Best Pedometer Apps (Dec 2018)

My loyalties to Accupedo have seriously been challenged the last two or three months, namely because I walk extensively throughout the day and access my pedometer rather frequently, but the last couple of months the app hasn't worked for me. The app sensor didn't clock my steps unless I held my cellphone in my hand! How irritating since the pedometer app is my second most used app, and for years I've made a game of getting at minimum 10,000 steps a day!

Several years ago when choosing a pedometer app, I carefully read through numerous online pedometer app reviews and decided that Accupedo, which was repeatedly featured as one of the best, had the qualities I thought to be most useful: nice appearance, quick visual access to the number of steps taken, a step widget so I wouldn't have to open the app itself, a history log of steps taken, and the bonus of seeing the average steps by day, week, month and year. Nice little package! I downloaded it and have happily used it for years ... until about two months ago. Hmmph! [I do think some of my problems were coming from the slow death of my five-year-old Note 4, and then complicated by the app not automatically updating (which I wasn't aware of) when I bought a new phone and switched the data over to it.]

So I went searching for a new pedometer app, and one that would work. Here's what I found:

So I tested these 6 pedometer apps for 2 consecutive days to draw my conclusions (commenting on them in order from left to right). Info included from the Google Play Store is the name of the app, the creator, the rating based on the 5 point scale, number of people rating the app, and the number of downloads:

PEDOMETER (blue)

ITO Technologies, Inc

4.4 (447,939) 10 million downloads

Comments:

This app didn't start counting till I actually pushed the "start" button. But until I push the "stop" button, it will keep counting, day after day. This is the only app among this group like this, and I don't like this feature. 

However, hello! This is probably going to be my new pedometer app! Why? It counts the steps well, a little more of a hyper counter than the others, which I don't like, but what I really really like about this is -- everything important is on the face screen -- the number of steps and what time during the day the most activity took place! I don't have to flip to another screen to find out what my day's activity was like! Another great point is this app had some of fewest advertisements, and the advertisements stayed at the bottom of the page, not obscuring the quick access when opening or closing the app. 

PEDOMETER STEP COUNTER (pink)

Leap Fitness Group

4.7 (169,403) 10 million downloads

Comments:

Nice appearance but right away I was put off by the pop up advertising to get in and to exit from the app. This totally destroyed my interest in the app, because, as I said earlier, I access this app several times a day and therefore I would be irritated not just in this testing mode, but several times a day. No thanks! That said, it does have a lot of nice features, counts pretty accurately I would say, and has a lot of extra features on other screens, but since it doesn't package the number of steps AND show the activity throughout the day on the face screen while other apps do, this app doesn't "shine" for me. 

PEDOMETER STEP COUNTER (blue)

Simple Design Ltd.

4.7 (86,722) 5 million downloads

Comments:

This app is almost identical to the Pedometer Step Counter (pink) although it is made by Simple Design. It has some extra calorie features, something I don't give a care about but which I turned off for the testing. However, the very very big downside is this app has even more pop-ups than the other Pedometer Step Counter. A lot more! As soon as I downloaded this one, I knew that despite it's pleasant appearance I was going to nix it. I did use it, however, as a kind of control group to test out how evenly the steps would be measured across the six apps. This one seemed to measure quite nicely. If the company would minimize the ads, I'm sure this app would become a popular ped counter. It really has a lot of bonus offerings and isn't limited to just being a pedometer.

DAILY PEDOMETER (dark blue)

ZJB Group

4.5 (17!) 500 downloads

Comments:

Erg. This app loads slowly, and then has a full page advertisement before getting into the app, and then a full page ad exiting. Erg! However, I love the face of this app - not cutesy like many apps are heading nowadays. Simple, somewhat elegant and very clean layout. No, the activity does not show on the face screen, but it does have a bar at the bottom that points toward awards earned. I actually like this feature, namely because I'm a big walker and want to have the challenge of some interesting goals beyond the 10,000 steps a day. I'm already motivated but the awards are unique and would make great competitive goals with a few of my big-time walking friends as well! Awards come in three categories: steps per day, combo, and total distance. 

