Too many subscriptions

I’m struggling with the concept of the many interesting websites out there, that all want us to subscribe. But there's not enough money in the bank, to subscribe to all of them. Yet every time someone who has subscribed shares a link, the site bugs everyone who follows the link, to subscribe. This got too old, too many years ago, and at this point in time, it’s getting to be infuriating. If they allow you to share something you find on their site, the visitors that follow the link shouldn’t be bothered, until they try to navigate to other places on the same site. Just an idea, to eliminate a lot of hostile feelings toward these sites. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other news sites... I'm looking at you first...

Cost splitting calculator

There are apps out there, for this, but once again, I haven't seen any that include all the features to be truly useful. My ideal cost sharing app would allow an unlimited list of people to share an unlimited list of costs. The list of participants would be exportable. The list of costs would be exportable. Attaching date/time to each coat would be an option. Each person's participation in any single cost would be optional. People would be able to pay for other people for specific costs. Reporting would be available for the individual and group levels. Reports could be copied/pasted, printed, emailed.

Walk tracking app ideas

So many things a walk tracking mobile phone app should be able to do:

• Automatically stop or pause tracking: Walk tracking apps should analyze the saved track, and figure out when the user forgot to stop it, at the end of the activity, and climbed in the car to go somewhere else. Realizing it's not easy to do that in real-time, maybe a post-activity analysis could fix the data.
  
• Edit the track log: Offer the user the opportunity to edit out bogus location points. In the app, not just on the website! Some services offer the capability to fix or remove bogus points in the track, but only using their website, and not through their app. More and more people are spending less and less time on their computers, and doing everything through apps on their phones. We need all service features available through the mobile apps!
• Capture geo-tagged photos: It's fun to snap photos during a walk, and be able to see where they were taken, on the map that also shows the walking route. It's understood that runners probably don't care about this, because they've got their head down trying to keep up a good pace, but walkers are more interested in looking around and enjoying the points of interest.
• Calculate calories burned: The calculation should consider distance covered, time taken, and altitude change. The calorie burn data should sync to the phone's health repository, so it can be used by other diet / exercise / health apps. 
• Weather overlays: Display weather data overlaid on the walking map. This can help immensely with decisions about which way to go, to avoid incoming weather cells, or even when to take cover. Yes, this information is easily available through other weather-specific apps, but when it's not integrated, it can easily be ignored until it's too late to take action.

Emergency bag for laptops

I was reading this morning, about the smoking / burning laptop battery on the JetBlue flight, and the concerns about a proposed new policy that would require moving laptops to the cargo bay. I'm wondering if there's a great opportunity right now, for someone to market a lightweight smoke-and-fire-proof laptop bag?

Pokemon GO observations

I've been experimenting with Pokémon GO on an iPhone 6+. It's fun to play.

* The maps are pretty darn accurate, especially the trails. I'm discovering trails I didn't know were there. 

* Considering that the developers want us to have the PoGo app open all the time, it would be nice, if we could use it to navigate our way somewhere, when we're walking. I use RunKeeper to track my walks with the dog. It records miles, geotags interesting photos I take along the way, and also connects with Lose It! to relay calories burned. Would be nice if this app could do that.

* It is unbelievably frustrating, when the game gets into a mode where it will no longer accept any kind of screen input. The only thing you can do is kill the app. This has happened a few times during each one of my walks. A related issue, is that PoGo restarts itself, after switching back from another app, probably because it needs more resources than are available, when the other app runs. It appears to be reliably repeatable, when activating the camera app, then switching back to PoGo. 

* After considerable time experimenting with Pokemon Go, it seems clear that the app doesn't know how to play well with other apps. It appears to suck up all available resources (probably memory). This causes other apps, that are attempting to run in the background, to run out of resources and fail, so that they have to restart when they are brought back to the foreground. An app like RunKeeper, that needs to capture position occasionally, is forced to stop, and can't do its tracking job, with no data. Update: A newer phone with more memory doesn't have this problem very often.

Managing blood glucose

There are so many useless, or marginally useful, apps out there, for blood glucose (BG) management.

I helped my wife try to manage her blood glucose for many years. We thought we had an idea of how things worked, but it was hard to find a decent app to help with BG management.

The old WaveSense app was a good start. It accepted time-stamped entries of blood glucose, food (carbs, fat, protein, calories), and short and long-term insulin. It had several weaknesses, including frequent crashes, taking forever to change time scales when a lot of data was present, mislabeling early morning activities as the next night.

My idea of a good / useful BG management app would include the following features:

• Allow entry of blood glucose, food carbs/fat/protein calories, insulin, exercise calories, stress, alcohol. 
• Graph the BG data with a choice of time scales ranging from a fraction of a day, to all data (years). Allow scrolling in time with any particular scale. 
• Don't limit things based on some artificial sense of how the data might look. 
• Realize that this app can be an extremely helpful tool, when several measurements are made just a few minutes apart, for example, when recovering from a serious low BG, and measuring every 15 minutes or less. 
• Optionally show insulin and food doses graphically with the BG plot, as translucent up (for food) and down (for insulin) histogram bars or vertical arrows, with the magnitude of the bars calculated from the user-entered sensitivity numbers (BG/carb and BG/insulin unit). 
• Optionally calculate recommended fast-acting insulin dose, based on the current BG entry, other recent BG entries that help establish a trend, recent food intake and insulin dose entries. 
• Export all data, or a specified time range, to email. 

I'll update this, if I remember more details of what we thought would be helpful.

Live weather on route mapping

How about putting live weather radar and prognostic graphics (fronts) overlaying real-time route mapping. Aviation apps got this right immediately, because it's more of a "life depends on it" kind of thing. But it's really helpful, to have a sense of what weather is ahead, on long road trips too. Having options to show current weather and forecast weather along the planned route would be awesome for deciding about possible alternate routes.