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Last week we looked at apps that help manage weight by offering simple tools to get nutritional information. In keeping with that healthy theme, this week we look at recipe apps for those seeking to add more veggies to their diets, for vegetarians and even for vegans. These apps are full of healthy and tasty choices for anyone looking to make a change to, or maintain a healthy lifestyle with the help of their iPhone, iPod touch or iPad.

Vegetarian How to Cook Everything

Part of the wildly popular How To Cook Everything series, this cookbook, written by Mark Bittman, offers over 2000 recipes for delicious meat free dishes - by far the most we've found in one app. The emphasis is on great taste, but also keeping it simple. The app includes vegan recipes along with tons of how-to's, illustrations and planning guides. Easy searching and shopping list creation that can be sent by email make this the ideal choice for anyone, whether a person looking for the occasional veggie pasta dinner or a true tofu addict.

Do Eat Raw

There are health conscious meat-avoiders, idealistic vegetarians, hard-core vegans and then there is the raw foods movement. Touted as being not just a way to lose weight and stay fit, but also to increase longevity and health, it may not be for everyone. If raw is on the menu, however, Do Eat Raw is the app to get. The app has over 300 raw vegan recipes along with information on everything from how to dress up a dish to what to drink. The app is divided into sections for easy browsing, and users can rate dishes and see user ratings to see what's, well, cold?

Whole Living Smoothies

Prefer a nice refreshing drink of fruits and veggies to a full-on vegetarian meal? From the kitchen of none other than Martha Stewart herself comes Whole Living Smoothies. Assembled by dieticians, this recipe app comes with 12 Essential Recipes, 12 Meal-in-a-Glass recipes and 12 Allergen-Free recipes. Additional sets for Weight loss, Immunity Boosting and Detox are available as in-app purchases. The app also contains a comprehensive glossary explaining the specific health benefits of the key ingredients, tips on buying organic produce and even email and Facebook sharing.

Veggie Love Cookbook from Better Homes and Gardens

While not for vegetarians, this app from Better Homes and Gardens provides 50 family-friendly recipes that teach moms and dads how to sneak veggies into everyday food so their kids will get the required servings without having to give up burgers, tacos, pizza or even bacon. This is not a weight-loss cookbook, but with a good search function, cook-together tips to get families interacting and invested in what they eat, a shopping list creator and built-in timer it's sure to help kids - and parents - get their daily allotment of veggies. And not just by hiding them, but by showing them how fun and tasty they are to cook and eat.

There is a massive industry related to losing weight, but most doctors agree eating healthy foods in moderation along with exercise is the real key to weight loss success. If being healthy, not just thin, is the objective, quick dieting isn't the answer. The permanent solution lies in making lifestyle changes that last. So we've compiled our favourite four apps to help track calories eaten and burned and find comprehensible nutritional information about foods for iPhone to make the journey to fitness a little easier.

Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker by MyFitnessPal

This app boasts the largest database of foods - over a million - and provides a calorie count along with information on fats, protein, sugars, fiber and other nutritional facts. But the app does a lot more. It allows dieters to enter entire meals, or add favorite foods, even recipes for fast access to comprehensive and useable information. The app also includes a web companion to track your food intake online and it syncs with the app. There is a barcode scanner for packaged foods, and even push notifications if a user forgets to log a meal. On the fitness end there are more than 350 exercises included for both cardio and strength training, and the app keeps track of calories expended. Create goals, generate reports and start shedding those pounds.

Fooducate Plus

Fooducate is all about helping those on a diet, for weight loss or any health reason, make wise choices at the supermarket. With a database of over 200,000 unique products, this app uses the iPhone camera to scan barcodes and then tells a user about what’s really in that can or box. It will reveal any veiled information from the use of chemical food colorings that may not be safe to excessive trans-fats while also highlighting that item's health benefits. The app allows for side-by-side product comparisons and even provides healthier alternative suggestions. The free version is ad supported.

