The iPhone Mom

After you’ve used Contraction Master and you’ve had your baby you might find yourself in need of Nursing Master to help you manage the feedings that will soon become a blur. Sleep deprivation is not to be messed with. The app lets you track when you start nursing your baby and the length of the feeding. You can also record which side you left off on. (Sorry menfolk readers for the inevitable TMI.) I like the fact that this app lets you record information for more than one baby. I know that if I had twins I’d seriously need help keeping track of who I fed when and what and how and maybe even why.

You’ll have the option of adding in your baby’s photo, name and gender. I was pleased to see that Nursing Master also lets you keep track of bottle feedings. You’ll be able to record what’s in the bottle (breast milk, formula, even soy formula, etc.) and how large the bottle is.  My baby was put on elemental formula when she was around two months old. For awhile I had no idea if I was feeding her too much or not often enough. Keeping track of those details probably would have saved me some trial and error. I’m not a statistics person but if you’re interested in looking at the overall feeding statistics you can do that too. You can even compare two babies. I almost forgot, you can also manually enter in feedings that you didn’t time with the app.

Nursing Master was just updated yesterday and not allows you to continue timing a feeding after you shut down the app. I think this is a great addition. There are times when I’m feeding my daughter with the bottle in one hand and my phone in the other checking email. So being able to continue to use the app while I’m doing other things is important to me. The other new addition is a number badge for the app’s home screen icon. The number shows how many babies have a feeding timer running.

I’m all for anything that makes managing newborn details easier. I haven’t tested it for weeks on end but Nursing Master seems easy to use and it kept track of all the details that I’d personally be interested in. I don’t need a ton of fluff. Just a record of how we’re all doing and whether my baby’s on track to becoming a nice, healthy chunk.

Price when Reviewed: $1.99

Seller: Bill Snebold Design

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this app for review purposes.

When Keith, the developer of GroceryList, contacted me about his app he’d already read my thoughts on the other grocery list apps that I’ve tried. He told me right up front that it didn’t have many of the features I’m looking for (multiple lists, syncing with another user, price information) but he also told me why he thought I would like it.  He said “it’s like a paper list, but much faster, more orderly and always in your pocket”.  I haven’t found the app yet that suits me perfectly so I thought, why not try it out?. And since one of my issues with the other apps is dealing with multiple screens to make a list I wasn’t going to say no to an app that claims to be fast.

So what did I think? Here are the things that I liked about GroceryList.

*It’s fast. The app comes with a “master list” and all you need to do to add an item to your shopping list is tap the plus sign next to it. Tap more than once to add  more than one of something. The items come with an aisle already preset. This will determine the order the items show up in for your shopping list.  You can change the aisle by tapping on the name of the item and then the blue arrow that appears. Now you can assign a new aisle and also add notes that will show up on your shopping list.

*The master list is thorough. Absinthe? Covered.  Whoppers? Yep. Trash bags? Would you like drawstring, drawstring scented, handle tie, outdoor or twist-tie? Like I said, it’s thorough. You can also add your own items to the list with the plus sign at the top right corner. All you need to do is type in your item and select the aisle it’s located on.

*I like the way the master list is organized. It’s alphabetized and the alphabet shows up vertically on the right hand side of your screen. Tap on the letter you want to jump to and you’ll get a list of beginnings of items. For example if you tap on “O” you’ll see Oatm, Onio, Ora-, Oran and Oven. Tap on the beginning that’s closest to the item you’re searching for and you’ll jump to that part of the list. It’s much faster than scrolling through a really, really long master list. You can also perform a search of the list.

*The aisle list is impressive. Usually I have to add in aisles like baby items and greeting cards but they’re covered here. You can drag the aisles up and down to rearrange how they’ll appear on your list. You can also add in your own aisles too. (To get to the “edit aisles” option you have to tap the “Go Shopping” button.)

Now for the things I didn’t like so much.

*As of right now you cannot delete items that came on the master list. You can delete the items that you add but not the original items. When you tap on the item name you’ll see a trash can icon but it doesn’t work yet. Keith tells me this is going to change in version 1.2 which should be coming by the end of next month.

*At the top of the master list is a button that says “My Common Items”. Tap on this and you’ll see a predetermined list of items. Right now you can’t manually add items to this list. But as you create shopping shopping lists the app will add the items you shop for most frequently to the common items. You also can’t delete the predetermined “common items”. Keith tells me this is also going to be changing in version 1.2. I like the idea of having the app automatically adding the items that I use most. That saves me a step but I also want some control too.

