Let the iPhone Help You Stick to Your New Year's Resolutions
The new year just recently passed, it's only been a few weeks, but you might find yourself faltering a little on your new years resolutions. Now is the time to re-commit to your resolutions, before it's too late. And maybe the iPhone can help.
Some of the most common resolutions have to do with health, money, and organization. Three things that the iPhone can help you track and organize. We're going to share some of the best applications for this, hoping to help you stick to those resolutions.
Health Resolutions
Health resolutions having to do with losing weight or getting in better shape are a natural fit to track on the iPhone. With it being portable, it's always with you to record your daily activities and track your progress. Here are our top three picks for tracking your diet on the iPhone.
Health Cubby - Social Fitness
Health Cubby does the things that you would expect a weight loss helper app to do and a lot more. One of the coolest features of this app is the social aspect. You can assign friends using the app that will be able to view your progress, and you can view theirs. With this access you have access to a group weight loss chart. (Biggest Loser?) The idea behind this great feature is to add a little competition or accountability and hoping that will give you that extra little bit of motivation needed to keep on your diet and stay fit.
Todo 6 (for devices that cannot upgrade to version 8)
$4.99
Weightbot
If you are less likely to track details of your diet, but just want a way to track your weight over time, Weightbot is the best way to do it. It's got a great interface and is perfect for just quickly entering your weight. Also included are some fantastic history graphs - just turn the device into landscape mode to view.
Weightbot — Track your Weight in Style
FREE!
Calorie Tracker by Livestrong.com
On the other end of the spectrum, if you want to track calories, exercise, and weight all in one place, check this app out. While I found it to be not the best app for tracking calories, it is free. While the app could use a few improvements, it does a good job at tracking calories with it's very large database of foods.
MyPlate Calorie Tracker - Your Diet and Fitness Calorie Counter for Better Health by LIVESTRONG.COM
FREE!
Money Resolutions
With the economy in the largest downturn that anyone alive can remember, tracking your expenses and money is looking more and more like something worth doing. We all could use a little better control of our money and that's one thing that's fantastically easy to do on your iPhone.
iCompta
iCompta for Mac OSX is a free and absolutely fantastic personal finance application. Take a look at the site to see all the features and give it a try. Recently the developers released an iPhone version, iCompta, that includes great features like mobile expense recording, transferring money between accounts, tracking of who owes you things, and most importantly syncing with the desktop version.
$0.99
Gas Cubby
Even though gas prices have fallen considerably recently, I think we all know that they will be going back up soon. The companies and countries involved will make it so. One of the best things you can do to help save gas money is make sure your car is well maintained. Gas Cubby helps you keep track of gas mileage and vehicle maintenance in a very well designed app.
Fuelly: MPG & Service Tracker
FREE!
Mint.com
If you are a subscriber to mint.com, the fantastic free ad-supported web-based money manager, you now have great mobile access through the mint.com iPhone app. With it you can quickly get to your mint.com organized finances. The app, like the service is free and ad-supported. The big plus that mint.com is always pushing is that you don't need to enter your transactions -- they grab all of the transactions from your bank, credit cards, etc. and organize them for you. The app is a great reference, but it's just that -- you can only use it to view your transactions.
Mint: Budget & Expense Manager
FREE!
Organization Resolutions
Getting organized is another common resolution, and the one where having a mobile device provides the greatest amount of help. There are really two different tracks you can take with organizing your responsibilities and tasks. The current popular Getting Things Done method, or GTD, has a lot of followers who claim it's the best way to do things. There are two fantastic apps that can help you get organized the GTD way on the iPhone.
Things
Things from Cultured Code was the winner of our 2008 Best App Ever Awards in the Best Productivity Enhancement category. It's a fantastic application that can sync to it's desktop version over WiFi.
Things
$9.99
OmniFocus
OmniFocus is also a fantastic GTD based application that adds a few extra features to the mix. For one they take advantage of the location based services in the iPhone to provide you a list of tasks that can be done near your location. That is a little hard to wrap your head around until you start thinking of some of the uses. How about having a grocery list in the application. Then when you walk into the grocery, up pops your grocery items. It's fantastic and very convenient. OmniFocus also syncs to a desktop counterpart and will do so over Mobile Me or WiFi.
OmniFocus for iPhone
$19.99
On the other end of the spectrum, sometimes you just want to keep a simple to do list and you don't want to have to learn a new methodology to do so. Here are our picks for some of the best simple to do applications.
Todo
Todo from Appigo is a powerful task manager that doesn't require you to do GTD to keep track of what you need to get done. But you can use that method if you wish. One of it's fantastic and killer features is that it can sync to iCal on the Mac OSX desktop. This feature was just added in the latest version and requires some sync software on the desktop. In addition, it will also sync to a couple web-based services, Toodledo and Remember the Milk.
Todo 6 (for devices that cannot upgrade to version 8)
$4.99
Done
Done, a recent release from Chilli X, is a great little task manager. While it's the simplest one we've shown here today, it's not too simple, but not too complex. It perfect if you just want to keep track of tasks. It has one really killer feature that I love, though I wish the iPhone permitted it to be better. When in the app you can generate a wallpaper of your top 6 tasks which is saved to your camera roll. You can then make it your wallpaper and see it whenever you turn on your phone. The downside to this, and that's all because of the limitations of the iPhone SDK, is that you have to create this all the time and change your wallpaper to the latest version. Still, an absolutely killer feature.
$1.99
While these apps can't keep you to your resolutions, only you can do that, hopefully they can give you some help in tracking them and maybe that will be just a little more incentive to stick with them.
If you've got other apps that you use to help you keep to your resolutions, please let us know in the comments.