5 January 2013

New Year Resolutions: 40+ iPhone Apps to Help You Succeed

iPhone apps to succeedI am sure most of you are actively planning how to get through 2013 with even more success. This will often involve how to avoid repeating bad habits and unsuccessful engagements. To help you get a good start and be as successful as possible with fulfilling your New Yeah resolutions, I have made a categorized collection of useful iPhone apps. I have handpicked the apps, and they have great features and reviews. I have selected classic New Year resolution themes (Lose weight, start working out, spending less money, becoming more productive, avoiding stress…) and hope your needs fall into one of these categories. I am sorry if you are not using an iPhone, but I am sure you can find similar apps for Android. Just look for the features you need and search for a similar App you can use.

Lose weight

Many people want to get rid of a few kilos after eating too much during the holiday. There is good help to get from iPhone and iPad apps to reach your goals.

Lose It

lose-it

Lose It is a great app to help you control the number of calories your take inside. I used this app myself for some time and it worked for me. One of the things that helped me was actually understanding the effect even small slip-up can have on the daily calorie budget.  With Lose It you get help to set a daily calorie budget, track your food and exercise, and stay motivated to make smarter choices and achieve your goal.

My Diet Diary

my-diet-diary-calorie-counter

With this app you get a full diet tracking system. You can track your food, exercise, weight, water consumption and more to see at any given time whether you are on track to lose weight, gain weight or stay the same. It is all about making the right choices to reach your goal during the day. As with some of the other apps in this category you can scan bar codes to quickly get insights on a food product.

Weightbot — Track your Weight in Style

Weightbot

Weightbot is a weight-tracking robot. Whether you are trying to lose (or gain) weight, tracking your progress has never been more fun. Set your goal, record your weight, view your BMI, and see your progress on a beautiful graph.

The Eatery

snap-your-food

This app does not encourage you to count calories. It is about changing habits and letting yourself and your friends judge how healthy your food is. You simply take a photo of your food and share it!

Juice

juice

Juice takes a fun and easy-to-use approach to delivering an energy and activity tracker solution. It seeks to help you connect the dots between your daily routine and your energy. You can use the app for keeping track of your activities such as sleep, diet and exercise can help you identify and change the behaviors that zap your energy. Using your daily input, Juice provides you with relevant energy tips and resources from well-known experts to help you be at your best every day.

Calorie Counter

calorie-counter

Calorie Counter helps you find nutritional info for the food you eat. It is simple since you can use it to scan bar-codes. This app also easily helps you keep track of your meals, exercise and weight.

Start working out

Another very popular New Year resolution for many people that have been planning to start working out for months… is to use the event to finally get it right!

Endomondo Sports Tracker – GPS Track Running Cycling Walking

endomondo-sports-tracker-gps

This app is one of the best and most popular for planning and keeping track of your outdoor exercise. It tracks your actual route using GPS and all your data can be accessed on their website for analysis.

Lift

lift

Lift works through positive reinforcement. If you can do something once, Lift will help you do it three times. If you can do it seven times, Lift will help you turn it into a habit. When you join Lift, choose habits that are most important to you and then set yourself the goal of making it through seven days. Lift will help you take it from there.

iFitness Pro

ifitness-pro

iFitness Pro not only provides instructions for hundreds of exercises, but it sorts them by body region, muscle of target, and the equipment needed. You can use the easy-to-use exercise builder to create your own custom exercise routine, and then track your progress as you perform each exercise. iFitness Pro allows you to log your exercises, view progress graphs, and email or backup the results online.

Sworkit – Circuit Training Workouts

sworkit-circuit-training-workouts

Sworkit is an App you install to make your workouts more interesting. It works by building randomized workouts that you can all do without any extra equipment. The circuit training aspect provides additional cardiovascular fitness with each exercise being presented in 30 second intervals with a built in rest periods every 2 minutes.

Fitness Buddy

fitness-buddy

With 1700+ unique exercises at your disposal, Fitness Buddy will give you a lot of options and new ideas. With this app, you will find the workout tracking process simple and easy in order to sustain your motivation and enforce your commitment to your fitness goals.

