There are currently over 160,000 apps available on the iphone and android combined, not to mention all of the other smart phones. What free apps are essential to the basics–happiness, health, education, career, housing and prosperity?
Happiness
Maximize Your Happiness
There are not many apps on the market yet that claim to help you reach happiness. The closest thing to it is trackyourhappiness.org which allows you to find out what factors in your life are associated with greater happiness. How it works is that you will be asked to report how you are feeling and what you are doing via text (only on iphone) . Once you know what truly makes you happy in the form of a happiness report you can then maximize your happiness.
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Health
Getting Healthy
There are all sorts of fitness, nutrition and weight loss applications- the best cited was lose it!. I tried this one out and it is really helpful- making it easy to set weight goals, count calories, measure exercise, track weight and add friends to stay on track.
Staying Healthy
WebMD mobile is the ultimate medical resource on the market. Allowing you to check out symptoms and treatments, first aid facts, identify pills, and locate health resources near you using your location. This app is a simplified trip to the doctors, allowing you to identify symptoms and match them with a series of possible conditions.
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Education
Finding the Perfect Degree Program
Colleges by Petersons is a fun shakable app that helps you find the perfect school for you based on location, topic of study, and price. It gives you all of the information you would ever need to know about the school- it even hooks you up with scholarship information.
Getting In
Pulchritudinous adj. Whether you are studying GED, SAT or GRE prep apps are plentiful on the iphone. Most comprehensive prep programs offer a free lite version as well a more all-encompassing paid options. MyPrepPal, Kaplan and iGrockit to mention a few.
Going for the 4.0
Who needs a textbook when you have Wikipanion? This app has really high ratings- because it’s simply a great app. You can access open source content on any topic imaginable- an essential tool for any class. Now that you have your textbook situation sorted- you need an innovative notebook app to take and share notes…Evernote. It allows you to add recordings, pictures and web-clippings to make content rich notes and easily share them with other users. Now all you have to do is figure out a way to lock all of the information away for your next big exam- no apps to help you with this one yet.
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Career
Location Based Job Hunting
There are many apps that make it easy to find a job based on your location- the top two would have to be Job Search by indeed.com and Job Compass. You have to type in a job title and location- and your search results are placed on a map with more elaborate job descriptions. These are great tools for the job search- but if you’re not satisfied with these check out the Craigslist Mobile app.
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Housing
Finding the Perfect Pad
This app will come as no surprise, and it is beneficially beyond finding the perfect apartment- Craigslist Mobile. It has about as many five star ratings as it does one on the iphone ratings because many complain of its slow load time- I tried it out and didn’t have any load time problems. I liked the layout of the pictures next to the postings-making it easier than the web to sort through.
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Prosperity
Manage and Save
Mint.com dominates the online money management sector- in app world this holds true. Mint.com mobile helps you find quick fixes in your spending habits that can help you save. Speaking of saving- there are hundreds of apps that claim to help you do this: Cardstar, a free app that allows you to store your shopping cards which can be scanned at checkout to help you save- and for coupons download Cellfire, Coupon Sherpa or MobiQpons for even more money apps.
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I would love to hear about your experiences with these apps or others. Also stay posted for ‘happiness, health, and prosperity- on the Web’ or check out thebeehive.org
