Schools rely on fundraising efforts from parents and supporters of their establishments, even more so in recent years thanks to the ever tighter budgets being implemented during these tough economic times. There are plenty of ways to raise money but so many of these are either time-intensive, hugely inconvenient or even expensive for supporters to back. Those people struggling need to check out Shoparoo. It’s a new app that’s set to make things so much easier and more profitable for schools and their supporters.

Basically, the app turns grocery receipts into money for schools. All the user has to do is take a photo of their receipt via the Shoparoo app and watch the “Roo Points” flood in for their designated school. It’s as simple as that. The more spent, the more points awarded with bonuses for clear pictures of receipts and regular submissions.

The folks at Shoparoo have managed to work out a deal that involves information gathered by the app being used to identify trends and general consumer behavior. Shoppers don’t have to worry about any excessive personal information being taken though as no credit card or bank details are required. Users can even cross out certain items on their receipts if they’d rather not disclose it. It’s a great way of ensuring that market research benefits you, not just major companies.

Jared Schrieber, co-founder and CEO of Shoparoo, explained the benefits to us. “The concept of turning grocery purchases into school donations is already widely adopted throughout the U.S.,” he said. “What’s so unique about our approach is that there’s absolutely nothing specific that parents have to buy, sell or collect in order to raise money for their school. This makes Shoparoo an amazingly hassle-free fundraiser and a natural complement to schools’ existing Box Tops and labels collection programs.”

It’s a pretty neat idea and it’s already been backed by numerous major companies such as Dove, Hellmanns and Knorr. Over 200 schools have already signed up to the project with it promised to be simple to join. Funds are then credited automatically based on the Roo Points accumulated.

Why not give it a try for your school? Let us know your experiences of the service.

Shoparoo is available now for free.

FREE!

Shoparoo

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Released: 2012-08-13 :: Category: Lifestyle

Eagle eyed sports fans may have noticed the prominence of a certain piece of technology during games. Soccer fans: remember pre-penalty shootouts seeing a tactics guy pull out the iPad and show the goalkeeper what to expect from the opposition? iPads are useful for many situations.

CoachNote offers a way of creating sports drills, strategies and tactics, all from an iOS device and it’ll be a real hit for coaches as well as fans. The app makes it easy to create complex plays and strategies with tools for drawing lines in multiple colors to explain what’s going on.

It’s an ideal tool for many different sports from football to baseball, basketball, ice hockey, even water polo and ultimate frisbee. Throughout, it’s simple and intuitive to adjust things such as player movement or ball/puck movement.

It’s even possible to record the plays and share them with others.

CoachNote is out now for iPhone and iPad and priced at $1.99 for a limited time, increasing to $3.99 soon.

$4.99

CoachNote : Sports Coach’s Interactive Whiteboard

+ Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Released: 2012-01-26 :: Category: Sports

It’s been said that everyone has a good novel inside them. It’s just a matter of finding the time to write it all down! Book Writer might not be able to add extra hours to the day, but it can make creating a book that’s possible to read through iBooks or send to friends, much easier.

The app makes it simple to produce all kinds of books from photo books to cookbooks, manuals or even children’s stories, all through the wealth of options within. It’s simple to add photos or videos to a book, as well as resizes such images and move them around easily. It’s the kind of thing that would be great for collating memories from a special event.

Once created, it’s just as simple to share the book via iTunes, email or by printing the document, making it a great way to share creations with friends and family.

Book Writer is out now, priced at $3.99, and it’s an Universal app.

$3.99

Book Writer - eBook, PDF creator

+ Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Released: 2011-12-03 :: Category: Books

Want to sell something but it’s too impractical to ship far away? What you need is a Yardsale! The app, that is, rather than the traditional yard sale which can prove limited.

Yardsale promises that listing anything for sale will only take a matter of seconds, it’s so simple. Take a photo and add it to the listing, set a price then put the item up for sale. It’s easy to share such listings with friends and family via Facebook and Twitter, but the app also allows you to list items to other Yardsale users.

