There are very few guarantees in life, but one of them is that you’ll misplace your gadgets. Some of you will merely misplace them in your couch cushions from time to time; some of you will leave them on the roof of your car as you careen down the highway. If you own multiple Apple devices, the company’s Find My iPhone app is a handy app to install, allowing you to track down your household’s missing iPhones, iPads, connected iPods and Macs on a map. Once you locate a missing iPhone, for instance, you can lock it, wipe all the data from it or send a message to the screen asking whoever found it to contact you.
A bajillion square-photo-taking, filter-adding, online-sharing shutterbugs can’t be wrong. Instagram has quickly turned into the preeminent photo app for the mobile generation, letting users instantly upload photos for their friends to comment on, and with a new 15-second video recording mode for capturing quick moments where a single photo just won’t do.
Bleacher Report’s Team Stream app has a pretty fitting name. You pick your favorite sports teams and the app serves up a heaping helping of scores, tweets, articles, videos and photos in short order. You can set yourself up to get various notifications as they happen, and easily share updates over social media and via text messages to your friends.
Finding flights is generally about as fun as having your teeth worked on by a far-sighted dentist with the shakes. Kayak makes the experience (finding flights, not the dentist) bearable by returning clean, organized, deep results from the various airlines. You can book hotels and car rentals, too, and the app gives you quick access to flight info and customer support numbers.
You’re signed up for various online services, and many of these services have additional services and apps hooked into them. The MyPermissions app lets you see how many apps have access to your personal information, sending you alerts when new apps connect and letting you quickly remove apps that you’re not okay with.
ShopSavvy
Real-life retailers must hate ShopSavvy. The app lets you wander around your local store, scanning product barcodes using your iPhone’s camera and returning the prices of the same item from online retailers, where it’s generally cheaper. The app also doubles as a QR code reader for making sense of those weird squarish blocks you see on posters and in magazine ads.
If you use Gmail on a daily basis, the mobile app should be a pretty easy sell. It sports many of the features found in the desktop version, letting you search all your past messages, see your contacts’ photos, read through your conversations using Gmail’s threaded interface and reply to Google Calendar invites directly.
Pocket serves as a repository for all the articles you find on the web but either don’t have time to read right away or don’t want to sit in front of your computer to read. The service integrates nicely with web browsers and popular third-party apps to make saving articles a snap; once saved, they’re formatted for easy reading, can be downloaded for offline reading and can be accessed from a multitude of connected devices.
In the dark ages, you had to pick up the phone to order food to be delivered to your house. Things eventually got better when we found ourselves able to order online, but sometimes the simple tasks of sitting upright and opening a laptop screen are just too much to overcome. Thankfully, there’s Seamless’s app, which lets you order food directly from your smartphone. Note: You most likely will have to get up to open the door. Sorry.
Before you start moving furniture around, consider giving MagicPlan a whirl. The app captures images of the room you’re thinking of changing and converts everything into a floorplan. With a few swipes, you can get your virtual furniture arranged just right before committing to moving it in real life.
Your various banking institutions and credit card companies may each have their own apps, but Mint.com’s app ties them all together and adds up your income and debt so you can put an exact number on the soul-crushing feeling of being constantly in the hole. There’s hope, though: The app helps you set a budget for yourself, tracks your spending and presents you with money-saving offers on financial services.