Weightbot – Track your Weight in Style

If regular apps are too lo-tech, how about a weight-tracking robot? Weightbot is weight loss - or gain - for geeks. Users just enter their goal, their current body specs, and the app calculates their BMI and shows progress on a graph. Rotate clockwise to view weight loss progress over time, or turn the iPhone the other way to view the goal and expected arrival date.

Dotti’s Food Score

We have apps to count calories in raw foods, packaged products, even favorite recipes, but most of us do a lot of our eating out. Getting the nutritional information from a restaurant menu can be difficult and even embarrassing. Dotti’s Food Score uses information from Dotti’s Weight Loss Zone web site to serve up the skinny on almost 600 restaurants. The app has information on the most popular food chains, gets regular updates, and is particularly well integrated with the Weight Watchers program, offering scores based on their program.

The passing of Labor Day marks the unofficial start of fall. With back-to-school and back-to-serious at work, staying on time is essential. Telling one alarm clock app from another with so many similar names and features, must less finding the best one, can be tricky. So this week we look at our favorite four full-featured alarm clock apps with built-in weather forecasts for this changeable time of year.

Night Stand HD – Alarm

Night Stand HD is a full-featured alarm clock app that has several gorgeous and genuinely unique clock-looks to choose from. Even better this app recently become universal. There are nine clocks designs all of which allow for multiple and recurring alarms, iPod integration to awaken users with music, and it keeps working in the background. Of course, the app displays the current and global current weather and forecast.

Night Stand for iPad – Social Reader, Weather & Alarm Clock

Night Stand for iPad is the only iPad-only app on the list, but it needs the extra screen room. This is a lot more than a simple flip-style alarm clock. It packs all the features one would expect and global GPS-based weather forecasts with video loops or a photo album slideshow backgrounds. But, that's the window dressing - what makes this unlike any of the other choices here is the way it integrates easily with a user's choice of RSS feeds, as well Twitter and Facebook timelines to serve up all the morning’s necessary information at a glance.

Magic Window

The app is more about style than substance, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a full-featured alarm clock and weather app. It’s filed under entertainment, however, not utilities because it is really like looking out a virtual window at any number of tranquil fully animated displays. 15 gorgeous scenes are included, like sunrise in Costa Rica or sunset in Tokyo and each come with soothing ambient sounds to help lull a user to sleep, not just wake them up. If the 15 included scenes aren’t enough, 30 more are available in bundles for in-app purchase. Magic Window is function meets eye candy, and looks and sounds best on a high-end speaker-dock.

Lifelike Alarm Clock and Weather HD

For really neat looking clocks including a pair of retrofied dial clocks and maximum iPod integration, Lifelike Alarm And Weather HD is the fun choice. Activate night mode by pulling a curtain, or use the built-in iPod player anytime, with full playlist creation support. With animated real-time weather simulation that works world-wide, a big snooze button and some silly-cute chimes, this one should appeal to the young and young at heart.

One exceptionally handy thing about iOS devices is that they're so very portable. Even more so than a laptop or netbook. Sure I can take my laptop into the kitchen and place it on the side while I consult it for recipe ideas but my kitchen isn't big enough to sacrifice a potential preparation area in favour of the laptop. In the case of my iPhone though, I can hold it in one hand while I stir with the other. Ideal! There's a huge multitude of cookery apps that aim to help or inspire you in the kitchen, but here are my picks of the bunch.

Around the World in 80 Recipes: This app is gorgeous. It's the equivalent of that recipe book that might not provide the cheapest or most convenient of recipes, but you'll love to just virtually flick through it and take in the delights. Offering an old fashioned looking map interface where you choose what country you want to look at according to its stamp, it's more than just a list of recipes. When you get to the actual recipe, you're given a gorgeous photo of the food making it look even more appetising and the ingredients and instructions are detailed but not intimidating. An ideal app for the connoisseur who fancies arranging a dinner party.

Easy Cooking: Of course you don't always want complicated, glamorous meals. Sometimes you just want good, simple food. Easy Cooking offers a whole array of different recipe ideas from the leftover type meals such as Breakfast Casserole to how to cook a good roast chicken. All the steps are easy to understand the addition of a description that suggests what accompaniments would go well with each meal is a great touch. Its New York Cheesecake recipe is particularly delicious!