*In other apps, when you have items on your list (but you don’t have the app open) the number of items shows up in a red circle near the app’s icon. That was a long sentence. The point is, GroceryList doesn’t have that feature yet.

*The $4.99 price seems a tad too high.

Ok, now that I’ve gone through all of that I’m going to tell you that I plan on keeping GroceryList on my phone. I really like the basics of it and I think with the tweaks that are planned it’s going to be a nice, easy to use grocery list. Keith tells me that he is also working on creating a multiple list feature which is a big thing for me. I want to be able to separate my Costco list from my regular groceries. Overall GroceryList is fast, there’s something to be said for being able to create a list with a few taps and it absolutely beats a crumpled paper in the bottom of my purse.

Price when Reviewed: $4.99

Seller: Helium Foot Software

Version 4 of Mom Maps was released last week. I given it an authentic test run yet because my schedule has been too tight and I’ve had no time for any fun outings. I’m looking forward to breaking out of my drive to school, WalMart, Costco, home and repeat  rut and finding some fun things to do here in Boise.

Jill from Mom Maps wanted me to let you know that they appreciate all the feedback from users regarding location information. When I was writing my original review and requested information on good ol’ Boise, Idaho they were terrific and added it into the app.  The new version now includes more than a dozen metro areas and they’re adding more all the time. Vancouver was just added as well – hooray for the Olympic spirit!

The new maps on version 4 have worked great for me so far. Now you can also enter in your own kid spots as you’re out and about. This means that the locations featured in the app will continue to grow even more. There’s also the ability to add pictures and search within the app. Mom Maps also has several travel bloggers who are adding in reviews of their favorite spots.

Last, but definitely not least in my opinion, Mom Maps is now free. Hopefully more people will grab this app and we can all contribute and help it’s content to grow and grow and grow….

Price when Reviewed: Free

Seller: Family Travel Tools

Yadahome.com is a website that lets you manage your family life online. You can create To Do lists, grocery lists, and a shareable family calendar. You can keep an online journal, store photos, and save recipes and personal contacts information. There is also a social networking side to the site and a tie in to coupons.com for grocery savings. I haven’t tried out the website because my personal system, as hare-brained and scattered as it may seem to everyone else, is working for me. But Yadahome.com also has an iPhone app called Organizer: ToDo+Calendar+Lists, and that I have tried. The organizer app has three sections – Calendar, To Do List and Grocery Lists. I’ll break them down one at a time.

Calendar – This  is a basic calendar that can be viewed either a month or day at a time. It’s easy enough to enter in the names, dates and times of your events. You’re also able to input any specific details that you  need to remember. When you’re done and looking at the month calendar there will be a dot on the date with your event, it looks similar to the iPhone’s built in calendar. You can then tap on the date and tap on the event name to see the details. If you’re at the daily calendar then your event will show up in a list for that day.

To Do List – The To Do List portion of the app works with folders. You create folders and then within those folders you add your To Do items. The app comes with several folders already set up. There are the folders of “Due Today”, “Overdue” “All”, “Open” and “Completed”. You’ve also got “Family”, “Personal”, “Work” and “School”.  If you need something more specific you can create your own folders. When you add a task to a list you will name it, add any notes, mark the due date, it’s priority and what folder it belongs in. Now the task will show up in the appropriate folder, listed in order of priority. You can customize which folders show up by tapping on “Hide” near the top of the screen. Next to each one on the list is a button that says “Show”. Tap on that and it turns to “Hide”, hiding the folder from your main list. You can always get it back by tapping “Hide” and switching back to “Show”. (As long as a folder has items in it you won’t be able to hide it.) Your “Due Today” and “Overdue” items are also accessible from the main YadaHome screen. There are two buttons at the bottom that will take you directly to those lists. 

Grocery List – The Grocery List part of the app is very basic. You create  a list and then add in items one at a time. You can only add in the name of an item, not a quantity, aisle location or price. When you are shopping off your list you’ll need to tap on the item to mark it off the list.

