Stationary exercise bikes have come a long way, with multiple programmed routines, built-in speakers, and even sweat-mitigating fans. But what about making you feel what it’s like to ride Stage 2 of the Tour de France? There’s an app—and a bike—for that.

Atech Totalsolution showed off its Electric Assistance Bike, a stay-in-place bicycle that connects to your iPhone. Use Google Maps to choose a biking route, and the bike will respond to the route and elevation with the proper resistance for those grueling climbs, as well as assistance for those downhill sprints.

No word on what you’ll have to pay to get one of your own, but the company is hoping to have a product for sale in the second half of 2013.

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Up is no longer down. Jawbone on Tuesday announced a do-over for the Up, the company’s $130 fitness- and sleep-tracking wristband accessory. The Up, which is available in three sizes and eight colors, tracks steps, distance, and sleep phases, and it aims to provide motivation for healthier eating and increasing daily movement.

But this isn’t the first time Jawbone—a company more famous for its audio accessories—has released the Up. The Up was initially unveiled (with a cheaper, $100 price tag) just over a year ago. At that time, Jason Fass, the company’s Director of Product Management, told Macworld that the company’s goal with the Up was “to make people consumers of their own health, so that health becomes a topic of conversation, like the TV show from last night or that new app that you downloaded.”

Unfortunately, though, the topic of conversation surrounding the Up’s initial release was that—for some customers, anyway—the device stopped working. Jawbone consistently replaced defective Up wristbands, and eventually announced a refund program for dissatisfied customers whose Ups were no longer on the up-and-up.

In December 2011, Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman wrote a letter to Up owners, apologizing for the issues. He said that the company had identified “an issue with two specific capacitors in the power system that affects the ability to hold a charge in some of our bands.” Other issues users had reported included problems with syncing, and the tendency of the band’s detachable clip—which covers the plug for syncing and charging—to get lost.

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We’re all very familiar with the concept of All You Can Eat, from the artery-clogging Vegas buffet to the less-literal digital equivalents such as Netflix for TV shows/movies, the various digital music subscription services, and even Audiobooks.com for audiobooks.

In April, Next Issue Media launched with a similar idea for magazines. Pay a monthly fee and get access to a bunch of digital magazines from Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp., and Time Inc. The problem? It was only available for some Android tablets. As of Tuesday, iPad users get to join in the fun with a catalog of nearly 40 magazines, and the promise of more to come. (See the complete list at the end of this story.)

As an avid reader of magazines on the iPad—I subscribe to several through Apple’s Newsstand, with individual apps, and via Zinio—I was excited to get a chance to play with the iPad version of Next Issue prior to its release.

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Most apps take aim at some small slice of your life and help improve it. MotionX Sleep is more like the rock band The Kinks—it wants to be with you all day, and all of the night.

As the name suggests, MotionX Sleep intends to make sure you’re getting a good night’s sleep. Activate the app’s sleep-monitoring mode, place your iPhone on the bed next to you—or strap it to an athletic armband—and the phone’s motion sensors will monitor your movements while you rest. Be careful if you’re sharing a bed: The app can capture the movements of both you and your partner, and that makes for less-than-helpful data.

When you wake, MotionX’s app provides analytics showing when you experienced light, moderate, and heavy sleep. (It also offers a “sleep efficiency” number.) Those charts, which track data for as long as a month, can be shared with your friends via Facebook or Twitter.

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The new year is underway and the gyms are filled with new faces which, unfortunately, may never be seen again in a month or two. Maintaining your motivation is always the hardest part of a new workout routine. Luckily, there’s now an app for that.

GymPact, a free iPhone app by the developer of the same name, takes a unique approach, using the civilized world’s oldest motivator: money. After a quick signup process, you sign a “pact” to work out a certain number of times per week. If you don’t meet your pact during any given week, your credit card is charged for each workout you missed. That money is then divided up among the users who met their goals that week. Your earnings accumulate and can be credited to your PayPal account whenever you want.

The app tracks your workout activity using a location-based check-in system. (A Wi-Fi connection is required for devices without 3G.) Upon leaving the gym, you check out and can then post your finished workout info to Twitter or Facebook if you want.

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Stats of the Union, a free iPad data visualization app from Fathom Information Design, appears at first glance to be a demography nerd’s dream, offering a color-coded county-by-county overview of the nation’s vital statistics. In reality the app is a disaster, offering up information that is sometimes incorrect, and doing it in misleading ways.

Here’s a striking example of how badly this app performs: I live in Philadelphia—sometimes known, unfortunately, as “Killadelphia” because of its high murder rate. But when you summon up the homicide-rate visualization in Stats of the Union, Philadelphia County is represented by a dark shade of blue: The color indicates my city has a low murder rate.

Except it doesn’t, of course. Jump online to the federal government’s Community Health Status Indicators report—where Stats of the Union draws its information—and you see that Philadelphia County’s rate of 24 murders per 100,000 residents is nearly five times the national average. So why does the app show my town as having a low murder rate? Who knows?

(The homicide data is not a one-time error within the app. Stats of the Union also suggests that Philadelphia County—with more than 10,000 people packed into every square mile—is close to the national median for population density. It’s obviously not.)

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Anyone who's trying to change their diet has heard--or learned--that one of the most basic and effective ways to break entrenched eating habits is to write down everything you eat. Not only will you get an idea of how much you cram into your snackhole on a daily basis, you'll get a decent idea of how many calories you're taking in daily.

