iPhone Task Apps Part I

I can’t seem to find exactly what I’m looking for in an iPhone app.  I’d like a list maker that I can use online, on my computer and on my phone, completely syncing them.  I’d like to be able to import part of a list into another list.  I’d love it if all my lists were able to find coupons that were relevant to my lists at local stores.  Not all of my lists are shopping lists, but some of them are and I’d like to have a way to differentiate between the two, maybe by keeping them in different categories. I’d also love some social functions so that I can share lists with people in my network if we’re planning a pot luck party, or to just send some errands to my husband if we’re both out taking care of things. I’ve been desperately trying to find one app the does it all, but it’s eluded me so far.

A while back I reviewed MiMeals, which I still feel is a great app and a huge step in the right direction, but I can’t create online, or on my computer and sync and it doesn’t have any coupon or social features.  I love that I can import a meal’s ingredients into my shopping list, but there’s only one list and I have to input everything on the phone.  I have been using MiMeals in conjunction with Evernote which has the syncing capabilites, as well as bookmarking, multiple lists, and categorizing, but there’s still no sharing/social features, and no coupons.

I started to do some searching, and thought I had found a couple of prospects.  Make It At Home was one, but it turned out to be WalMart specific and when I went to the site in late January, they hadn’t updated it since the holidays.  I hate to think about how much money they spent on this and then just allowed it to languish into uselessness.  I don’t love Walmart,  so it probably wouldn’t have been a good fit for me anyway.

Next I found Yada Home.  I signed up for the free service and received an email that was an image file.  On the graphic were links to different parts of the site, but since it was a graphic, I couldn’t copy and paste and the entire image was linked to their paid subscription page, which according to the email was on special for $4.99 per year, yet when I clicked the link, the charge was $9.99 a year (still inexpensive, but I wanted to know if it was worth it).  I sent them the following email:

Hi! I signed up for Yadahome today and I received an email saying that I had a 7 day free trial to Turbo.  Also, it had a supposed link to an upgrade for $4.99, but when I click it – the charge is $9.99.  I’d like to review this app and service, but I can’t figure out the difference between free and turbo and the FAQ doesn’t’ really help.  Also, in the email, since it’s sent as a graphic, you can’t copy and paste the link to the terms and you can’t click on it because the whole graphic takes you to the upgrade page.  I hope to explore this further, thanks for your attention.

They responded:

Hi Christine.

Thank you for writing and for your interest in our service.

We recently returned pricing to $9.99/user/year. We will review our email text to make sure the pricing information has been updated.

We’re in the process of preparing a comparison page to help users decide between the free and paid offer, but the primary differences are:
1) The Turbo service allows users to create multiple grocery lists and to do lists, whereas the free version allows for a single generic grocery list and a single to do list.
2) The Turbo service allows you to access and sync from the iPhone and soon our web app, which will make access from many pther SmartPhones possible.
3) The Turbo service lets you share grocery lists and to do lists with others in your network.

The terms and privacy are available at the following link on the website:

http://www.yadahome.com/terms.php

http://www.yadahome.com/privacy.php

We continue to refine our product and are looking forward to introducing new features that will strengthen our offering and simplifying the overall user experience.

Thanks again,
YadaHome.com, LLC

If this were my company, I might have apologized for the mistake and offered the prospective client (who is obviously pretty vocal), the $4.99 rate.  They didn’t do either and it felt a little “bait and switchy” to me, so I deleted that app too. Also, in order to get “upgrades”, you had to invite friends to the community.  I know lots of communities that rely on word of mouth, but that felt a little too “spammy” to me. Maybe I’m jumping the gun and maybe they weren’t exactly ready for launch, but I wasn’t feeling so great about this one.

It did however, have some of the social functions I was looking for; I was able to share recipes, but I couldn’t import ingredients from those recipes into my shopping list.  The dashboard is very cute with a refrigerator/kitchen interface and if they had the import and coupon functions, I might have reconsidered.

I’m still on the lookout and I’m hopeful I’ll find the perfect app.  It doesn’t have to be free, but I have to feel that it’s worth the cost of admission and a free trial would be very helpful. I will continue to explore and download and try them out.  What are you using? Can you recommend something?

