MiMeals Meal Planning App

A few weeks ago I went in search of a good meal planner/grocery list app.  I downloaded ALL of the free ones but none of them really fit the bill.  I found MiMeals and it looked like what I was looking for so I decided that $1.99 was pretty reasonable and if I hated it, wouldn’t hurt me too much.

I was thrilled that I could add recipes and then with a flick of my finger, add all the ingredients to the grocery list.  I entered all my meals for the week and added them to the grocery list and set out for the store.  I was a multitasking, digital age mama - throwing stuff in the cart and tapping the item to toggle it for removal.  I hit the trash can at the top of the page and chose remove checked items and it shut down.   Hmm. I tapped the app icon and it opened right back up with all of my items on the list, none of them removed.  I toggled a few of them, clicked the trash can and again, it shut down.  I reopened it and my list was still full.  I figured it was better than losing the list and decided to just do my shopping and not try to delete items.  When I got home, I went to the app store and saw that other people were having the same problem.  The developers were very apologetic and wrote on their page, that you needed to uninstall and reinstall.  I did and lost all my recipes.. Ack!   Ok, I thought, this won’t kill me, let’s see if it works now.  Nope. I still had the same issue.

Not ready to give up on this app with so much potential I sent an email to the developer.  In it, I told them about my issue and made some suggestions about features I’d really like to see.  Within a very short time, I heard back from one of them, who sent me a very nice note saying that they had fixed the issue and submitted it to the Itunes store and were just waiting for them to approve it.  He told me that most of what I had suggested was in the release and that one of my ideas he really liked and would think about implementing it.  The email was so nice and he was so pleasant and I was really happy with the communication.

Today, Itunes informed me that the app had an update, so I rushed right in to download it. It was so worth the wait!  This app is really beautifully done.  First of all the interface is really beautiful.  Great colors, easy to navigate.  And yum, who doesn’t love a big bowl of oranges?

You input your meals (and you can move them back and forth between all meals and favorite meals).  You can date them if you like, I just kept today’s date, but you could really do this for each day of your planned week, month, year, whatever.

Open a meal and tap “add ingredients to grocery list” and that’s it.  Do this with all the meals you want to have for the week and then you can add other things manually (like my conditioner there).

I’ve been really beating up the grocery list and it hasn’t crashed at all, so that’s obviously fixed!  For $1.99 you really can’t go wrong and with such nice people behind the app, this one is truly a no brainer.

Check it out!

**Disclaimer: I was not in any way compensated for this review.  I bought it, loved it and decided to write about it. **

Some of My (Current) Favorite PlugIns

I’ve been having an awful lot of fun this week setting up a couple of blogs for clients, friends and family. Of course I’m always tweaking this one, as I’m sure you may have noticed, but it’s always interesting to start with a blank canvas and build according to the writer’s unique needs and desires. I thought I’d share with you some of the things that I found, some great old stand-bys, and where and how to implement them.  We’re WordPress Centric ’round here, so if that’s not your flavor, you might want to skip this.

First I thought that I would try the plug in that’s gotten so much buzz lately; the Google Analyticator from Spiral Web Consulting.  I came to Google Analytics a little late in the game as I’ve been using Sitemeter for so long that I didn’t really see the need to change.  Wrong. Google Analytics is so much more powerful with so many different ways of looking at your traffic and your readers.  The Analyticator makes it very easy to install your code to each page, but there are also some other features making it really useful, like putting the code in your footer with the click of a button for faster load times, tracking your adsense information etc.  Useful stuff!

404 Notifier: A great one for anyone, but especially if you’ve had your site for a long time and there have been several incarnations of it, there are most definitely old links to pages that no longer exist from other blogs, forums, etc. With 404 Notifier, every time someone gets a 404 error from your site, you’re notified (by email or RSS feed) of the page they were looking for and you can then either modify your 404 page to send the visitor elsewhere in your site or simply create another file of that name.  Very cool.

Blog Icons might be my favorite one this week - because I’m insane for customized icons.  This one lets you easily add your customized Apple iPod Touch / iPhone icon,  favicon and  feed image to your blog. Go ahead and look, take your iphone and visit colormepink.com - click on the “+” and choose “Add to Home Screen”.  Now you have my pretty butterfly icon right there, easy access!

Post Ideas: This is great. Instead of the 300 drafts I would sometimes wind up with, Post Ideas keeps your ideas, target tags and links you want to reference.  When you’re ready to write the actual post, click “Write This” and it converts your idea into a New Post and deletes it from Post Ideas.  I added a link to this page of my admin panel on my Iphone as well, so I can jot this information down when I’m out of the house. Note: This is compatible with WP 2.7.1 the link is under “Tools” instead of “Manage”.

The last one I’ll talk about today is Podcasting, another one by Spiral Web Consulting. Of course you can use it for podcasting, but I needed a way to take a client’s audio file from their commercial and add it to their website for easy listening.  This was a simple, elegant way to do it.  The best part is, it was so easy to teach the client how to do this for themselves. Yay!

