I’ve been spending more time on my phone in the last 7 months than I did before. Breastfeeding for 3+ hours a day will do that to you. As a result, I’ve found myself much more open to snooping around the app store to see what’s available to amuse me. I’m always looking for something that might be actually useful or educational. I love testing out new camera or editing apps. And I love apps that make every day life a little easier.
Here are some apps I’ve discovered in the last few months and that I’m loving lately:
Blinkist
I’ll admit, I’m not the biggest reader of non-fiction. Blinkist is an app that summarizes non-fiction books into “blinks”. It’s basically sparknotes for books you’d actually want to read (if you had the time or weren’t too busy reading fiction). It’s perfect for those books that you want the main information from but don’t feel the need to sit down with for hours.
Blinkist offers a free book each day. Some days I’m very interested in the free book, some days I’m not. They do a great job of rotating through a variety of topics. You have until the end of the day to finish the blink. I find that this is perfect for breastfeeding. If you want access to their entire library of over 2,500 books it costs $12.99 billed monthly or $79.99 billed annually.
Focos
Ever take a picture in portrait mode and it’s just not how you thought it would be? Focos allows you to adjust the aperture of a photo after the fact. You can get pretty extreme with it but sometimes just a little tweak makes the photo much better or brings the focus to the subject more appropriately.
Here’s an example, utilizing a truly unflattering photo my husband took of me in portrait mode (how is he so good at that?!). You’re welcome.
HoursTracker
I’ve been using this for months to track my hours for my job. If you are a freelancer, it allows you to add multiple jobs. You can easily take a break instead of clocking out and clocking back in. At the end of each pay period, I easily export my timesheet to a .csv and email it to myself. It’s simple, intuitive, and it works.
I use the free version which does have a 5 second ad each time I clock in. It also maxes out the number of times you can clock in with the free version so I always make sure I only take breaks during they day (vs. clocking out and clocking back in) and then delete all of my tracking once I export the data.
Huji Cam
I’m probably more amused by this than I should be but as someone who freaking loved disposable cameras as a teenager, this app just hits me in the feels. Every photo is time stamped with today’s month and day but the year 1988. The photos that it takes look eerily like those disposable camera photos we all loved. Even the experience of taking the photo looks just like a disposable one (left photo below).
Sometimes I want to make a totally separate Instagram that’s just snapshots of my life in these delightfully retro looking photos. Since it’s not a filter, it just is what it is, it’s so much less complicated and therefore more enjoyable (for me).
Flic
Someone told me about Flic via Instagram DM when I complained about running out of storage space on my phone (I wish I remembered who! Thank you to that person!).
Flic goes through your pictures and allows you to swipe left or right to delete the photos that you don’t want, faster.
This is exactly what I needed because I always take a dozen versions of each photo. Usually I can’t tell from looking at them all together which one was the good version. Flic makes it easy to see the full size photo and swipe quickly to keep it or trash it.
Postagram
I talked about this on my Insta story but Postagram is my jam! I use it to send postcards with pictures of Ben to both of my grandmothers, my mother-in-law, and parents. My grandmothers love having an actual photo they can put in their wallet. The part of the card that is the actual photo is actually perforated so you can pop it out and save it.
The best part is that it saves your contacts once you send it to someone. Now sending a quick note and picture is a breeze because all of their contact info is already saved. Each postcard costs $1.99 to send and is sent directly from Postagram to the recipient. They use Apple Pay so it’s honestly too easy to use. It’s one of my favorite things to do while nursing and I have gotten rave reviews from everyone I’ve sent them to.
UNUM
I’ve tried all of the Instagram planning apps and UNUM is definitely my favorite. It’s simply so easy to use! And it’s free!
The basic drag and drop format allows you to quickly visualize what your feed will look like. Sure, it doesn’t have tons of bells and whistles but really, I don’t want to be spending too much time in my planning tool. I just want to see what it’ll look like and be done. Of note, I do not post directly from the app because I believe it saves photos at a slightly lower quality.
I hope you learned about an app or two that you didn’t know about before. Have any apps that have been your favorite lately? Share below!