The total distance category is what I'd like to earn towards:

Everest - 8848m
Marathon - 42km
Canals of Amsterdam - 100km
F1 Circuit - 305km
Thousand Miles - 500km [sic]
A Fuel Tank - 700km
Million Meters - 1,000km
2018 Challenge - 2,018km
Circle the Earth - 40,076km

PEDOMETER STEP COUNTER (blue)

Pacer Health

4.6 (593,802) 10 million downloads

Comments:

This app does have the two key points I'm most interested in: the total number of steps per day and the walking activity measurement, although that activity is not particularly easy to read. This app has a nice appearance, isn't cutesy, puts a lot of focus on calories (something I don't care about), BUT the counter seems to be rather inaccurately low. Notice the totals on all of the apps in this blog entry and you'll see what I mean -- this app has clocked 1,000 - 2,000 less steps than the other 5 apps, so for that reason, if someone is wanting something with a bit more accuracy, this app would NOT be an option. This app has a clean uncluttered appearance (big criteria for me) and is pretty good for my purposes because of the step counter and activity log on the face screen, but it does have some full screen ads, which are annoying and it's very inaccurate in the step count. So, no, this app, while nice, still needs a bit of development.

ACCUPEDO

Corusen LLC

4.0 (50,452) 5 million downloads

Wow, surprised at these statistics because 6-7 years ago when I was choosing a pedometer app, this app along with Noom, which also isn't so popular anymore, were in the top rankings! Since updating this app for this test, the Accupedo works just fine, but it's a little high in the step count, although I think that can be explained as I kept adjusting the step sensitivity so that it would count ... so it now counts in hyper-sensitivity. Anyway, it works and apparently I just had to get a more reliable phone and update the app! However, because Accupedo didn't work during a 2 month period and I've actively embarked on finding the best pedometer app for my purposes, I realize that there are now better apps (for my purposes) on the market and so I'll be saying goodbye to Accupedo. That said, after I updated it, it now has a map to be used with GPS that logs the daily walking trail. This would suck battery and I wouldn't use much at all, but it is a very nice feature and one which was not included in any of the above apps tested.

So, in outcome, the best app for me based on pleasant and not cutesy appearance, the face screen having both step count and activity log, and minimal advertising is ........ Pedometer by ITO Technologies. I have to say, though, that there are now a huge number of great apps to choose from, and this particular one is just my favorite among the tiny number of 6 tested here.

Talking Hands: Signing in an Israeli Village

Margalit Fox, a New York Times reporter trained as a linguist, is the only Western journalist to have set foot in the remarkable Bedouin community in Israel where there is an unusually high rate of deafness. Margalit’s book Talking Hands: What Sign Language Reveals about the Mind (2007) is the outcome of her three-day immersion visit to the village with expert sign linguists. To be allowed into the village as an observer, Margalit had some background in American Sign Language but was under no circumstances to “speak” to anyone during the three days. She was allowed to document but not allowed to contaminate the pure sign language that had evolved in the previous 70 years into a third-generation language. Margalit explored the visit with an analysis of the unique syntactic sign language which was very different from the Israeli Sign Language (ISL), the sign language of the country.

Of Al-Sayyid’s 3,500 residents, about one in 25 is deaf—4% of the population! In Israel and the United States, the incidence of deafness in the general population is about 0.1 percent or one in a 1,000! Unlike in those areas, in Al-Sayyid there is no stigma against being deaf, and because of the high rate of deafness, and because of the remoteness of the village, the rest of the village sees deafness as normal and the majority of hearing villagers are bilingual, signing their local sign language while also speaking Hebrew.

Seventy years ago the first deaf child was born to the community and soon followed by nine more. In this first cohort of deaf children sprouted the pidgin sign which blossomed into the highly communicative local sign language three generations later. However, in the present generation the young deaf children are bussed to a neighboring village to be educated with Israeli Sign Language and linguists are madly trying to document the local sign language that is now  being infiltrated with more and more ISL. Thus, Margalit’s visit with linguists to Al-Sayyid.

Speakers and signers work side by side with almost no job being exclusive for either a speaker or a signer. In fact, the whole village has evolved into a speaking-signing village, but this is not new. From the early 1700s to mid-1900s Martha’s Vineyard had two up-island towns (West Tisbury and Chilmark) where the villagers had so intermarried that their incidences of deafness was one in 49 in Tisbury and one in 25 in Chilmark, just as it is in Al-Sayyid. Also like in Al-Sayyid, signing among all of the townspeople had evolved but was very difficult if not impossible for signing outsiders to understand. Apparently and unique to signing in the United States, Martha’s Vineyard sign language evolved from British Sign Language as 40% of the signs were found to have British cognates while only 22% had overlap with ASL. Martha’s Vineyard sign language was active for about 250 years until islanders started marrying off-islanders, diluting the recessive deaf gene. No deaf signers from Martha’s Vineyard are alive today. Similarly, the demise of the local sign language at Al-Sayyid is expected to rapidly decline, also to marriages outside of the village and with the more globalized education of bussing the young to broader educational opportunities outside of the Al-Sayyid community.

