Pebble Time with Michael – Day 3
My second most favorite Pebble Time app (after Nav Me) is FitCat. This is a very quirky app that I initially dismissed, but the more I now use it the more I love it.
My personal fitness program is very simple and consists of strength training and walking. The only fitness tracking I really need from a smartwatch is the ability to count my steps and report against my daily goals. FitCat does exactly that. It runs in background on the Pebble and counts steps. I’ve done some accuracy testing and it seems to be quite good at that task.
Yet, it does even more than that simple function. It actually combines fitness tracking with a virtual pet – the cat Gnocchi. When you start up the application on the Pebble, you see animated images of this virtual cat living his life the way you do. If you’re walking, he’s walking. If you’re relaxing, he’s relaxing. In fact, there’s a whole lot more to this virtual pet. Apparently your walking earns virtual money that you can use to feed him and even buy him toys. There is also a game in the app that you can play with Gnocchi.
I haven’t really used this app for anything more than tracking my steps, but it does that task quite well. The opening screen of the app shows the battery status, time, and real-time step count, as well as Gnocchi mimicking your current activity level. The app also posts step goals to the Pebble Time timeline and posts when they are met. That’s really the only thing I want it to do, but I have to admit that watching the animated Gnocchi accompanying me when I walk is quite amusing and adds to this app’s charm!