I got myself a Polar 720i heart-rate monitor a few months ago which allows you to download exercise files to your computer via an Infra-red (IR) link. Unfortunately the Mac is not supported and while Polar suggest you can get around this by using Virtual PC, in practice it doesn’t bloody work.

The main problem is that Polar’s USB implementation is incorrect and doesn’t conform to the USB 1.1 standard, meaning that I can’t use their USB-IR adaptor. Instead I had to get their Serial-IR adaptor, then buy a separate USB-Serial adaptor so I could give my Mac an antiquated serial port. Plug everything in correctly, follow the software installation instructions and bingo! – nothing works! Bastards.

Luckily, there are two groups writing Mac-native versions of the Polar software and doing a reasonably good job. The first is iSMARTTrain, a $40 product written by a UK company, and the second is iTrain Pro, a free program written by a single Aussie.

At the moment iSMARTTrain is the more fully-functional product, but iTrain Pro looks very promising and I’ll be keeping an eye on it. They could do with choosing slightly more different names though!