Interesting Points Related to Signing Noted by Margarit Fox

• Al-Sayyid sign language has not evolved differently because of differences related to gender. However, sign language for Dublin’s deaf children was introduced in the mid 1800s by two Dominican nuns but taught in two gender isolated institutions—St. Mary’s School for Deaf Girls and St. Joseph’s School for Deaf Boys. The schools rarely mixed and thus their language evolved radically differently. However, the deaf girls frequently married the deaf boys with the girls learning the dialect of their husbands, making them bilingual Irish Sign Language users. Husbands rarely deigned to learn the dialect of the women as it was viewed as an inferior dialect. With children using the “male” dialect for schooling and interactions, the women’s dialect gradually disappeared.

• In 1917 Thomas Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc opened the Connecticut Asylum for teaching the French version of sign language (the British refused to teach Gallaudet).

• Nicaragua had no widespread education for the deaf until the 1970s. In 1977 a small 50-pupil school was opened and this cohort brought their many home-signs which started a more universal Nicaraguan sign language. The first cohort of students never really attained fluency but they did establish a mean of communication, much like a pidgin language. The second cohort came in 1983 and attached grammar, fluency and syntax to the pidgin, creating a Creole. In the space of just a few years the full-blown Nicaraguan Sign Language had evolved.

• American Sign Language (and perhaps Al-Sayyid Sign Language) evolved into signs for complex words on seemingly an infinite rage and nuance, from compounds to constellations of inflections. As one researchers states, “The existence of such elaborate formal inflectional devices clearly establishes ASL as one of the inflecting languages of the world, like Latin, Russian, and Navajo.”

• Spoonerisms are the reversal of two speech sounds, often with a humorous effect, and were made famous by the Oxford don, Reverend William A. Spooner (1844-1930). Examples:

“the queer old dean”
“noble tons of soil”
“You have hissed all my mystery lecture. I saw you fight a liar in the back quad; in fact, you have tasted the whole worm.” (said to reprimand a student)

Or others not attributed to Spooner:

“Don’t throw your cigarette down, there’s a hire fazard.”
“Who am I to sneeze at a flee runch?”
“We’re having a rot post for dinner.”
“fash and tickle”
“Wing’s babliography”

• Linguists study slips of the tongue to reveal info about language—language structure, language acquisition and historical language change. For signers, slips of the hand can similarly reveal the structure and organization of language.

• Sign language is of “vertical” construction. People can speak faster than they can sign, with the ASL signers producing about two signs per second to typical speakers of English saying about four words per second. However, sign language has “vertical” construction which allows words to be pluralized by a shift in the hand or questions asked by the tilt of the head. In fact, these subtle sign cues make signing easier comparable to spoken English.

• The most commonly word order for spoken languages in the world is SOV, e.g. Japanese and Korean. The local languages of Al-Sayyid are Arabic, a SVO (Standard Arabic is VSO) and Hebrew, also SVO. Israeli Sign Language, however, is relatively free, but the most common orders are SVO and OSV. The local sign language wasn’t specified, but it is modality-driven, has WH-questions tagged on the end, and is clearly a structure consistent language. Imagine that--a language evolving in a mere 70 years!

8 Modern Advancements the Moors Brought to Europeans

The YouTube clip "When Black Men Ruled the World: THE MOORS" (3:05 minutes) sheds light on a little known fact -- on historically, who really was intellectually superior and developed.

“Moors were commonly viewed as being mostly black or very swarthy, and hence the word is often used for negro,” The Oxford English Dictionary

The Moors established an Empire spanning parts of northern Africa to southern Europe, ruling in Europe for nearly 800 years (711-1492 AD), which is longer than Europeans have been out of the Dark Ages,

In fact, the Moorish advances in mathematics, astronomy, art and agriculture brought Europe out of the Dark Ages and into the Renaissance. 

