Apps

I remember the days of taking home a huge vocabulary list home from school and spending hours memorizing the definitions. Back then, it was pain in the ass. But nowadays, I get a secret joy from using those same vocabulary words I dreaded. I don’t know about you, but as an adult, I still want to learn new words and continue to expand my vocabulary. Of course, the best way to do that is to read. But the next best way may very well be this app. The Daily Word is a super simple app that gives you a new word to learn each day along with its pronunciation, definition, and an example sentence. Here’s more on what it does and why we love it.

If you have an Instagram account, you’ve surely seen reposted photos with credit given to the account it originated from. But there is no option to repost a photo within the Instagram app, so how do they do it? With a third-party app! Being able to repost photos is crucial for businesses and fun for individuals. There are multiple third-party apps you can use to repost photos to Instagram, but I’m going to show you my favorite and how I use it along with the Instagram app to repost a photo.

If you take a photo within Messages, it isn’t automatically saved to your iPhone. If you take a photo you really like, you’ll want to manually save it with this tip. It’s nice that iPhone doesn’t automatically save those photos so that you aren’t accidentally taking up too much space or saving private photos meant only for the conversation. But if you send a photo you like, here’s how to save it to the Photos app.

I often refer to Evernote as my “second brain.” The app allows me to follow a modified version of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) philosophy, a productivity method designed to help you arrange a systematic workflow to prioritize, manage, and execute important tasks while snoozing those that can wait. Today, I don’t know what I would do without my omnipresent, all-knowing digital assistant. Here are some tips that will keep you coming back to the green, glowing reliability of Evernote.

Are you an animal lover? Do you have kids? Great, then you’ll love these interactive apps! Along with being visually pleasing and easy to use, these are some of the best game apps for iPad and iPhone that promote learning – through pictures, puzzles, and even some math! Kids will be so into the apps that they will forget they are learning, but parents will be pleased because their children are gaining fundamental knowledge. Here are four iPhone apps for kids that have some purely fun objectives and features to stimulate your child’s giggly, energetic personality.

I think we can all agree that money can be a tense subject. Rarely do we enjoy reminding a friend they owe us twenty bucks for last week’s group dinner. But, if you’re a social animal in the slightest, I’m sure you’ve found yourself splitting a tab with friends and family. At the beginning of this year, some of the iPhone Life team took a trip to Mexico, where we had to split a whole lot of different things from dinner to snorkeling. But it was easy to keep track of and pay each other back thanks to the app Splitwise (free). Here’s what it does and why we love it.

The games I play most often on my iPhone are those I can easily pick up for a few minutes and set back down without needing to get too heavily involved. I also very much enjoy a game that makes me think a bit by figuring out some elaborate puzzle. The puzzle adventure game Aurora for iPhone or iPad combines both of those in an adorable game that asks you look at things from all different perspectives. Here’s what this game is all about and why we love it.

These five to-list apps and task management apps are fairly simple, contain a sleek interface, and most importantly, keep you organized. Say goodbye to forgetting to write important tasks down and having to remember the paper list on the counter. The following to-do list apps can help you keep up with your everyday life while keeping the process as simple (or detailed) as you like and as personalized as you desire. Also, they all have free versions with the option to pay for premium with an in-app purchase. Give one (or all) a try and comment below on how it goes.

iPhone Life’s resident iPhoneographer and Managing Editor Rheanne Taylor has a favorite photo editing app that she uses constantly for her polishing her photos: Darkroom Photo Editor (free). But it’s not just her—avid photographers will tell you their all-time favorite filter from Darkroom at the drop of a hat, and a quick look at the app’s review will tell you much users love it. This app offers users a lot of control over their photos with a wide range of options. Access to the basic features of the app is free, but users say it’s well worth $3.99 to get all the premium tools or $5.99 for all the tools and filters. We’ll tell you more about the Darkroom app below, including what  it can do and why we love it.

Apple Music's social networking feature lets you follow your favorite musicians. They share things such as behind-the-scenes photos, lyrics they're working on, a new video, and whatever else interests them. When you add songs to your music library, by default the artists are automatically added to your Connect Posts. But you may not want to follow some of these artists. In my case, for example, I added Beethoven, but it seems unlikely he'll be sharing anything. You can change the default so that artists aren't automatically added. Or you can unfollow selected artists that were added by default. Here’s how to unfollow artists in Apple Music on iPhone.

For new Apple Music users, Apple offers a three-month trial. When those three months are up, you can choose to cancel your subscription if you’ve decided it’s not for you. But Apple will automatically begin to charge your account if you haven’t turned off auto renew. On the other hand, let’s say you’ve been using Apple Music for a while but want to cancel. You can use this tip to make sure your account isn’t automatically renewed for another month of Apple Music. Here’s how to turn off Apple Music auto renew on the iPhone.

Want to get rid of that annoying, “Sent from my iPhone” signature? Here’s how. Better yet, if you have more than one email account connected to your Mail app, you can create different signatures for the separate accounts. This is especially convenient if you have mail accounts for different purposes, such as one for work and one for personal use. You can create different signatures for Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, iCloud, and more. Here’s how to create different signatures for separate email accounts on iPhone.

When you do a search in Safari, it preloads the top search result in the background so that if you do indeed select that result, the page will appear almost instantly. What this means, though, is that if that's not the web page you want, you've already used up some of your data to preload it. This is fine if you're on Wi-Fi or an unlimited data plan, but perhaps not a good idea if you're trying to keep down your data usage. Fortunately, you can turn off this feature, thereby avoiding data usage for web pages that you may not want to access.

Welcome to App Saturdays! (*insert jazz hands*) Every Saturday we’ll feature an app we love, telling you what it can do and why it’s awesome.

Our brains have a great way of never shutting up. Just search Mindfulness in the App Store and you’ll see that people are actively looking for ways to relax, let go of the past, calm their heart, and come to a present state of awareness. But do any of those apps deliver on what they promise? I’ve tried a few and have even found some that I like. But never before have I found an app that utilizes a proven method of hacking our unconscious responses. You’ll be amazed what a simple breathing technique can do for your body, mind, and spirit. Don’t take my word for it though; this is the same breathing technique used by the military and professional athletes. This is Box Breathing. Here’s what it does and why we love it.

I use the Reminders app on my iPhone quite a bit. I’ll create a reminder to pick up my dry cleaning, to buy my cousin a birthday present, or to pay a bill. When I create Reminders, I usually set them to remind me on a certain day, at a certain time. But if I need to make a change to one reminder among many, manually shuffling through them is a pain. For example, I made a Reminder to “pay a fee for the school trip” my son was going on. I forgot what the fee amount was and needed the information before the due date. Instead of tapping each folder and scrolling through them to find it, I simply accessed the Reminders search field. Here’s how to search for a particular reminder on iPhone.

There are several reasons why you might want to see comments on a Facebook post—I often want to see comments if the poster is asking a question I'd like to know the answer to. You can receive notifications about future comments by leaving a comment yourself. Indeed, I often see people comment "following" or "commenting because I'd like to receive updates" on Facebook status updates. But did you know that you can easily subscribe to updates without commenting on a thread? Here's how to follow a Facebook thread and receive notifications of comments without leaving a comment.

Pages