It’s all free and available across the US, with items listed according to distance. For keen buyers, users can turn on New Item Alerts to see exactly when new items have been posted nearby, as well as save keywords to get alerts for relevant items.

Even better, it’s all entirely free to list with!

Yardsale is out now.

FREE!

Yardsale

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Released: 2011-08-25 :: Category: Lifestyle

Knowing what’s going on near you is one of the great things about location aware apps. Eventster does exactly that with all manners of events, from concerts and festivals to community events and the humble craft sale.

The freely available app allows users to browse popular events nearby, while up-voting occassions to encourage others to participate. It’s possible to filter events according to keywords, location, date and category, with the chosen event easily added to iCalendar for later reference.

The app promises 600,000 events in nearly every city in North America, as well as many large cities in Europe, so there should be something here for everyone.

With Summer here and plenty of events out there, Eventster should prove very useful to those planning what to do with their free time.

Check out the video below detailing how things work.

Eventster is out now for the iPad.

FREE!

Eventster for iPad

iPad Only App - Designed for the iPad
Released: 2012-06-10 :: Category: Lifestyle

For those in the Northern hemisphere, Spring is here which means sun, less rain and snow and more plant growth out in the garden. This makes it an ideal time to round up our favorite four gardening apps. Each is an app that will help keen gardeners keep their land in check, whether it be by providing guides to fruit and vegetables or by helping users plot out their garden.

iVeggieGarden
Aiming to be an all round solution for gardeners, iVeggieGarden offers reference and planning tools as well as a means of tracking things. There’s even a means in which users can enter their own notes and photos of how things are progressing. Over 50 different vegetables and over 500 different varieties are catered for with a plethora of information from appropriate temperatures and planting depths to harvesting tips. The app should cover all the key questions that both novice and experienced gardeners may have and it’s all done in a very attractive format.

$0.99

$9.99

iVeggieGarden

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Released: 2010-12-21 :: Category: Reference

Vegetable Garden
Similar to iVeggieGarden but for those on a budget, Vegetable Garden offers growing tips, soil preparation advice and a schedule chart for vegetables. It’s geared towards the UK market in terms of growing times but everything else is universal. A plot planner helps users plan out their garden, no matter how big or small.

$2.99

Vegetable Garden

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Released: 2010-02-15 :: Category: Reference

Gardening Toolkit HD
An iPad exclusive, Gardening Toolkit HD uses the extra screen space to create an appealing way of tracking everything to do within the garden. A notes section helps users keep track of what they need to do and when. There’s a colorful and photo-packed encyclopaedia of more than 1000 plants. For the US users, they can enter their zip-code and be informed of how hard their soil is, plus there’s information on suggested plants for the area. It’s an all round attractive reference tool.

$3.99

Gardening Toolkit HD - the easy way to garden!

iPad Only App - Designed for the iPad
Released: 2011-06-23 :: Category: Lifestyle

Harvest – Select the Best Produce
Harvest provides a guide to how to pick the best produce by offering tips and techniques of exactly how to look for the ripest and healthiest fruit or veg. It’ll be ideal once keen gardeners have already grown their crop. A large variety of different produce is catered for, each with their own bunch of tips and tricks that are impressively educational. The app follows such tips up with information on pesticide residue levels which can help those who still buy from stores, but why would you want to do that once you’ve finished growing your own, anyhow?

$1.99

Harvest - Select the Best Produce

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Released: 2009-07-01 :: Category: Reference

It might not be the start of a new year but it’s never too late to start making a change to one’s life. LifeSpicer goes some way to facilitating that ideal.

The app offers 365 different ways to spice up life, with challenges ranging from going commando for the day to donating to charity or memorizing a Simpsons quote.

They might not be all life affirming or revolutionary but they’re bound to give the day a bit more of a kick and make things more interesting. Some will push users to step outside of their comfort zone, others will be randomly silly. All will be worth trying.

Throughout, users can track their progress and check the tally to see how they’re doing. Each day a random Spice of the Day is offered by the app so there’s no guessing what’s going to come up next!

