected item in OmniFocus. - Open the item in the app with a given ID.
- Get the name of the active item in the app, like the title of the front tab in Safari.
- Create a new item in the app.
- It’s not available for iPhone and iPad. I’m not sure how an iOS version of Hook would work (perhaps through the Share action? Through drag and drop?), but I wish it were on my favorite mobile platforms. I’m using my iPad for a lot of work I’d would have used my Mac for before and cross-platform tools are splendid. An mobile “Hook Lite” version that supported opening
hook://links would help a lot. - I haven’t met another person using it. Although I’ve read articles about Hook, I’m the only person among my friends, family, and coworkers who has it installed. The link sharing idea could be brilliant if it becomes ubiquitous but I don’t want to be its lone evangelist among the people I know, many of whom are still annoyed by my Emacs and Amiga days.
- CogSci: please ask someone who doesn’t work with you to review your home page. All the information there is technically accurate, but much of it only becomes clear to users who’ve downloaded Hook and experimented with it. If I hadn’t been evaluating the app on the recommendation of a friend, I might not have downloaded it. Your app is cool. Give it some marketing love!
Review: Apple Fitness+
I’ve been using Apple’s Fitness+ service since it came available. It’s still a young product and has lots of room to improve, but its fundamentals are solid. This is what I like and dislike about it.
What I like: doing the exercises
First, the workouts themselves are excellent. They offer exercises I’m not used to, and I’ve found that working with a trainer, even a pre-recorded one that isn’t talking to me personally, motivates me to push harder than I do when I’m working out alone. At the end of a workout I’m exhausted, and the next day my body reminds me that I did something difficult.
This is the litmus test, after all. A trainer that doesn’t challenge and doesn’t push me harder than I would push myself isn’t much of a trainer. Fitness+ meets this requirement in spades.
Second, Fitness+ has a lot of workouts. When it’s time to use one, I want help picking one that’s appropriate to me. The app’s “discoverability” is… decent:
If I know what workout I want to do, and which trainer I want to work with, Fitness+ is fine.
What I don’t like: finding the exercises
But that discoverability is barely sufficient, and leads to my sole criticism. Fitness+ could and should help me find new workouts that are appropriate for me personally, and today it doesn’t.
Within selections, the main differentiator in a screenful of similar-seeming workouts is the genre of background music. I know people may have strong preferences here but I don’t. As of writing there are 15 “Strength with Gregg” workouts. At a glance, I can’t tell the difference between them. Every screenshot shows exercises for both upper and lower body, even though most workouts target certain muscles. Navigating through each available workout exposes that information but it’s a lot of work when I’m ready to start lifting weights and would rather lift than investigate. Better titles like “Leg Strength with Gregg” would help a lot here.
There’s not an option to like or dislike workouts. I want a recommendation system like Apple Music’s: tell me what I might like based on what I’ve enjoyed, not just what’s similar to what I did last time.
Descriptions of workouts are more vague than they should be. For example, one reads “the focus of this workout is upper body, with a new element added to each move as you go.” But what part of my upper body? I want to know:
If Fitness+ had filters that let me specify that I’d like to work my triceps and lats for 20 minutes, or find one that includes hammer curls because that sounds good today, I’d use it a lot.
Workouts need more audio cues. I spend a lot of effort trying to look at the TV so I can pace myself with the trainer, and would like a consistent signal to complete a rep. I wish the producer would add a chime or beep after each movement so that I could follow along without contorting to see the screen.
Finally, many other Apple apps use Siri to power smart recommendations. Putting all the above together, I’d like to see a Fitness+ notification like “you skipped leg day. Here’s a good leg workout you’ll going to like.” It’s easy to rationalize skipping a workout, but harder when someone’s reminding you that you’ve been a couch potato and giving you personalized suggestions for changing that.
Summary
It’s tricky to find an exercise I want in Fitness+, but that’s because there are so very many excellent ones to choose from. And that’s the important part: once I find workouts I like, they motivate me to work harder than I would on my own. I’ve found the accountability, even if it’s to someone who can’t see me and who I’ll never meet, to keep me moving. I am stronger and healthier for using the app than I would be without it.
Apple Fitness+ may have some rough edges, but for a new service that’s still improving, I’m into it.
Review: Hook by CogSci
I’ve been playing with Hook, an app I’ve started hearing about. It’s an interesting bird, and its own docs didn’t explain why I should want to use it. That’s too bad, because after downloading it and playing around for a few days, I understand why people are excited about Hook.
Let me try my own explanation:
It makes deep links into apps
Hook knows how to talk to a lot of other apps (about 150 as of now) and ask or direct them to do a few things:
Those first 2 options are interesting because many of its supported apps don’t offer their own URL scheme. You can refer to a web page by its address or an OmniFocus object by its URL as seen above, but Apple’s own Notes app doesn’t offer a way to make a link to a specific note. Hook solves this by offering its own URL scheme. For instance, if I try to open the URL hook://notes/dt/1498065293 on my Mac, it opens the Hook app, which sees that it’s supposed to open the Notes app, and uses AppleScript or JavaScript wizardry to go straight to the desired note. Or consider emails, each with their own unique Message-ID. Hook accepts URLs like hook://email/[Message-ID] and opens them in your favorite mail app, even if you’ve moved the mail to a different folder or switch mail apps since you copied the link.
That’s slick, and if Hook only allowed me to deep link straight into Mail and Notes and Finder and iTerm (!!!) and VS Code (now you’re showing off), it would be invaluable.