Avoid Stress

Stress is a common problem for many people trying to get the ends to meet every day. It is somtimes about using the small time slots during the day to releax and clear the head. Some apps can help you do this and at the same time keep you from checking emails and starting games that keeps your brain hyper active!

Breathe2Relax

breathe2relax

Breathe2Relax is a portable stress management tool which provides detailed information on the effects of stress on the body and instructions and practice exercises to help users learn the stress management skill called diaphragmatic breathing.Breathing exercises have been documented to decrease the body’s ‘fight-or-flight’ (stress) response, and help with mood stabilization, anger control, and anxiety management. Breathe2Relax can be used as a stand-alone stress reduction tool, or can be used in tandem with clinical care directed by a healthcare worker.

Relax Melodies Oriental

relax-melodies-oriental-white

Relax Melodies Oriental Edition combines a simple and easy way of mixing sounds with a complete set of beautiful high-resolution images. Select your favourite sound and music, then listen and admire your selections via a slideshow for a truly amazing relaxation experience. You won’t stop listening to your melodic creations and admire your screen after trying it!

Relaxing Sounds – Sleep well, relieve stress

relaxing-sounds-sleep-well

This app seeks to help you meet your inner peace by playing really relaxing sounds on your iPhone or iPad.

Guided Meditation & Deep Relaxation Audio

guided-meditation-deep-relaxation

This apps gives you access to a guided meditation journey.

Naturespace: Relax Meditate Escape Sleep

naturespace-relax-meditate

This App provides your with astounding 3D recordings from the most beautiful places on earth and it will help you relax and rejuvenate.

Improve your finances

There is always a way to improve personal finances. This can be simply by always paying bills on time to save late fees, but also by tracking expenses to find unhealthy patterns and areas that need to be cut off!

Spending Tracker

spending-tracker

This apps is a free personal finance solution to help you track your spending and keep on your budget. The dashboard gives you a quick and simple to understand overview of your financial situation and you can use it on the move to track purchases as they take place.

MoneyPad? – Integrated Money Manager

MoneyPad

This is a smart and easy to use App to control budget/spending and replace you paper checkbook. You can manage income and track as many accounts as you want. With MoneyPad? application, you can reconcile transactions, transfer funds, view graphs & reports, export data etc.

HomeBudget with Sync

homebudget-with-sync

HomeBudget is an integrated expense tracker designed to help you track your expenses, income, bills-due and account balances. It offers support for budgeting, and allows analysis of your expenses and income, including charts and graphs. The Family Sync. feature allows a group of devices within the household to exchange expense and income information, and work together within a single budget. This is a cool option.

Balance

balance

Balance is an app designed to help you keep track of the balances of all of your accounts. Intended to replace a paper-based checkbook register, Balance maintains a list of credits and debits to each of your accounts. When you enter a new transaction, Balance automatically recalculates that account’s balance. You can enter recurring transactions into Balance, and new occurrences will be entered into Balance automatically. Password protection is available to keep others from looking at your transactions. Balance also allows you to expo

Bills Monitor

Bills-Monitor-Free

With this app you can track and categorize all your bills in a easy to use and good looking interface. Bills Monitor lets you generate weekly, monthy and yearly reports and the build in calendar shows you all due dates for known bills.

Toshl Finance

toshl-finance-save-money-budget

Toshl Finance is a personal iPhone finance manager that syncs data to a server so you can access your faninacial data in the cool and vizual web app. With this finance app you can find out where your money is going, keep on top of bills and spending, set up budgets and live easy with a financial peace of mind. It’s intuitive, safe, private, designed with character and attention to detail.

Pageonce – Money And Bills

pageonce-money-bills

Tracking bills to avoid late fees and track your spending and see where you can save. Get a high-level overview of all your bills, bank account balances, and credit cards – or drill down to see due dates, transactions, and even pay your bills – all from one simple place. Get real-time alerts and reminders about upcoming bills that are due, overage charges, suspicious transactions, and more.

Expensify

expensify

This app helps you keep track of your expenses when you are on the move. The idea is to track the expense then it happends and it will help you avoid the “did I buy this?” situations. For any purchases that are made with cash or are not eligible for eReceipts, turn your phone in to a receipt scanner by snapping a picture of the receipt! The app will SmartScan the image and pull out the merchant, date and amount of the transaction. With this information a new cash expense will be created or tthe receipt will be attach to its matching credit card purchase.

