Five iPhone Apps for Holiday Shopping
I’ve done about 0.2% of the holiday shopping I need to do. With limited time, a limited budget and a 45-minute public transportation commute to my nearest accessible shopping destination, I need to make sure I plan a smart attack on the stores. Consequently, I’ve been checking out some holiday-themed productivity apps in the iPhone App Store today, and wanted to share my favorites with you. There’s a lot of overlap, but take a look.
Christmas Shopping List: This one is probably my favorite of the bunch. It allows you to enter gift recipients’ names, your overall budget, and how much you’re spending on each person. When you click on each person’s name, you can create a list of gifts you plan to purchase for them. Seems like a really great app, and for $1.99 I think I can get it for myself as a gift!
Gift List Budget Shopper: This one’s a little slicker-looking, but busy. It lets you categorize and manage your gift-shopping, by individual and occasion. What it adds to the mix is a spot to enter the stores where you’re buying gifts. You can also import wish lists sent to you by family and friends.
Nice List Holiday Gift Manager: This one celebrates the naughty and nice concept around Christmas gift-giving. You can add people directly from your contact list, and then mark gifts on the list as purchased, wrapped or shipped, accordingly. You better hope you’re on someone’s nice list this year…
WishList: This one really boils it down. It’s a really basic way to create a list of people, their wish lists, and the stores where you’ll find those wishes. If you’re into simplicity, this app’s for you.
GiftBox: This one has cute little gift box icons that represent if you’ve finished shopping for someone, have it under control, or haven’t started yet. You can also make notes for gift ideas and take photos of gifts while you’re shopping or after you’ve wrapped so you know exactly what gifts you bought and who they’re for.
Apps, Holidays, I'm Buying This | Comments (3)Five Helpful Food 2.0 Tools
Earlier in the summer, I blogged about beYOU.tv, and encouraged you (and myself) to live a little healthier. I don’t feel that I’ve been doing my best at following my own advice lately, but I’m embarking on some lifestyle changes that will no doubt kick my butt into gear.
One of those changes is that I’m not letting myself order delivery and takeout every day anymore. It’s easy, it’s comfortable, it’s familiar–but it’s an expensive and calorie-filled habit that isn’t helping me reach any fitness goals. The solution? I have to prepare some of my own meals. Ummm, easier said than done, Amanda.
I have no idea how to make food. I can use a microwave and I can open pints of sherbet. It’s a very special day if I make an omelette. But that’s the extent of my skills. The thought of having to prepare my own food is daunting to say the least. But I’ve found some helpful resources out there on the social web that I’ll be playing with as I explore the many unfamiliar appliances and utensils in my kitchen.
Zeer is a resource to help nutritards like me learn more about what you’re buying at the store, and what you’re putting in your body. The site’s community feature enables members to share advice and information about various food products related to specific lifestyles or grub preferences. You can also browse through huge lists of products to find better or tastier choices for yourself. This is a valuable tool: Zeer helps you shop smarter so you can eat better.
Tasty Planner seems like exactly what I need. This site allows you to search for new recipes based on keywords or choices from a tag cloud, and has Recipe Box and Weekly Planner functions to help you along the way. Once you find a recipe you like, you can add it to your Recipe Box so that it’s saved, and you can go a step further by adding it to a Weekly Planner that helps you outline your meals and nutrition for the week. For someone who hasn’t planned a meal in her life, Tasty Planner seems like a great, easy way to get a healthy diet underway.
SuperCook is an interesting concept. You enter what foods you already have in your kitchen, and the site will generate recipes for you based on those ingredients. For someone who really has no creative cooking skills to fall back on, and for someone who is pretty lazy when it comes to trekking out to the grocery store on the train (it’s so hard to get your grocery shopping done without a car!), this resource may come in handy. It’s sort of like a Top Chef challenge without having to think about anything.
Cookthink is all about cravings, which can be a girl’s worst enemy. This site lets you find recipes that may satisfy your various cravings, and you can search by entering a keyword, choosing an ingredient, picking a dish, selecting a cuisine, or focusing on a mood. Based on the cravings you enter, Cookthink gives you a list of recipes that will probably make your tummy growl and send you running to the kitchen.
FoodFeed is a strange creature. It’s like Twitter for eating. The premise is simple: you make updates to the site about what you’re having to eat and you can search for other users who have having the same thing. On the About page, the site claims that it isn’t really useful, but on some level I disagree. There’s a lot to be said about regularly, honestly, and publicly announcing what you’re eating, and that may drive you to make healthier choices so you aren’t forced to reveal that you’re having 2 Big Macs per day.
Have you tried any of these Food 2.0 sites? What are your thoughts? Are you hungry yet???
Apps, Helping People, Social Networks | Comments (5)Wordle is Sort of Fun
My friend Juliana showed me Wordle the other day and I’ve sort of enjoyed playing around with it. I say “sort of” because it doesn’t exactly work the way I want.
With Wordle, you enter a URL (for your blog or your del.icio.us page or whatever) and it produces a word cloud that you can tweak. You can choose from a bunch of fonts, colors and layouts, making it fun to play with as you match your cloud to your mood or style. However, you can’t input different pages of a site or specific posts on your blog (or at least I can’t). It only chooses words from the most recent couple of posts on your home page, regardless of whether you enter a specific page or not.
This is annoying for me because sometimes I blog about things that are sort of random. (OK, I pretty much always do…) When I first tried Wordle, all my words had to do with my recent post about honey bees and ice cream, so I felt my Wordle cloud wasn’t all that representative of my blog or myself. And I like customized Web 2.0 toys to represent mah style, yo. Don’t you?
Anyway, here’s my current Wordle cloud anyway. Sort of fun, sort of whatever. Try it out.