LifeSpicer should prove to be a great way of getting more out of life and doing something fun and different each day of the year. Let us know how things go with the LifeSpicer plan.

The app is $0.99 and it’s out now.

$0.99

LifeSpicer

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Released: 2012-04-04 :: Category: Lifestyle

Got a garden or lawn? I have and it’s amazing how fast weeds grow and bugs appear to eat away at things faster than I can plant them. Spectracide, known for its many weed and bug killing products, has just released an app to help identify what’s going on and how to fix it.

Bug & Weed Identifier by Spectracide® is free to download and offers some key features. First of all is the Pest Guidebook which tells the user how to figure out what bugs and weeds are involved. There’s then Capture & Compare in which the user can take photos and place them side by side with those in the guide, or even email an expert for help.

Identifying isn’t all that the app offers, however, with the ability to provide advice of what treatment to use to eradicate them, and also which retailer to go visit.

It’s simple yet useful for the keen gardener, quickly giving them a way of defeating the scourge of weeds and pests.

Bug & Weed Identifier by Spectracide® is out now.

FREE!

Bug & Weed Identifier by Spectracide®

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Released: 2011-07-24 :: Category: Lifestyle

I’m not quite at the wedding planning stage of life but I know plenty of people who are. It’s a stressful time but also a hugely enjoyable experience. One of the latest wedding apps to hit the app store, Vera Wang on Weddings, intends to hit the spot in both upping the excitement quota and reducing some stress.

Free to download, Vera Wang on Weddings offers Vera’s personal style advice for the occassion and the ability to select a dress from the Vera Wang Bridal Collection. Alongside that are tools in which the user can organize wedding guests including invitations, RSVPs and seating arrangements, along with the ability to manage contact details for everyone involved in the event.

A Wedding To-Do list as well as Inspiration Boards, allowing for new and creative designs as well as the option to view existing gallery images, completes the app.

For anyone planning a wedding at the moment, Vera Wang on Weddings is clearly worth a look.

FREE!

Vera Wang on Weddings

+ Universal App - Designed for iPhone and iPad
Released: 2012-02-15 :: Category: Lifestyle

Junk mail. Yuck. Not only is it annoying, it’s also a terrible waste. All those circulars about sales no one cares about involving products nobody wants… At least those unsolicited emails from Nigerian princes don’t waste any paper. Well now there’s this neat little app that will theoretically put a stop to most of these unwanted advertisements.

PaperKarma is so simple in its execution it almost sounds like magic. All a user has to do is snap a photo with their iOS device’s camera and the app will (read: should) find the company responsible and take care of the rest. The rest referring to getting users off of the mailing list. It’s a mind-bogglingly simple concept, really.

Anyone with an iOS device and a thinning patience for junk mail should definitely check out PaperKarma. It’s on the App Store right now, and it’s on sale for free for a “limited time.” What’s the harm in giving it a try, right?

FREE!

PaperKarma

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Released: 2012-01-20 :: Category: Lifestyle

In life, everyone needs a moment of clarity and calm in their day, no matter how brief it may be. An Ordinary App: Ordinary Words ~ Extraordinary Power has recently been released in order to facilitate that.

For $2.99, users are given a fresh insight every day through the app. It’s simple philosophy but offers some great inspirational quotes that are worth paying attention to. As an added bonus, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, the insight comes bundled with a link to an article or exercise that sets out to enhance a particular area of the user’s life.

On Saturdays, An Ordinary App: Ordinary Words ~ Extraordinary Power goes one step further by including a link to a short inspirational video that uses song, entertainment or commentary to help the user take in the moment of wisdom.

With a quote for each day of the year, plus 148 unique articles and 52 videos, it’s a satisfying inspirational package that will hopefully give its users some wise words across the rest of the year.

$0.99

An Ordinary App: Ordinary Words ~ Extraordinary Power

iPhone App - Designed for the iPhone, compatible with the iPad
Released: 2012-01-25 :: Category: Lifestyle