AllRecipes: Dinner Spinner: Trying to decide what to eat each day can be tough, even if you love cooking. Inspiration isn't always easy to come by. AllRecipes: Dinner Spinner aims to add some randomness to the equation by coming up with a recipe for you. You can be entirely random or you can focus on certain food types. If for example, you know you fancy having a pasta main dish, select that and the app will come up with loads of suggestions of what you can do. You can even adjust it according to how long you want to spend cooking, making finding quick recipes a much easier task than in other recipe apps. Each recipe is submitted by a regular person rather than a chef so they're typically very easy to prepare. A load of nutritional information is great too for the health conscious. The only real downside is that recipes aren't available offline but this isn't too big a deal if you're in the house anyway. There's a Pro version available too which offers a few extra bits and pieces but the Free version will serve you well for a while to come.

Cookery School Multi-Timer: Timing is everything with cooking. Being able to cook one thing isn't that hard, being able to cook a whole meal ensuring that everything's ready at the same time is the hard part. Multi-Timer goes some way to solving this problem by allowing you to set up numerous timers correlating to the various items that need to go in the oven/on the hob at differing times. You can set it up meal by meal meaning you don't have to keep re-inputting new information every time. You can simple tap Roast Dinner for instance and it'll have all your timings there from last time. It's a huge help made even better by the fact that it's free.

This week, February 13-20, Apple launched subscription services for applications, meaning that developers must offer an in-app purchase option if they offer an outside-app purchase option, like a newspaper does through its website. For example, if Company A offers a monthly service charge of $10 for its articles, and it has an application on the App Store, it must now offer that same deal for the same price ($10) or less through its iOS application. Here's the catch - that $10 is subject to Apple's 30% commission policy.

"Apple feels as though they are providing lots of new users for these services and Apple wants to be compensated for that. That makes sense. They are providing a service and bringing users to these subscription services, they should be compensated" writes Jeff Scott, Founder of 148Apps. However, he warns that "in the end, it’s going to backfire and we the users are going to lose out" - outlining a number of possible scenarios, one of which is shifting the extra cost of paying commission onto the consumer. So that $10 service would need to rise to $13.33 (30% of $10, plus the original $10) in order for the developer to remain no better or no worse off. And that's not good for consumers.

In other news, the all-time favourite Angry Birds has reached a new App Store peak: 250 non-consecutive days at the number one spot on the biggest application store the world has ever known. The iOS favourite was launched on December 11 2009 and, in less than six months after its conception, reached the number one spot in Apple's App Store on April 27 2010. Bonnie Eisenman's been hard at work, collaborating a myriad of data to produce a pictorial review of its massive success. You can see (and read) all about it right here.

In other news, this week 148Apps awarded NBA Jam Review 4.5 stars as well as the Editor's Choice badge for its excellent gameplay and 5 star graphics. "EA has managed to perfectly recreate the NBA Jam experience on a device that was never designed to handle that volume of visual insanity" writes Blake Grundman. "Every dunk, jumpshot and alley-oop runs smoothly and flawlessly, once again raising the bar for gaming on the platform. There is really no amount of praise that can do this game enough justice. It is simply outstanding."

But there are many who just don't find touch screen gaming an equal substitute. "When it comes to iOS gaming, the biggest complaint that continues to come up is the lack of physical controls. While veteran iOS gamers have gotten used to virtual controls, games still often suffer from not having actual physical buttons and joysticks to use" writes Carter Dotson, who goes on to outline a number of solution for hand-using gamers, such as the Fling, JOYSTICK-IT, iCade and iControlPad.

And to wrap up this week, we've brought back the much-loved Favorite 4 column. This week, Favorite 4 examines "the finest examples of established gaming franchises making appearances on iOS" - Street Fighter IV, Space Invaders Infinity Gene, NBA Jam and PAC-MAN. Episode 72 of The Portable Podcast is also available to download, featuring your host Carter Dotson and special guest Brett Nolan from AppAddict.

I'll leave you this week with a glimpse into the future. It has Telltale Games written all over it.