While the act of recording what you put in your mouth can be a great reality check ("I had no idea I ate that many Snickers bars in a week") or an effective deterrent ("Do I really want to write down that lunch was 'a bag of Doritos?'"), it can also be a real pain. While the iPhone does not lack for calorie-counting, food logging apps, many of these require a lot of tedious searching; worse, some of them require you to look up the nutritional information and enter it into the app yourself. And one of the most frustrating features of nearly all the food logging programs is that they're often not equipped to handle "compound foods”—salads, soups, casseroles or sandwiches.

Calorific Lite from WorkSmart Labs sidesteps those hassles, making it an excellent tool for those of us who want to improve our behavior with a minimum of inconvenience.

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This week’s app roundup brings you new and better ways to get in shape, watch TV, and battle alien pigs. Because in space, no one can hear you oink.

Already this week, Macworld’s Lex Friedman brought you news of Smule’s latest offering—Beatstream, an app that takes tracks from your iTunes library and turns them into a Tap Tap Revenge-style game. Lex also reported that the popular new game Draw Something had been acquired by Zynga. Jason Snell let us know about the update of Comixology’s Comics app to take advantage of the new iPad’s high-definition Retina display. And Chris Breen took a first look at the MyTunes Pro music apps, which he called “an attractive app given its $10 price.”

Here are a few other new and updated apps that caught our eye this week:

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With the upcoming 7.0 update to its line of iOS fitness trackers, Abvio is cleaning up its act.

Abvio offers a trio of GPS-enabled fitness apps for the iPhone—Cyclemeter, Runmeter, and Walkmeter—that record a wealth data about your workout. Tap your way through one of Abvio’s apps, in fact, and you can find around 150 data items covering everything from the speed of your run or ride to your heart intervals during your workout. The problem, Abvio co-founder Steve Kusmer concedes, is that data isn’t always presented in the most accessible way.

“We have this great information,” he told me at Abvio’s booth on the show floor at Macworld | iWorld this week. “We needed a great way to display it.”

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The International Consumer Electronics Show is a veritable electronics smorgasbord, full-to-brimming with televisions, tablets, telephones, and cameras. The iOS accessories market is no different, getting its very own dedicated pavilion at CES. Here are some of the standout products we’ve seen in both the iLounge Pavilion and the rest of the show floor throughout our CES travels.

Scosche RDTX Pro

With Scosche’s $330 RDTX Pro, anyone with an iOS device will be able to accurately detect radiation levels around them. Originally made to detect radiation in post-tsunami Japan, the device will soon be available for consumers in the U.S. The RDTX Pro is significantly cheaper compared to other geiger counters on the market, but it’s just as accurate, according to a company rep we spoke to. Attach it to your iPhone and you’ll be able to see radiation levels on a compatible iOS app’s meter. The app also lets you share radiation readings with others, as well as see radiation levels across the globe.

iPort LaunchPort

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Jawbone on Thursday published an open letter to Up owners, announcing a refund program for dissatisfied owners of the company’s step and sleep tracking armband.

The $100 Up was released in early November. The band is meant to measure the steps you take, monitor your sleeping patterns, and wake you up at the ideal moment through vibration; it connects to an iPhone app to store your tracked data. Some folks, however, found that their Up units died suddenly within the first week of use. Jawbone has been replacing afflicted Ups for free—though some customers end up with replacement bands that suffer a similar fate.

In Thursday’s letter, Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman writes that he considers the failures some Ups have exhibited “unacceptable,” and offers the company’s “deepest apologies.” By examining the returned bands, Rahman says, Jawbone “found an issue with two specific capacitors in the power system that affects the ability to hold a charge in some of our bands.” Additionally, he says that the company is “fixing an issue with syncing related to the band hardware.”

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Editor’s Note: The following article is reprinted from CIO.com. Visit CIO’s Macs in the Enterprise page.

A handful of clinicians at Seattle Children’s Hospital gave iPads a test run, using them to tap into the corporate network and run critical apps in a virtual desktop environment. The results weren’t good: iPads came back with a poor bill of health.

“Every one of the clinicians returned the iPad, saying that it wasn’t going to work for day-to-day clinical work,” says CTO Wes Wright. “The EMR (electronic medical record) apps are unwieldy on the iPad.”

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Jawbone’s Up iPhone accessory now has a November 6 ship date, a $100 price tag, and a free iPhone app that help track your steps, sleep cycles, and more.

First announced in July at TED Global, the Up is a slim, electronic bracelet that tracks your movement and sleep, and syncs with an iPhone app that also happens to go by the Up moniker.

Jason Fass, Jawbone’s Director of Product Management, spoke to Macworld on the Up and Up. Up’s goal, Fass said, is making health “cool”—“We want to make people consumers of their own health, so that health becomes a topic of conversation, like the TV show from last night or that new app that you downloaded.”

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The new Garmin Fit app is similar to Nike+ GPS or RunKeeper Pro: Strap on your iPhone before a jog or a bike ride, and the app displays your speed, distance and route traveled, and estimated calories burned. When the workout is complete, the data can be shared with the Garmin Connect community—a service like DailyMile, only targeted to Garmin customers—to allow for comparisons and long-term tracking of your progress.

The app can also work in the background, allowing users to send and receive phone calls, texts, and mails from the trail if necessary.

iPhone owners who love to exercise may also be interested in Garmin's new Ant+ adapter for iPhone. The $50 device links your phone to other Garmin products—such as heart monitors and footpod centers—to track the pace and intensity of indoor workouts.

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