Upgrade your productivity

Getting the right tasks done first and on time is so important for success and a stress less life. With the apps in this category you will be able to get a helping hand with prioritization, reminders for important tasks and events etc. I hope you will find the right tool for increasing your productivity.

30/30 – Get Things Done

30-30

This app is simple, attractive and very useful. It allows you to set a timeframe on the tasks and breaks of the day and get a signal when it’s time to move on. It is very powerful if you use it!

Cozi Family Organizer: Shared Calendar, Shopping Lists, To Do Lists

cozi-family-organizer-shared

This is an award winning app that allows you to manage your jam-packed life and keep everyone in the loop. Some would say that it is a must-have tool for busy families!

Errands To-Do List

errands-to-do-list

Errands is a powerful app for managing tasks. It has a pleasing design, is easy to use and comes with a lot of useful features like the Folders, Checklists, Task Images, Scheduling & Repeating, Alerts (alarms), , Calendar View, Mail Tasks, Multiple View Modes and more!

RE.minder

re-minder¨

This is a powerful To-Do list app that will help you get less To-Didn’ts in 2013. It is easy to plan to do’s into the future and let RE.minder notify you when it is time. It has a nice user-friendly design and it is fast and easy to operate.

Remember The Milk

remember-the-milk

Remember The Milk is a popular and powerful TO TO list App for your iPhone. With this App you don’t have to worry about forgetting things any more. The App (RTM) connects with the popular online service of the same name and you can access it everywhere. It has millions of users worldwide.

Todoist: To Do List

todoist-to-do-list-task-list

This is a  simple to use and well organized todo and productivity app. You can access and update your todos everywhere, on your mobile device, desktop, browser, Gmail, and more.

Any.DO To-do list

any-to-do

This is one of the most popular to do apps available and it I’m sure you will love the minimalistic interface. It provides seamless cloud sync, speech recognition, time & location reminders, folders, notes, repeating tasks, calendar view, gesture support etc.

Enhance your career!

If you are not happy with your job, your boss, your colleagues, the distance to your office etc. finding a new job is one of many options. Make sure you consider what the problem is before swapping. The economy is not making it easy for job swappers and the problem may move with you. However, you can also just check the availability and you market value. Keep in mind that some of the best job apps may be local and that I have mainly added apps that have general interest.

Pocket CV

pocket-cv

A good CV is important as always! Making a CVthat really sells you and your talents, however, can be a both tricky and tedious process. This app helps you organize the information and it then generate a PDF CV for you. The apps supports Dropbox, emails and Air Print for exporting the CV.

LinkedIn

linkedin

As in many other aspects of life, it is important to have a good network if you want a highly desired job. Getting in through your network is always a good start and may be the best icebreaker you can ever get. LinkedIn is all about business oriented networking and if your profile looks great, active and attractive you may even get headhunted. The LinkedIn App is a good supplement for using the service when you are not sitting in front of your computer.

Interview Questions Pro

interview-questions-pro

Don’t know how to prepare for your next interview? Tired of carrying papers everywhere you go? Interview Questions Pro is a flashcard review app for your next job interview – with over 600 detailed flashcards to help you prepare. Study on the train, on the bus, anywhere you go – as long as you have your iPhone.

iFreelancer

ifreelancer

If you ever considered starting for yourself as a freelancer this App will give you access to the largest markets online for finding freelancing jobs including Elance.com, Freelancer.com, Odesk.com, Vworker.com, Scriptlance.com.

Freelancer Mobile

freelancer-mobile

This app is similar to the iFreelancer app, but it is dedicated to work with the popular freelancer.com service.

Jobs

indeed

Jobs is an App that allows you to search for jobs in 50+ countries and 26+ languages. It works with the Indeed.com database.

Infinity CV Builder

infinity-cv-builder

Infinity CV Builder features a step by step guide, audio help and hints and tips for getting your CV and job hunting spirit right. Simply input your information and let the app do the formatting.

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The above article was originally published by by LARS in the Tripwire Magazine and can be seen here.