1 - UNIVERSAL EDUCATION — While Christian Europe had a 99% illiteracy rate, 2 universities and 0 libraries, the Moors had 17 universities in 7 cities along with over 70 libraries. The Moors introduced their education system to Europe, bringing it out of 1,000 years of intellectual gloom.

2 - FASHION AND HYGIENE — The Moor Ziryab pioneered the concept of changing clothes based on seasons. He also created deodorant, daily bathing, and invented toothpaste. He made popular the concepts of shaving, haircuts, and hair washing among men.

3 - CUISINE — Ziryab introduced the concept of the three-course meal, which included the soup, main course and desert. The Moors introduced a number of crops that remain prominent in Spain today.

4 - URBAN UTILITIES — Moorish cities had street lights, hospitals, and running water. Paved and lighted streets did not appear in London or Paris for hundreds of years later. Moors built an aqueduct that brought water from the mountains to the city.

5 - MEDICINE — The “father of modern surgery” was the Moor Al Zahrawi, who developed innovative and precise surgical instruments, as well as the premier textbook of Western medical training.

6 - HUMAN FLIGHT — The Moor Ibn Firnas made the first scientific attempt to fly. Although his flight worked, his landing was unsuccessful.

7 - ADVANCED AGRICULTURAL TECHNIQUES — The Moors introduced Spain to rice, hard wheat, cotton, and more. Along with this came knowledge of crop irrigation and cultivation, building underground grain silos that stored grain for up to 100 years.

8 - PAPER MAKING — Moors introduced paper making to Spain, allowing for accurate preservation and dispersal of knowledge.

Paris by Rutherford

I have just discovered another favorite author, Edward Rutherfurd. He writes like my favorite author of many years, James Michener (1907 - 1997) and author of more than 40 books, most of which were historical novels. Michener's historical fiction were typically on countries or geographical areas, and he would travel the area for months, interacting with locals, historians, researchers, delving into the history. Then he would organize a rich history in his mensa-brain and create novel characters (pun intended) to live from, often preceding, recorded time in the area to the present. His books are epics, they are historical dynasties of people not famous but who, by their very lives, were the foundation to what exists today, they are tomes of knowledge! I've read several of his books, which usually are 600+ pages, and I marvel that every page is filled with rich content. Michener doesn't waste words; he shapes thought and imagery with every word!

Edward Rutherfurd (1948 - present) writes rich historical novels in epic and tome-like multi-generational format like Michener. Since I've only read this book by Rutherford, I can't really compare overall content, but from looking at what Rutherford puts on the shelves, Rutherfurd writes on not only countries — e.g. Sarum (1987), Russka (1991), Dublin: Foundation (2003), Ireland: Awakening (2006), China (this year 2017) — but also on deep histories of big cities — London (1997), New York (2009), Paris (2013). 

Paris, the book I just finished, is 832 pages. The book opens with a light history of the days before Julius Caesar saw the possibilities of the mud-flats and islands and rich valley where the throbbing city of Paris now is. The tribal village on the Seine River was ideally located for development, a hub, a road to see what lay beyond, and so the village developed, shaped by conquerors, reshaped by the Huns, the Franks, the Dark Ages. 

Rutherfurd writes the dramatic history of Paris, starting in the year 1216, by following the dynastic line of four families. Each family represents a different socioeconomic class of people that contributed to building the city into the modern, refined and travel-venerated city it is today: a family of street persons descending from a cutthroat, a noble titled family blood-related to the king, a merchant family that directly contributed to the financial and socioeconomic development of the city and a branch of which broke off and represented emigration to Canada, and a Jewish family that developed the learned centers of Paris and in payment received ostracization, deportment and even death as their legacy. 

In the 1600s two other family dynasties were added: another merchant family strategically intermarrying with the Renard merchant family and which represented a growing hierarchy of merchant classes and the unspoken taboo of not marrying outside of one's economic level. The other family (the Gascons) was a look at the laboring class who with their blood and sweat built the physical foundation of the city. In fact, a greater part of the latter half of the book was about the Gascons and how this family met great people and how the social barriers of class started collapsing, particularly with world war, and how war brought these families into a tight network together, having to interact together, and this beginning of integration representing the modern Paris — families still separated by socioeconomic histories but integrating and recognizing that each socioeconomic class played its part in the Paris of the 20th century.