Tech in my Life - Apps I Love

When it comes to technology I am not an early adopter, but I’m married to one. Actually, before I met Aaron, technology was barely on my radar and my DVD player was plugged into the front of my TV. I’m pretty sure he was horrified by my TV setup when he first saw my apartment, and he’ll still say he has nightmares about it. However, I’ve come a long way and now when there’s a piece of technology that can make my life easier, I’m open to giving it a try. Here’s the tech apps that help manage my life.

• FitBit Charge HR - I’ve been a long time user and fan of Fitbit but the FitBit Charge HR is a game changer. My favorite feature is that it automatically tracks sleep, which has been especially interesting since Max was born. Based on my data, Max’s birth is directly correlated with sleep deprivation. Here’s a look at my sleep from the first year as a new mom.
• Pinboard - Nothing beats this app for organizing all of the random websites I want to remember into a single location. But my favorite part is how well it integrates across my devices. The key for using this effectively is adding relevant tags to each site as you save it so you can easily find it later. Some of my most common tags are: DIY, cloths, home.
• 1Password - I hate creating and remembering new passwords and I used to use the same one across multiple services. Obviously this isn’t ideal, so I let Aaron talk me into some small level of protection. (For the record, before Aaron came into my life I stored all my passwords in a word docx on my desktop called “Bernice’s PW”.) This app stores and/or creates logins for any site and only requires you to remember one password to access everything. It also works with TouchID on the iPhone!
• Evernote - I use Evernote to share household notes with Aaron. It was especially useful when we moved into our house and needed a unified system to store product manuals and other relevant information. Evernote offers a few great features including annotating PDFs and sharing notebooks.
• Day One - This app is a personal journal. For someone whose natural disposition is to be anxious, this app is a good way to take a breath and jot down what’s on my mind.
• Dropcam - This HD camera has been a great investment and one of our favorite baby gifts. It provides live streaming video/audio, but I love that you can set up zones to receive notifications if something happens in those specific areas. Even better, it allows you to go back and save a clip if your child did something adorable that you want to save. It also stores your clips in the cloud, so I don’t need to carry around a separate monitor.
• Baby Tracker - An app that logs baby-related activity so that I don’t have to rely on my memory. You can input everything from feed times and bottle quantities, to diapers poopy or wet, and it allows you to export the data in a csv file, so that you can start to recognize patterns. Here’s a look at some of Max’s data from his first year.
• Dropbox - While there is no great solution for seamlessly managing photos, Aaron and I have been really happy consolidating our photo libraries using Carousel. It is a no-frills workflow that quickly adds new photos to our shared account and provides the added reassurance that our photos are backed up in the cloud. It’s been invaluable in managing the hundreds of pictures we’ve taken of Max since he was born. But now that Dropbox has announced that it is doing away with Carousel, we are looking for a new photo management system.