Six of My Favorite Wordpress Plugins

Every so often I go through my plugins, upgrading, activating, deactiving, deleting. . . While I was doing it today, I thought I’d share with you some of my favorites. Most of them are pretty well known, but I thought I’d share anyway, just in case you might have missed one.  I have to tell you it took me forever to narrow it down this far and as always, I do reserve the right to change my mind.

I tried to skip the really obvious ones, but I couldn’t completely as you’ll see below.  So, here they are in no particular order, my current favorite Wordpress Plug Ins.

1. Send It Really easy, yet robust newsletter subscription plug in.  Yes, it’s in Italian, but there are English instructions too.  I love this one!
2. WP Greet Box – Let’s you show a different welcome message to your visitor, depending upon the referring URL.  Very Cusomizable.  Change multiple messages, placement, etc.  Very easy to use.
3. Post Ideas – Some people keep them as drafts, but that seems messy to me some how, I much prefer this plug in that lets you jot down any ideas, relevant links, keywords, etc., till you’re ready.  Ranks by priority too.
4. Blog Icons – Makes it ridiculously easy to add favicon and icons for Ipod/Itouch icons to your blog
5. Follow My Links -  Prevents WordPress from automatically adding a “rel=nofollow” attribute.  Show your commenters Linky Love, which leads us to:  Edit! The gracious author of this plugin was kind enough to stop by and explain that this does not pertain to comments left by readers, only the “authorial comments (i.e., comments made by the post author)”. I took it to mean the author of the comments, because I don’t actually read documentation, I skim it and then just keep pressing buttons till it either works, or I break it completely.  You can see his whole comment below.
6. Comment Luv – Everyone is already using this right?  It goes without saying, right?

So tell me, what are your current favorites? Anything you think I absolutely have to know about? I’m all ears eyes.

Santa’s List

Can you believe there’s only 58 days till Christmas?  Yeah, me neither.  This year there’s a much smaller budget for presents – and quite honestly, I’m not very good with budgets.  However, Vurgood came up with another outstanding app to make my life just a little bit easier. You might remember how much I loved their Mimeals app and I have to say they’ve come up with another great one.

Santa’s List is a Christmas list organizer with some great features.  There are three categories, “Recipients”, “Gifts”, and “Settings”.  In the “Recipients” section, you can enter all of the people you’re buying gifts for – their name, and an image if you like.  You can even add them from your contacts list, eliminating the embarrassment of misspelled names.  Once entered, you can then set budget limits per recipient and gifts from the gift list… Which brings us to the “Gifts” section.  Here you can enter gifts, images, cost, description and store location as well as whether it was purchased and when. You can also delete items if you change your mind about a particular gift.

In the “Settings” section you can set your total budget, password protect your list if you’ve got nosy family members who’ll peek, and set your sorting options.

My favorite part is the “Actions” area though; you can create your own wishlist, email your gift list or send it as a PDF attachment, which looks so much nicer than plain email.  Especially if this is for your business, and you need to send it to someone for approval it’s just a small touch that makes it look so much neater and more professional.

Notice: Jim and Grandpa are left blank – that’s because they’ve been known to show up here and I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise!

So again, I’m a big fan of Vurgood.  This app is useful, easy to use and the graphics are bright and cheerful and the $1.99 price point makes this an easy addition to your holiday planning toolbox!

Full Disclosure:  I paid for this app and have not received any compensation, financial or otherwise.

MiMeals Meal Planning App

A few weeks ago I went in search of a good meal planner/grocery list app.  I downloaded ALL of the free ones but none of them really fit the bill.  I found MiMeals and it looked like what I was looking for so I decided that $1.99 was pretty reasonable and if I hated it, wouldn’t hurt me too much.

I was thrilled that I could add recipes and then with a flick of my finger, add all the ingredients to the grocery list.  I entered all my meals for the week and added them to the grocery list and set out for the store.  I was a multitasking, digital age mama – throwing stuff in the cart and tapping the item to toggle it for removal.  I hit the trash can at the top of the page and chose remove checked items and it shut down.   Hmm. I tapped the app icon and it opened right back up with all of my items on the list, none of them removed.  I toggled a few of them, clicked the trash can and again, it shut down.  I reopened it and my list was still full.  I figured it was better than losing the list and decided to just do my shopping and not try to delete items.  When I got home, I went to the app store and saw that other people were having the same problem.  The developers were very apologetic and wrote on their page, that you needed to uninstall and reinstall.  I did and lost all my recipes.. Ack!   Ok, I thought, this won’t kill me, let’s see if it works now.  Nope. I still had the same issue.