It keeps a database of bidirectional links
The “a-ha!” moment was understanding that Hook itself stores links between objects, even if they’re not editable. For example, suppose you’re viewing a PDF and it reminds you of a web page. You can ask Hook to copy the PDF’s location in Finder. When you open the web page in Safari, you can use Hook’s “Hook to Copied Link” action to make a two-way link (the eponymous “hook”) between the PDF and the web page. That is, if you come back to that web page a week later and wonder what PDF it reminds you of, you can press the Hook shortcut and it will pop up a list of all documents “hooked” to that web page. Use the arrow keys to scroll down to the PDF and press enter, then voila!, it opens the PDF for you.
This is the magic in Hook: you can make linkages between resources that aren’t under your own control. You don’t download a webpage and then edit its metadata to link to the PDF. Hook says “oh, when you’re looking at this page, I’ll remember that it made you interested in this PDF”. And even if that PDF can’t be edited to add a link to the webpage, Hook manages that association for you.
In this sense, Hook is like a personal wiki, except that you don’t have to edit a page to associate bits of data and that doesn’t have to be in the same app. You open the first item and press a few keys, then open the second item and press a few more, and now your system knows that you think these 2 items are related and can remind you of that later. That’s powerful. It’s easy enough to make a link from a Things action to its information resources in DEVONthink. Linking from DEVONthink information back to Things so that you can bounce right back to your project planning without lifting your hands from the keyboard? That’s harder, and it’s the true value of Hook.
A note on terminology: giving things a good name is hard, but I might’ve called “Hook to Copied Link” almost anything else. My mind kept reading “Hook” as a noun, as though I were converting it to a “Copied Link” similar to calling “JPEG to PNG” in a graphics program. Instead it’s a verb: “create a link back to the item whose link is in the clipboard” is clearer to me, although too verbose.
It lets you share links with friends and coworkers
Hook is available in a free version that’s focused on opening links, not making them. The idea is that you can send your coworker a link to a file stored in Git or Dropbox, or an email they were Cc’ed on, and they can go straight to it. That’s nifty, but in practice I can’t imagine my friends tolerating this: “hey Tom, I’m going to send you a link, and you’ll need to download this free app from…” “Stop right there.” Hook is cool and I’ve told several friends about it, but I’m not kidding myself about the likelihood of them all installing it.
Maybe I’ll look back on this in a few years and laugh at my own skepticism because it became the universal standard app that everyone uses, but I’m not counting on it.
Licensing
CogSci, Hook’s authors, have an interesting licensing model: if you buy the “essentials” or “pro” version, you can use any new versions that come out within 12 months of your purchase date for free, forever. If newer versions come out with features you can’t live without, you can buy a discounted renewal license that’s good for another 12 months of updates.
I love this idea. I hate renting software, and this is a nice compromise between an unsustainable “buy it once and get free support for the rest of your life” and “keeps working as long as you keep paying”. I wish this licensing model were the norm.
Drawbacks
The few things I dislike about Hook are minor:
Summary: try it.
I like Hook. I haven’t registered it yet but I’m leaning that way. Again, if Hook only allowed me to create deep links into apps that don’t natively support them, that’s enough reason to buy it. I’m not sold on the life-changingness of the bidirectional links between documents — not because I don’t think it’s an wonderful idea, but because I’m a sucker for things that promise to be the cure for what ails ya and then become disillusioned when they’re not as amazing as I’d hoped. For example, I’d heard that Zettlekasten note keeping is the magic key to life-long productivity, but realized that it’s a nice solution to problems I don’t have. I’m being cautious about Hook for the same reason. But skepticism aside, I think its core conceit that making links between all your related resources is valuable has merit, and Hook makes this easy. I’m still in the trial period my wish is it’s as helpful as CogSci thinks it will be.
Try Hook. I think we’re going to like it.
Dropkick Murphys The Meanest Of Times
This is kind of a hard review to write. Short take on the music: it’s brilliant. If you like Irish folk or punk, you’ll like “The Meanest of Times”. However, I just can’t get past the awful recording quality, and by awful, I mean truly, utterly terrible.
As though the music industry didn’t have enough problems to deal with, such as the string of lawsuits against its customers, the major labels have been busy with something called the “loudness war”. The thinking is that the louder music is played, the better most people will think it sounds. In an effort to make their CDs sounds better than their competitors’, the companies are recording music as loudly as possible. There’s nothing inherently bad about turning up the volume, but they try to squeeze out a few extra decibels by smoothing out the sound so that even the quietest sounds can blow out your speakers.
“The Meanest of Times” is a sad example of this. You’d think that a bunch of angry Irish punks would rattle your fillings, right? Nah. The music is painstakingly compressed until you can tell that someone’s playing the drums, but can’t quite make out the kick or snare.
Track 8, “(F)lannigan’s Ball”, starts with an aggressive bass line. After the first two notes, you know it’s going to be noisy. Too bad the drums kick in then, and the total sound of the bass line and the drums would have been too loud because the sound engineer already had the volume up all the way, so the compressor kicks in to mute both of them. Instead of THUM—THUM—THUM, we get THUM—THUM—splut.
So, there you have it. The music is wonderful, but the sound quality is horrible. “The Meanest of Times” could have been the soundtrack to a riot, but it’s been successfully tamed for the “Matlock” crowd. If your grandpa ever asks what punk music is, give this to him.
We already suspected that Warner Music Group hates their customers, and this just proves it. Go see Dropkick Murphys live if you can and buy lots of their stuff, but don’t bother with this album.