Using Actifit while playing Pokémon Go on iOS

Actifit is a Steem-blockchain-based app that rewards you for activity, such as walking. Pokemon Go is an augmented reality game that motivates players to walk around to capture wild pokemon and visit particular locations to get in-game rewards. I've been playing Pokemon Go for a while, but Actifit only had its first iOS release yesterday, so I was only able to try them together on my long poke-walk this morning. It seems pretty good so far!

I woke up a few hours early this morning and couldn't get back to sleep. When I ran out of things to do to kill time I set out on my normal morning Pokemon route about a half hour early. With the changing seasons and the earlier start time it was still pretty dark when I got to the Owen Rose Garden. Things started to brighten up a bit on my way back home, though.

In terms of interesting Pokemon Go activity, I got a research task this morning that rewarded me with a Silver Pinap Berry, the first time I've seen one of those. It seems to have a combination of the candy-boosting power of a Pinap Berry and the catch-probability boosting power of a Razz Berry.

I also got a quest that rewarded me with a Spinda encounter at the pokestop at this park sign, and since I managed to complete the quest right then and there with a great curveball throw at a wild pokemon I decided to take an AR photo of the Spinda near the sign where I got the quest.

I periodically checked Actifit throughout the walk, and it was around ~19,000 when I got home, which was in the same ballpark as my other fitness apps were saying in terms of how many steps I had taken. I thought it would be fun to get over 20k for my post and I remembered an errand I had to do, so I walked to that. Unfortunately when I got there I checked Actifit again and it was still reading ~19,000, so it didn't log those steps (maybe the app wasn't active? I'm not sure). But it got the ones on the way back, so I'm over 20k for this post.

Overall I'm pretty optimistic about using Actifit going forward, although it's probably still a little clunky for people who aren't Steem-savvy (the need to enter a private posting key in the app would probably be a big barrier for casual users). I'm also not sure how I feel about the app creating a Steemit post as the basis for giving you rewards. While I'm happy to have this blog post you're reading now show up in my blog alongside my normal content, I don't think I'll be composing full-on blog posts every time I want to submit an activity count. Plus it's a bit clunky to have to enter this blog post via the phone and then add in images later via the web interface. Things are still a little rough around the edges, but they're early in the dev process so I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of that stuff gets smoothed out, and some of my problems might still be user error as I'm still new to using the app. And since I've only just started using the app I haven't yet seen the “reward” part of it in action, so I can't form an opinion about that yet. Right now I'd say it's pretty good, and I'm going to try to keep using the app during my long morning poke-walks.

Walking