Not ready to give up on this app with so much potential I sent an email to the developer.  In it, I told them about my issue and made some suggestions about features I’d really like to see.  Within a very short time, I heard back from one of them, who sent me a very nice note saying that they had fixed the issue and submitted it to the Itunes store and were just waiting for them to approve it.  He told me that most of what I had suggested was in the release and that one of my ideas he really liked and would think about implementing it.  The email was so nice and he was so pleasant and I was really happy with the communication.

Today, Itunes informed me that the app had an update, so I rushed right in to download it. It was so worth the wait!  This app is really beautifully done.  First of all the interface is really beautiful.  Great colors, easy to navigate.  And yum, who doesn’t love a big bowl of oranges?

You input your meals (and you can move them back and forth between all meals and favorite meals).  You can date them if you like, I just kept today’s date, but you could really do this for each day of your planned week, month, year, whatever.

Open a meal and tap “add ingredients to grocery list” and that’s it.  Do this with all the meals you want to have for the week and then you can add other things manually (like my conditioner there).

I’ve been really beating up the grocery list and it hasn’t crashed at all, so that’s obviously fixed!  For $1.99 you really can’t go wrong and with such nice people behind the app, this one is truly a no brainer.

Check it out!

**Disclaimer: I was not in any way compensated for this review.  I bought it, loved it and decided to write about it. **

Some of My (Current) Favorite PlugIns

I’ve been having an awful lot of fun this week setting up a couple of blogs for clients, friends and family. Of course I’m always tweaking this one, as I’m sure you may have noticed, but it’s always interesting to start with a blank canvas and build according to the writer’s unique needs and desires. I thought I’d share with you some of the things that I found, some great old stand-bys, and where and how to implement them.  We’re WordPress Centric ’round here, so if that’s not your flavor, you might want to skip this.

First I thought that I would try the plug in that’s gotten so much buzz lately; the Google Analyticator from Spiral Web Consulting.  I came to Google Analytics a little late in the game as I’ve been using Sitemeter for so long that I didn’t really see the need to change.  Wrong. Google Analytics is so much more powerful with so many different ways of looking at your traffic and your readers.  The Analyticator makes it very easy to install your code to each page, but there are also some other features making it really useful, like putting the code in your footer with the click of a button for faster load times, tracking your adsense information etc.  Useful stuff!

404 Notifier: A great one for anyone, but especially if you’ve had your site for a long time and there have been several incarnations of it, there are most definitely old links to pages that no longer exist from other blogs, forums, etc. With 404 Notifier, every time someone gets a 404 error from your site, you’re notified (by email or RSS feed) of the page they were looking for and you can then either modify your 404 page to send the visitor elsewhere in your site or simply create another file of that name.  Very cool.

Blog Icons might be my favorite one this week – because I’m insane for customized icons.  This one lets you easily add your customized Apple iPod Touch / iPhone icon,  favicon and  feed image to your blog. Go ahead and look, take your iphone and visit colormepink.com – click on the “+” and choose “Add to Home Screen”.  Now you have my pretty butterfly icon right there, easy access!

Post Ideas: This is great. Instead of the 300 drafts I would sometimes wind up with, Post Ideas keeps your ideas, target tags and links you want to reference.  When you’re ready to write the actual post, click “Write This” and it converts your idea into a New Post and deletes it from Post Ideas.  I added a link to this page of my admin panel on my Iphone as well, so I can jot this information down when I’m out of the house. Note: This is compatible with WP 2.7.1 the link is under “Tools” instead of “Manage”.

The last one I’ll talk about today is Podcasting, another one by Spiral Web Consulting. Of course you can use it for podcasting, but I needed a way to take a client’s audio file from their commercial and add it to their website for easy listening.  This was a simple, elegant way to do it.  The best part is, it was so easy to teach the client how to do this for themselves. Yay!

I can’t say enough about Wordpress and the community of talented developers working on a never ending stream of great plugins and themes.

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