Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “15 Apps That Improved My Life”.
If you have lots of old black and white photos that you really wish were in color put them through the colorize app, which uses AI to recognize the characteristics associated with different colors, to figure out what they should have been and paint them back. In. Welcome to the first app video that I’ve made in almost four years, then, hopefully the best I’ve ever made. I don’t want this to be just another tech Channel.
I want to show you how you can use Tech to actually make your life better, and I think these 15 apps do that. So let’s go from the goods to the great to the best in 2023. If you ever search online for cooking recipes, then absolutely hate.
The fact that you have to navigate through an entire series of ads and the entire life story of whoever’s recipe it is, then you can instead open that recipe using the app pestle. It really smartly figures out what you actually need to know from that recipe and present it all in a way that doesn’t make you want to grab that bag of flour and bury your phone in it plus it lets you finally Auto convert the units to whatever Makes most sense to you? Okay, let’s be honest, Paper Tickets, history, literally every event I’ve been to in the last five years has either used a QR code or an email to get you in which in theory is great, because all you need now is your phone, but in practice I mean I just sit there fumbling through my emails, trying to remember the exact message I received the code, and that is where you can use something like any code wallet which can scan all of your tickets and codes and store them together and plus. It also gives you the option to add in an expiry date so that the app can remind you, as that date gets close, which we’ll actually save my skin, because I’m notorious for someone gifting me one of those experience vouchers and then never getting around to booking It okay, one of my top asked questions of all time.
Apart from how do you fake your accent like that is where’d you get that wallpaper? Well, the answer in 95 of cases is an app called Vellum. For a few reasons, the interface is super clean. It’S Snappy, and it also just makes sense.
I can’t tell you how many wallpaper apps I’ve used that just expect you to keep scrolling to Infinity the average wallpaper quality on it is like the highest of any app I’ve used. Generally speaking, when you find a category of wallpapers that Vibes with you on this, that’s like your next 15 wallpaper sorted, oh yeah, and it’s free without being annoying about it. It’S just one tiny, add Banner at the bottom, and if you want to get rid of it, it’s like a single upfront, one-off payment of 299.
– that’s how it should be now if you’ve been following iOS at all recently, you’ll have seen the lock screen go through A bit of a transformation in the last few years, but there’s one key thing that it’s still missing, which lock launcher fixes the ability to directly shortcut into your apps from it. So, for me, I’ve set this up to open my email and my WhatsApp, because those are the two apps that I get pinged from the most and it’s just making sure that when I go onto my phone, I’m going straight into actioning those notifications that need my Attention that end being purposeful with my time – oh yeah and then there’s YouTube, that’s just for my phone, but we all know that if you actually want the best customization, you still have to go with Android. Oh I’m, okay, um! Emotionally, I’m shaking assuming you know what launches to use what icon packs to use the widgets.
You can make anything you can think of, but it’s the knowing that’s the hard bit so fellow YouTuber Sam Beckman has made an app called palette. It’S like a growing library of home screen inspiration, they’re, not just jogs the creative thinking that tells you exactly what was used to make it even going as far as to link each component directly like tell me, this doesn’t look. Amazing is oh, so it doesn’t. Look. Amazing, okay, I mean you can see it now right pretty impressive, but I do still want to recommend one specific launcher that I’ve been loving recently, it’s called before and just like, the iOS lock launcher it’s trying to improve your ability to focus on real world things And to do that, the main home screen is highly decluttered. There’S no bright icons shouting out for your attention. Just words: if you want to see everything you swipe to the right and you can quick search for most of what you’re looking for, but really it is the left screen.
That is the most interesting it lets. You pick a few apps, the ones that you deem. Let’S say the most important and those become the unfiltered apps, the apps, which you need to see the notifications for the minute they come in and the rest of your apps become filtered. So all of your non-immediately, essential notifications will be collected in this screen on the site, which basically means you can focus on your day and just get to them. When you get to them, I mean any app or product that tries to keep you focused in the real world like this, it is going to come at the cost of some functionality from your Tech, but this is probably the best compromise I’ve seen like it doesn’t Feel like a burden now, one of the, since when does this sofa move one of the most unique ways that you can customize any type of smartphone, though, is the locket widget.
It sits on your home screen and it updates. Whenever your partner or one of your friends takes a photo for it or the latest dumb meme, they really want you to see it’s kind of like Instagram stories, but just for really close people in a way that it feels more seamless. Because you don’t need to go into an app, it comes to you and also doesn’t show you an ad for cat food in between every single story.
Hey, that’s just me, though, oh and in the exact same way aftershave if you’re like me, and you spend more time paying FedEx Customs bills than actually being physically in a shop. This lets you keep track of your Parcels without leaving your home screen. It’Ll link to your email and automatically figure out when something’s been dispatched, it’ll import, the tracking number to the app by itself and then display status updates, either in text form or with a literal map that pings the location of the latest updates. I love chess when I was a lot younger. My dad had a major sports injury and all the time he was in hospital. The only thing he had as a form of entertainment was a chess set, so you just played and played and played, fell in love with the game and used that to teach me everything he knew the point being. I know a lot of people right now are trying to learn this game but are put off by how really you need someone to teach you well, I think the Dr Wolf app is the most accessible fun way to learn the game.