Organizer:ToDo+Calendar+List isn’t bad for a free app and it’s got some features that would probably work for me. Out of the app’s three parts the one that I personally would use is the To Do Lists. For me, the Grocery List is too basic and I don’t want to replace my iPhone calendar because it syncs up to Google calendar and I automatically get everyone’s schedules, without a membership fee. I’m going to stick with what I’m already using but if you haven’t found an organizational/calendar system that works for you there’s no better starting place than a free app.

Price when Reviewed: Free

Seller: Yadahome.com, LLC

Siri Assistant is billed as your new personal assistant, who just happens to be an iPhone app. It combines a smorgasbord of different information into one app that is also very easy to use. You can ask Siri to do all sorts of things for you. Find a restaurant, check the weather, book a taxi, find an ATM and more. It pulls in search information from bing, yelp, Yahoo, Citysearch and movietickets.com just to name a few places. You can type in what you’re looking for or say it out loud to the app. Siri uses dictation software from Nuance and it worked like a charm for me. It even deciphered what my 5 year old was asking for and we can’t even do that much of the time. Tonight I was looking for an alternative to cooking dinner so I told Siri I wanted to find a take out restaurant nearby. It used my location to pull up a list of choices along with their addresses and phone numbers. Some restaurants even had reviews that were pulled from the web. If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for then you can let Siri “guide” you. The main screen provides a list of things that it can help you with. Restaurants, movies, events, local businesses, taxis and weather. You can tap on one of these and then continue to make selections that will narrow down your search results.

Siri keeps a running list of what you’ve used it for. This way you can scroll up and down the screen to look things over again. This list disappears when you shut down the app but the next time you open it the searches will be available via the “Recents” button at the bottom of the screen. Siri also has the ability to send you email reminders about anything you like. You simply set it up, choose when (and how often) you’d like to be reminded and the next thing you know you’ll have a friendly reminder in your inbox.

It didn’t take me much time to learn how to use Siri but I’m still discovering all the things it can do.  I’m impressed with how quickly it pulls up information and how relevant that information is. There’s no need to visit Safari and click through search results anymore. Throw in the app’s solid dictation ability and I’m sold.

Price when Reviewed: Free

Seller: Siri

I recently put the free Redbox and Southwest Airlines apps on my phone. So far, so good.

The Redbox app lets you search for movies and then reserve them at a nearby Redbox. You will need to have a Redbox account to do this.  You can also search for the Redbox that’s closest to your current location. My husband and I used that feature on a date the other night. We had a movie that needed to be returned and we forgot to do it at the Redbox by our home. We’d ended up downtown but were able to find a drop off spot thanks to this nifty little app. It saved us paying another $1.06 on a kids movie that was a painful viewing experience. Painful for us anyway, the kids loved it.

The Southwest app appears to let you do everything that you can on their website via your iPhone. That includes receiving fare alerts, making air and car reservations, checking in for a flight and checking on a flight status. I went through the motions of making a flight reservation and I liked it as much, if not a little more, than the website. I didn’t go as far as buying a ticket with my phone but I tried everything up to that point. I also like the idea of being able to check in for a flight from my phone. I tend to forget to do it on the web before I leave home and end up with a lower boarding pass than I’d like.

Have any of you had experience with either of these apps? What did you think?

My Town provides a way for moms to store and sort contacts that are useful in their everyday mom life. The app comes with a list of categories that are ready for you to enter in contacts. Some of the categories are doctors, emergency room, library, police and fire departments, vet, schools, neighbors and relatives. There are quite a few more including “court house”. I hope that I never need to call that one on a regular basis but I guess you never know what life’s going to bring. Entering in the contacts is easy and the app has a nice, straightforward feel to it. You choose a category  and then enter in the name, phone number, address, email, website, etc. You can also add a photo.

There are a few things that I found tricky with this app. When you are entering in a phone number the app doesn’t automatically enter in the dashes between numbers. For example, you enter in 5551234 for the number 555-1234. This felt a little odd to me at first. After you enter in the information you have to restart the app before the contact shows up in your list. Once you’ve done that you’ll see a “My Town Call List” that shows the numbers you’ve entered. From here you can just tap on the name and it will automatically dial the phone number. This is great but I couldn’t find a way to see all of the other information I had entered in on this list. To see find that I had to look up the contact again in the edit screen. I know that the one tap dialing feature is nice and efficient but it might be worth one more tap so you could easily view the other information too. A suggestion that I’d like to make is to add the ability to import contacts into My Town from the iPhone’s contact list. This would be a huge help for me because it would eliminate the need to reenter information I’ve already got on my phone.