Facebook Chat is Here, Ridiculous
Facebook‘s chat feature launched today. In my opinion, we all have PLENTY of chat and conversation options separate from Facebook and this new feature is just redundant. I already have AIM/iChat, GChat/GTalk, ooVoo, Skype, Twitter and SMS that enable me to have real-time conversations with my friends. Facebook was never about that for me. It’s a place to store and share information–including the contact information I choose to display for the conversation-enablers mentioned above. I won’t say that I’ll never use this new Facebook chat feature, but I maintain that it’s ridiculous and unnecessary.
Below is my reaction. What’s yours?
Because There Aren’t Enough Ways to Stalk What People Are Saying on Twitter…
There are about 47.3 billion Twitter apps to break down what people are saying, who they’re saying it to, where they’re saying it and how popular they are for saying what they say. But there’s always room for more, right?
I’ve seen some of my Twitter friends like Geoff Livingston, Greg Verdino and Matt Dickman talking about Tweet Clouds recently, so I checked the site out. It’s a cool way to visualize your most tweeted words.
What I find interesting as a PR person is that you can see the terms arguably most important to people as well as who they’re talking to most often. This gives us insight into who our influencers are and what things and people are central to their conversations. Tweet Clouds could end up being a visually interesting and useful way to get a better snapshot of who people are on Twitter.
Try this out. In the meantime, here’s my Tweet Cloud:
I Hulu, Do You?
I don’t know what my problem is. I got my Hulu beta invite back in December, and I never really used my account until recently. I don’t know why I waited around neglecting my access, but I’m glad I finally got on board. Oh, and don’t worry–if you never got an invite, it’s all good. Hulu came out of private beta on March 12, 2008 so now you can (and should) sign yo’self on up.
For those of you who aren’t already using Hulu, it’s a place to watch TV and movie content online. Why do I like it? You can create a “queue” of videos which acts sort of like a DVR function, so you can have your content ready and waiting for you when you want it. The video quality is great on my MacBook Pro, and Hulu makes it easy to watch your content in different ways. You can watch shows and movies directly in the Hulu tab of your browser or you can pop the content out into its own window. This is good if you want to resize the video box or minimize other distractions, with the additional option of muting and dimming the light on the rest of your browser. There’s even an embed feature so you can share your online videos–in their entirety or as a selected clip. It’s all very simple, with a pretty UI to boot. I must admit, I’m a fan.
Hulu’s gotten all sorts of press over the past year, in everything from Fortune and BusinessWeek to Wired and PC World. And of course, the blogosphere has buzzed about the service as well. Hulu’s got the sticky and the buzz part down. I read this morning that Hulu may be jumping from my laptop to my mobile phone in the near future. As someone who gets antsy if she hasn’t touched her phone in the past 30 seconds, I’m interested to see where this goes and how it looks once it’s implemented. When and if Hulu is available on my iPhone, you may see me on the bus or the train in Boston, giggling at Michael Scott or gasping at Jack Bauer.
Now I know not everyone likes Hulu, and some prefer other online video sites like Joost and Fancast. If you want to watch TV shows or movies online, where do you go? What do you think of Hulu now, and what value might the service bring to your mobile content consumption? Online video, nom nom nom.
Apps, Social Media, Video | Comments (4)Social Aggregators: FriendFeed vs. Socialthing!
When I explain FriendFeed and Socialthing! to my non-social media friends, they think the general idea is pretty cool. A place where you can aggregate the updates from your favorite social communities? Very nice. Borat style.
I recently got a Socialthing! invite from modern journalist and friend Brad King and signed up for FriendFeed at the same time. I’ve been using these two services side by side to see what I think and get a flavor for what the buzz is about. Although the case can be made that each service is bringing users a unique solution, so far I’ve been using them the same way.
Initial feelings: I like the Socialthing! UI much better than the look and feel of FriendFeed. The Lifestream thing is working for me. However, I have a lot more social networks aggregating in FriendFeed, making it much fuller as a one-stop shop for checking in on what my friends are up to. I don’t think I’d choose one over the other at this point. The thing is, I’m not sure that I even like mixing up all my networks in one place, even though social aggregators are so hot right now.
There’s something familiar and comfortable about going to each distinct site to find that separate content. I know what to expect from each different network and they’ve all become like favorite hangout spots for me. These social communities are not just about contributing and absorbing the content my friends are creating, but about the experience of going to a comfy, cozy place I’ve come to enjoy.
Do you find tools like FriendFeed and Socialthing! to be useful for you? How do you use these services?
Apps, Social Networks, Tech | Comments (4)PicLens is Enhancing My Photo Viewing Experience
Social media evangelist and friend Bryan Person (formerly known as Bryper) recently turned me on to the Web browser add-on PicLens. I’m generally a fan of toolbars, buttons and widgets that make things flashier and/or easier to use, so I checked it out. As someone who takes a lot of pictures and finds herself turning up in a lot of pictures on the Web, I was curious to see what this app could do. And I agree with earlier reviews–it’s pretty special.
PicLens puts a little “play” button on images you find within certain Web sites, like Google Images, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, etc. When you click the little button, it transports your browser to this alternate universe where photos are much more amazing than they are with the average, everyday browser. Note: if a photo is small (think thumbnail size), the button will take up most of the picture. If you don’t want to PicLens it, make sure you click on the corner or edge of the photo so it doesn’t enable the PicLens app.
So, say you clicked on a friend’s profile photo within Facebook. PicLens now takes you to what they call a “3D Wall” of photos related to the one you clicked–in this case, your friend’s other photos in the album. From there, you can zip around, look at things up close, play a slideshow, search for keywords and generally have a very rich photo viewing experience.
Now excuse me while I go PicLens it up with the 1,336 photos currently filling the BS08 Flickr group.
Apps, Honey, Tech | Comments (3)