Monitoring one’s health and fitness via gadgets and gizmos has become a hot trend as of late, but Argus is surging past all the other contenders. This app is incredibly comprehensive, allowing you to track your steps, workouts, runs, yoga sessions, diet, sleep, water and coffee intake, weight, and more.
Set personal goals, connect with friends, and view your history and trends. All this information is sophisticatedly displayed in your timeline as a web of beautiful, sophisticated and engaging honeycomb icons. Click “more” for an overview.
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Your Timeline
Argus’ timeline displayed with a honeycomb effect will wow you from the get-go. The app automatically provides for you the weekday and date as well as the local high temperature for the day. Also, as you carry your phone around with you throughout the day, Argus will record and automatically display your steps.
Your timeline is displayed in a grid of honeycombs, displaying all your activity and stats.
The rest of the data that can potentially be displayed is up to you to add. To track an activity, tap the plus sign in the upper right. Now you’ll see a list of any activities you’ve recently tracked, as well as popular activities.
Argus can tell you about how many calories you can expect to burn while participating in a certain activity.
If there’s an activity you’d like to track that you don’t see on the list, use the search bar at the top. If it’s one Argus is capable of tracking, your search will return a result.
Tracking Activities
Automatic tracking is easy: Just make sure your step counter is on, plus GPS, if necessary, and then click Start. To manually enter an activity, or to record an activity from the past, select the Manual tab instead. You’ll need to enter the start date and time as well as the duration and possibly the distance.
Make Argus track an activity automatically as it occurs, or add an activity manually later.
Each activity you enter will appear as a honeycomb in your timeline. If you want to delete an entry or view more details, just tap it. For example, tapping Daily Steps will reveal an activity level graph, distance, amount of active time and calories burned.
Argus displays the calories burned for every activity you track, so you know exactly where you stand with your efforts. And for some activities, such as walking, the app displays total calories burned plus distinguishes between basal calories burned and calories burned as a result of the specific activity.
Tap a steps entry to view all your related data; add a food entry by taking a photo of what you’re about to eat.
Food can also be tracked by taking a snapshot of your meal. Just tap the camera icon at the top of the screen and then select the food groups represented by whatever you ate. The benefit to recording this is that you will be able to view patterns in your diet later. And if you’re interested in keeping track of your hydration and coffee consumption, just tap those entries to increase the amount.
Your timeline can also easily segue to your archive for easy recall of past dates. Tapping any day will display all available dates, so you can quickly select one from the past to review all its details, rather than scroll downward across time and space to get to it.
It’s on the Menu
You’ll find all sorts of goodies in your menu, accessed using the top left button on your timeline. Maybe you want to see all your food entries at a glance? Tap the menu icon in the top left of your timeline and then select Food. This makes it possible to view all your food entries at the same time.
Tap any date to cluster all dates for easy access to data for any day you choose. Food can also be grouped.
Using the menu you can also select Friends to connect Argus and your public Facebook profile. By adding your Facebook friends, you can find out which of your friends already have Argus and then engage in social features such as Likes and Comments. Give your friends feedback and support in their own health endeavors and if they’re good friends they’ll do the same for you!
Your menu is accessed from the top left in your timeline and can reveal Trends, Goals, and Friends.
Under Goals you will be able to set things like how many hours of sleep you want to get, how many glasses of water per day you’d want to drink, and how many steps you’re aiming to take each day. When you’re viewing your timeline, you can pull the screen downward to quickly reveal your progress for the day toward these goals.
Click Trends to view patterns in your daily step count and diet filtered either by Day, Week or Month. And if you use another tracking device to count your daily steps and other health-related information, you can connect it under Devices & Apps, although for me, the app showed a limited number of compatible devices: the Withings scale, the New Balance LifeTRNr+ and the LifeTrak.
Set goals for yourself related to sleep, hydration and steps. View your data under Trends.
In Settings you can supply some additional option information about yourself, as well as change the data units from U.S. to metric or vice versa. You can also turn on or off the Automatic Run Detection — a feature that automatically starts and stops running sessions, plus automatically turns on GPS to record paths or uses the step counting algorithm instead if you’re running indoors. (The developers have promised automatic biking and driving detection in future updates.)
So Much More
I’ve tried to provide you with a brief overview of the app here because I am limited to a word count, but in truth, it would take a few thousand words to cover all the features Argus contains.
But its greatest attribute is that it’s so comprehensive. You no longer have to use four or five apps to keep track of all the things you can now log with just this one. Steps, sleep, diet, weight, heart rate, running, swimming — all of those and more are contained right here in Argus.
The second best thing about Argus is the way the developers have chosen to display the data in such a visually engaging way. The honeycomb grid is eye-catching and allows users to quickly and easily view how their day — and their health — is shaping up.
Other standout features include the Facebook integration for social butterflies who will want to bond with their friends over their latest workout or great meal, as well as the graphs that display progress and trends for people who want to dive a little deeper into the data. And if you’re a datahead, Argus is guaranteed to be your new best friend.
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