09 March,2014 01:00 PM IST | | Harpreet Kaur Sapra
Now keeping track of your monthly cycles, style and fashion, sleep and fitness is easy. These apps certainly are a boon for the woman on the go
Every year, as Women's Day approaches, gadget and app makers start flooding the market with stuff. This is their way of saying they are aware that today's woman balances various roles adeptly. But even then, technology can go a long way in making lives simpler.
In recent years, some apps have been introduced to help women with their diet and exercise schedules, plan the wardrobe, keep track of their ovulation cycles, be an assistant in the kitchen and even help her sleep after the full day of running around. Here are a few...
Apps to track your Ovulation Cycle
My Days (Free, iOS, Android)
One can put in information such as birth control, days on which you had intercourse, length of the periodic cycle and depending on the information, it will send out notification for the coming period and ovulation.
Clue (Free, iOS)
A good looking tracker that helps you understand your ovulation cycle and monthly cycles.
My Monthly Cycles (Free, Blackberry, iOS, Android)
It lets you keep a journal of the premenopausal symptoms and create reports for the periodic history, the fertility cycles and the weight fluctuations.
Apps to track your exercise routine
Fitocracy (Free, iOS, Android)
This app lets you track all your physical activity, be it walking, stairs or dancing. All activity is charted in a progress graph and lets you earn badges for significant achievements. It lets you become a part of small groups where you can talk about common interests and benefit from the advice of fitness and nutrition experts from around the world. Invite all your friends to join in community and you can challenge each other to achieve individual goals faster.
Map My Hike (Free, Blackberry, iOS, Android)
If you are an outdoor exercise enthusiast, then this is the app for you. It not only tracks your walks / runs / rides, but lets you plan out the routes as well. It has a built-in Route Genius that lets you select the city you are in currently, the distance you want to walk /run /ride, difficulty level and accordingly suggests the routes. It even keeps track of the other groups and the events in different cities across the world. Different training programs and challenges are built into it to motivate the users to do better.
Human (Free, iOS)
Human runs in the background of the phone and as long as the phone is in your pocket, it tracks even the smallest of your activities throughout the day. Any activity longer than a minute is recorded and the app notifies you when you have reached your predefined goals. It builds a map of all your activity and lets you share it with friends on your social networks
Apps to help you sleep
Yoga for Insomnia (Free, iOS, Android)
Yoga For Insomnia provides structured yoga poses that help you sleep. The programme guides the user through
several yoga poses while emphasising on the correct breathing patterns. One can select different levels from beginners to advance depending on the ability to do the poses and the time available.
eSleep Lite (Free, iOS)
It is a relaxation tool that helps you sleep while listening to music. It lets you select from a wide range of background music, the volume you want to play it at and the length of the loop. It comes with a built-in timer and alarm, so all you have to do is programme it.
Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock (Free, iOS, Android)
Sleep Cycle acts like a smart alarm clock and wakes you up when you are in light sleep, so that you don't hit the snooze button and doze off again. You can set a window of upto 90 minutes and the alarm will buzz only when you are sleeping the lightest. It even saves the sleep data and offers detailed sleep graphs. It has 15 different built-in alarm melodies or the choice of your favorite music.
DIY apps
Snapguide (Free, iOS)
From cooking recipes to fancy ways of painting the nails, from ways of doing your own facial to how to plant a herb garden, Snapguide gives you details for everything with pictures.
Craftgawker (Free, iOS, Android, Blackberry)
Craftgawker gives you ideas on how to create beautiful stuff for your house. All you have to do simply select the art and craft that you like, click on it and you will be redirected to the blogpost on how to do it yourself.
Beauty Tips (Free, iOS, Android)
It provides you with tips from experts on how to use basic kitchen items to pamper yourself and enhance your beauty.
Stylish Girl (Free, iOS, Android)
It's the ultimate app for style planning and shopping revolving around the clothes in your closet and the ones you want to buy. All you have to do is take a picture of all the clothes, shoes and accessories in your closet and those that you wish to buy, and it will suggest the best combos to wear and accessories to carry with it. It comes with a calendar to keep track of what was worn on a specific date or what is planned for a date in future. It even acts as a packing assistant for your travels by telling you what items to take along.
Shopping and style apps
My Fashion Assistant (Free, iOS, Android)
This app likes to call itself The Closet Organiser, Style Manager and Shopping Companion. Like all other fashion apps, this also lets you photograph all your clothes and accessories, plan you daily outfits, keep tabs on what you wore and when, what to shop for etc. Over and above this it takes in the information of what item is lying where in the cupboard. So all you have to do is select a certain item from the screen and it will tell what shelve it is on. So it is okay to have messy cupboards as long as you catalogue what was on what shelf.
Trendstop Fashion Trendtracker
This app might not help you organise your closet but it definitely helps you keep track of world trends, what is going on in the fashion industry and what was latest on the run way. It has hundreds of videos of international shows, fashion news, high res pictures from fashion weeks around the globe and even lets you share the trends you like with
your friends over the social network.