I can’t say enough about Wordpress and the community of talented developers working on a never ending stream of great plugins and themes.

“Drync Wine” Free App for the Iphone

I’ve been looking for the perfect wine cellar app.  I want it to be able to find most of my wines in its easily accessible data base, store my notes on each wine, take pictures of the label right from the app, make suggestions based on my notes, and have a nice looking interface.  I also want it to have social abilities, so that I can share my ratings and notes with other people.  Oh and I want it to be free (or very cheap).

My research is ongoing, but I thought I’d share as I go along.  I downloaded “Drync Wine” free version and put the info for a couple of bottles of wine into it to give it a test drive.  First of all the interface is beautiful.  It looks like polished hardwood.  Really pretty.  The icons are well designed; simple and pleasant.  I had a couple of issues with crashing while I tried to take a picture of my label from inside the app, but other than that it was pretty stable.  I was able to work around by taking pictures of my labels using the camera function and then importing them into Drync. The Itunes page on the pro version says that the picture crash issue has been fixed in that version. I found the search database to be fairly thorough, although a lot of the wines I was trying to add didn’t have the particular vintage that I was looking for.  It’s not hard to change the year, but I was surprised that I had that issue so often.  When you select the wine from the database you can choose whether, “I Drank”, “I Own” or “I Want”.

I wanted to check the connectivity and social aspect of the app, so I asked my father to download a copy too.  We had quite a bit of fun, comparing wines long distance and all in all this app is really well done.  My wishlist, to make this perfect would be the ability to share within the app, rather than just through Twitter or Email.  I’d also like to be able to log in online so that I could enter wines there - especially when I’m importing more than a couple of them.

The free version has ads and a ten bottle cellar limit.  Their blog alludes to a website to manage your cellar in the future.  That might be enough to make me purchase the full version.

Brain Quest for the Iphone

A few weeks ago I was contacted by Modality and they asked me if I’d be interested in reviewing a piece of educational software called Brain Quest.  Being a homeschool mom, of course I jumped at the chance!  I chose the 7th grade version as I thought I could probably use it with both kids.  I downloaded my copy from the Itunes store and synced my Iphone.  When I opened the app, the first thing I noticed was that the splash screen was unobtrusive and didn’t last long.  Two quick credit screens and the app opened.  Nice.  The intro on the app itself was also very quick which I really liked.  There’s nothing worse than a long intro that you have to watch over and over each time you use the app.   We’re off to a good start here.  The graphics are clear and pleasant, well designed and easy on the eyes.

You can store up to three players’ stats within the app to keep track of everyone’s progress. Create your user name and you’re presented with a screen that has four choices: “Your Quest”, “Trophy Room”, “Progress Report”, and “Free Play”. The only one that’s unlocked is “Your Quest”, so that’s where I went.  You can choose from six different subjects, Science, World History, Math, English, Geography and Grab Bag. Within each subject you have different activities that you can run through, earning points and unlocking other areas. I felt that the questions were a good mix of difficulty levels and I had a ball with it, but I’m easy - the real question was, would the kids like it?

On a day that we had a particularly long drive ahead of us, and the husband was there to do the driving, I handed my phone back to Haley and let her play with the game, occasionally peeking at her to gauge her reaction.   By the time we got to our destination, she was still fully engrossed!  On the way home, I gave it to Travis and he too really enjoyed it.  The general consensus was that it was a lot of fun, with enough challenge to keep it interesting, but not so hard that it got tedious.

My overall impression is that for the $4.99 price tag, it’s well worth it!

Full Disclosure:  Modality provided me with a code for 1 free copy of this app and absolutely no other compensation.

Kajeet Phone Giveaway

******Update!  We have a winner!**********

Remember when I wrote about kids and cellphones? Well, I won a contest that was going on at Twitter Moms for having the best tips regarding kids and cellphone usage!  I won a beautiful LG Rumor from Kajeet with $150 in the wallet to be used towards services.

This phone features a QWERTY keyboard with MP3 player, easy parental controls that allow you to set up when and how it is used - allowances, timeblocks and it’s GPS enabled!

Kajeet is a very different kind of cell phone company;  plans starting from $4.99, always free parental controls, very flexible add-ons and no contracts! Unfortunately, I don’t have a plan this flexible and have at least a year and a half left on our family plan.  I contacted the folks at Kajeet and asked them if it would be ok to transfer the prize to someone else and they very graciously agreed to give the prize to one of my readers.  So cool, right?

So if you need a great cell phone with all the bells and whistles as well as a $150 credit for your little one, please leave a comment to enter.  If you tweet it or blog about it, come back and leave another comment (three entries per person) with the exact link for another entry.  On May 1st, I’ll choose a random number and you could be the winner of this way cool phone!

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