My Town has a nice feel to it and I like the idea of having the ability to keep all my momcentric contacts in a single location. The way my iPhone is setup my contacts from Gmail automatically show up on my iPhone. So I get contacts that I only email occasionally mixed in with those that I call on a daily basis. There are times when this no longer bothers me and times when it irritates me like crazy.  However, it’d be nice to have another option for seeing my most important contacts, in one place and grouped into categories that pertained to my life.

Price when Reviewed: $.99

Seller: tapunited

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this app for review purposes.

Kid Point Tracking allows you to use your iPhone to keep track of “points” for your children. Some people use sticker charts to reward their child’s behavior. Some people use points and this would be the app for those people. You’ll want to begin in the setup section of the app. First, add in your children. You can track up to ten children’s points. That’s a lot of children! You’ll be asked to enter their names, age and add a photo if you like. Now back on the setup screen you’ll want to edit the categories. These are the categories for the different “actions” you want your child performing. Kid Point Tracking comes preset with the categories of morning, noon, evening, household and manners. You can change the name of these categories or add in entirely new ones of your own. The last thing to set up are the actions and point values. In this setup you’ll see the actions grouped by the categories I just mentioned. Tap on an action to edit it’s name, change the amount of points it’s worth or the category it’s placed in. Again, if the app doesn’t already list what you’re looking for you can enter in a new action of your own. Make sure you select a category for your action.

Once you’ve finished the setup you’re ready to enter in points. Back on the app’s home screen you’ll want to tap the large button that says “Record Points”. This takes you to a screen listing all of your children along with their daily and weekly balance of points. Tap the child you’re working with and then the category that applies. Now you’ll see a screen with a wheel showing all the actions for that particular category. Spin the wheel until you’ve reached the one you want and then tap “Record Points”. The points assigned to that action will now show up in the child’s point balance. Kid Point Tracking will also provide you with reports outlining how your children are doing with their progress.

I like the way Kid Point Tracking allows you to customize categories, actions and points. I think it’s also important that they allow you to add in your own ideas. This lets you fit the app to your family’s situation. I found the setup to be an easy process and it flowed well. Recording points worked well too but it took me a little longer to get the hang of it. It almost felt as if there was one too many steps to the process but as I think on it I’m not sure what step I’d eliminate. Overall the app ran smoothly, the information is all displayed in a nice, clean design and it does exactly what it says it will.

Price when Reviewed: $1.99

Seller: Juicebox Software

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this app for review purposes.

Nuance has released another Dragon app. Dragon Search allows you to say a search term and then it analyzes your voice and pull up searchs results. Results will show up for Google, Wiki, YouTube, Twitter and iTunes songs. Depending on your default settings you may see results in Bing or Yahoo instead of Google. The app is so easy to use it’s ridiculous. You open the app and say what you are looking for. Tap the big “Done” button and your search results will appear. From here you can tap on the result that you’d like to see more of and you’ll be off. Dragon Search also keeps a record of terms that you have searched for. You can tap on these and the previous search results will appear. This app is another great hands free tool from Nuance.

Price when Reviewed: Free

Seller: Nuance Communications

Thankfully I’ve been done with potty training for awhile. I’ll have one more go at it with the baby in a few years but I’m not even thinking those thoughts yet.  The iPhone wasn’t around the last time I attempted potty training but guess what, now there are apps for that. One of those apps is It’s Potty Time. It features a catchy song all about doing it myself and includes plenty of singable details about using the bathroom.  I think that a 2-3 year old would find the song catchy and probably encouraging. While they are listening to the song they can tap the screen and watch the characters move around doing funny things. If you tap on the clipboard that the mom is holding a potty chart appears on the screen.  There are stickers to drag onto the chart for completing different potty-type tasks. I think it would be nice if the chart details were a wee bit larger.

Because my kids are older than the It’s Potty Time’s target audience I wasn’t able to properly test out the app. I could have played it for my older kids but they are at the age where songs like this become humor at the dinner table.  I don’t think It’s Potty Time was designed to be used in a 2nd graders stand up routine so I’m not going to take any chances encouraging that behavior. Any readers out there with potty trainees who’ve given this app a go?? Leave a comment!

Price when Reviewed: $1.99

Seller: AppsNMinded

Disclosure: I received a free copy of this app for review purposes.