It focuses on getting you playing and then fixing your mistakes, which I think is so much better than all those chess apps that bore you hours of theory before letting you touch a piece, and it’s just generally really smartly done like on the main menu. You have three options: you can either just keep playing game after game, and this, Dr Wolf will decide what things he wants to teach you on each specific game. You can hop over to train and he’ll pick apart. The mistakes that you’ve made on past games he’ll show you what you did wrong he’ll, let you know that there was a better option and I love the fact that he then lets you figure out what that better option was, and then, if you are feeling like Actually doing some Theory they’ve created a whole Suite of these bite-sized lessons that track your progress from Noob to Master Plus.
I just appreciate really good app design, and this is very slick to use if you’ve ever had the privilege of going on a full-on holiday with friends. It’S the best right, but the problem is it’s also really hard to coordinate like I am actually flying off to Portugal tomorrow. But the group that’s going is 14 people. How on Earth do you coordinate 14 people on a WhatsApp chat? Well, that is where wonderlot comes in.
It’S your travel plans, your hotel details, your itinerary, even your place to research everything there is to do it’s everything and more. It really feels like you’re rocking up to this holiday, fully ready to make the most of it like it gives you a one-page summary of the history of the place, you’re going and a compilation of the best rated things to do there with the option. To quickly add those to your itinerary, now I wouldn’t say it’s generating any new content per se.
Everything on this app is sourced from other parts of the internet, but it’s just having it all in one place. That makes you feel like the most organized person in the group, oh and speaking, of clean interfaces and we’re now in my top five Forest is a beautifully designed app. It sounds like a really strange concept. Essentially, the longer you keep the app open the more this tree that you’ve planted grows, to which you might say, Aaron. You have very poor taste in entertainment, but that’s not the point. This is not designed to be a Netflix Killer by any means. It’S designed to sit in the background as you do your work and basically guilt-trip you into not losing focus.
They used to have this feature that if you left the app your tree would die, which was definitely the best deterrent I’ve been there. It’S very sad. Don’T want that, but now they’ve switched it for a feature that stops you opening whatever apps, that you deem to be the biggest distraction and if you successfully avoid them, your tree will finish growing and be added to this ever expanding Forest, which is a really rewarding Way of reminding yourself everything you’ve achieved, number four is too good to go, and it’s one of those apps that just puts a smile on your face, because it creates one of those rare situations where everybody wins essentially any food place that makes stuff that would go To waste, if it’s not eaten soon and list it on this app and if they do, the customer wins because you can get stuff what’s often between a half and a quarter of the price. It usually is the business wins, because they’re making sales that they otherwise wouldn’t have and the planet wins, because no joke for every single ton of food waste that doesn’t get eaten and ends up in landfill that contributes 4.2 tons of greenhouse gas emissions.
Only real downside is how active it is in your area like here in the UK, if you’re in central London, it is thriving you head 20 miles. North of that is not, but my absolute favorites are the apps that leverage AI, because they often end up doing things. That just surprises me. So one of those is auto voice notes.
Have you ever been to a meeting where there was someone there specifically just to take notes? Well, this app kind of puts them out of a jaw. It listens to what’s being said, and it gives you a full transcript to keep, which is already handy, but the extra benefit of something being text, as opposed to just speech, is that it also allows you to navigate easier when the iPhone 14 got announced. This app is actually a big part of how we got our video out so quickly. We had the phone recording the entire event and it meant that when we wanted to talk about a specific feature like say, crash detection, we could just type that word in and read everything that was said.
So we can have that topic fresh in our minds. Plus, it means it can automatically summarize meetings using the AI for people who couldn’t make it and sort through your notes, based on what it deems as keywords, but Moises take concepts of AI audio manipulation to the Moon. If you’re at all passionate about music – and you want to make a remix or a cover or just Pat around with it, then this app can listen to any track and use artificial intelligence to essentially let you isolate all the different instrumentals and vocals. It feels like sorcery, and you can then control these individual elements as if you were the one in the editing Booth making the drive like listen to this. Quite so, let’s say that I wanted to get rid of the vocals and then let’s say I want to get rid of the drums.
It’S ridiculous and that lenser is my absolute favorite, because it applies this kind of sophisticated AI to a visual medium. I’Ve used an app called Lightroom to do a lot of my photo editing for years now it lets you tweak some finer details. You can mess with colors, you can add a vignette. There is a whole new tier of what you can do in a photo and video editing app when AI is involved, like, for example, specifically decide. My neck looks a bit stubbly in this photo. Let’S fix that or I want to apply effects to just the background.
Normal editing, apps can’t do this because they don’t know what’s foreground and background. It does also have that ability to feed in normal photos of yourself and then get out these incredibly realistic, themed, AI versions of them, but you do have to pay every single time. You use that specific feature, oh and then bonus app. If you’re like me – and you want to organize your entire work life, then monday.com is one of the easiest ways to do that. It can adapt to any kind of workflow. It doesn’t matter what kind of job or business you’re in without needing any code like I’ve built a bunch of these little widgets. It took me less than 15 minutes in total, but this alone allows me to keep track of every single thing I have going on and it can include your finances, your work projects, your long-term goals, all in one page and if you manage a team or you Work in a team: this is where it really comes into its own. I’Ve only just started thinking about this. We just hired our eighth person and all of a sudden, organizing using a pen and a notepad isn’t cutting it anymore, but with monday.com I can just whack in all the currently ongoing videos.
We have assign a person to be in charge of each one, and then each team member can take responsibility over a project and update it as it moves further along the process. All I need to do is to just look at the dashboard to get an instant bird’s eye view of the entire business, so hit the link in the description to learn more about monday.com and get a special free 30-day trial. .