Everyone loves a new year. It’s a fresh start, full of promise that this will be the year you get fit, budget better, organize your life, and help others. Just like last year. And the year before that.
So how can you ensure that your resolutions last past January? Well, you won’t be surprised to find out, there’s an app for that. Here are 10 great iPhone apps to help you stay true to your New Year’s resolutions.
Note: Many of these apps are on sale for the New Year holiday.
Lose Weight and Get Fit Apps
This app does everything but burn the calories for you. Enter your current weight and goal weight, and it’ll tell you how many calories you should eat a day and show your progress. You can even input in what foods you eat, and the comprehensive database will tell you the calorie count. Keeping track of everything you eat may seem a little OCD, but studies have shown that food diaries help with weight loss. If you want to make this process easier you can buy their companion app, Food Scanner ($2.99), that allows you to scan UPC codes of store-bought food to keep track of calorie and nutrition info. Oh, and everything syncs to dailyburn.com. What are you waiting for?
Cost: Free
iFitness is the best fitness app out there right now. It has over 230 different individual exercises to choose from. For each exercise you’ll see a picture, a description, and, for most, a video as well. You can even choose exercises based on muscle group. This app is great for everyone from the beginner who’s looking for an easy-to-follow workout, to the advanced body builder who wants a custom way to track progress.
Cost: $2.99
Save Money Apps
Mint somehow makes budgeting fun (or as close to fun as possible) with it’s slick interface and color coded graphs and charts. The iPhone app allows you to check in with your account on the go. You can see alerts (“You’ve spent too much on parking!”) and take a quick look at your budgetary goals, which may be just the thing to prevent that impulse buy, or remind you that $4 lattes add up really fast.
Cost: Free
If you’ve ever paid a bill late, this is the app for you. Enter all your upcoming bills and BillMinder will keep track of when they’re due and whether they’re auto-paid or not. If a due date is coming up, it’ll send you a push notification. They have a free version, Bill Minder Lite, you can try as well (it limits the number of bills you can input).
Cost: $1.99
Get Organized
This app is made for sticking to life goals and New Year’s resolutions, so it was a no-brainer for this list. In it you can keep track of up to 43 “things” that you’d like to accomplish, write notes about each goal, and indicate what percentage of the way you are towards finishing it. It also syncs with their online community 43things.com, which has a cool feature that shows you the goals others are trying to accomplish — just the thing to inspire you to set goals of your own.
Cost: Free
Remember the Milk has got a lot of things going for it. Aside from it’s catchy name and cute cow mascot, it’s a great simple to-do list and task manager. It’ll send you push notifications when your task is due and allows you to categorize tasks with multiple lists. You can also sync with the Remember the Milk web app, Google Calendar, and Google tasks. Adding tasks is easy, and you can even add them via e-mail as well as share them with others. However, you might spend so much time getting your tasks organized, you run out of time to actually get them done.
Cost: 15 day free trial and then $25/year subscription
Learn Something New
Everyone always says they want to learn another language. Well, stop waiting and get an iPhone app to actually do it. Human Japanese is an amazing app that lets you learn the language from square one. If you’re interested in learning other languages, check out Basic Spanish for Dummies ($0.99), Pocket Italian – Beginner ($4.99), or FREE French Essentials by AccelaStudy (Free). The iPhone has apps to help you learn just about any language you’d want to.
Cost: $9.99
Maybe this is just one of my personal goals, but I’ve always wanted to know more constellations (other than the big dipper). This app feels like stargazing with my own personal astronomer. Hold the app up to the sky and it’ll show you what constellations you’re looking at. You can even use it in the daytime to see what the night sky would look like. And it has more info than I’ll ever find time to absorb.
Cost: $2.99
Go Green
Let’s say one of your goals is that you’d like to make a difference. You walk into the grocery store and try to figure out what to buy, but you can’t tell which products are the most “green.” Are any of them actually better for the environment? Are they worth the extra price? Use Good Guide’s comprehensive database to figure out which products are best for your health, the environment, and society. This app even has a barcode scanner so you can quickly check out products before you buy them. Also, each product has not only a rating but a breakdown of why they were given that rating so you can make your own judgments.
Cost: Free
Much as the name implies, this app plants a real tree in one of twelve countries facing deforestation. Lest you get confused (like some of the app’s reviewers) the point is not the the app itself, which simply shows a growing tree animation. Instead it’s created to give iPhone users an easy way to donate, simply by buying the app. If you’d like to learn more check out Mokugift. Their site allows you to virtually gift a tree to a friend.
Cost: $0.99
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, robynmac, narvikk, Mashable