2 Apps, 1 Very Happy User

On my phone live many apps. But only two of these make me smile and start in on thisreallylongexplanationofwhyyoumustgetthemtoo. One speaks to the ABC of me (yay communication all the time!), and the other to the OCD (I must have order!).

Fring

See, I'm a very important person. I need to be available to people should they need to plan something, or ask a very important question. My husband, friends and I all have divided loyalties when it comes to which instant messenger we use. And no matter how much I love these people, I am not about to have 14 different clients on my phone or computer. Enter Fring. It's just a simple little app that lets you sign into all of your IM accounts at once. GChat people sit in the same buddy list as AIM and Yahoo! folks. It's a glorious world, and buddies are none the wiser. While typing this blog, my husband and I had a very important conversation, see:

Because I have Fring on my phone, I wouldn't have missed this conversation had I been somewhere more exciting than my living room. Thank God for technology.


StitchMinder
The best free app ever for knitters/yarn people. Is your phone set to automatically go into sleep mode after X minutes? Not when you're using StitchMinder! What? You don't knit? Ok, I'll start from the beginning. In knitting projects, often you'll have a chart to follow, repeating the design in the chart over and over until you want to throw something (this blog post describes how the knitting rage begins for me quite well. Read it later.). Or sometimes you are given a really long list of row-by-row instructions. Sometimes that list has 14 billion rows on it, and if you can't remember if you just finished row 13,789,342 or row 13,789,343 the pattern gets all mucked up and you become violent. Just look at this instruction sheet I started before I knew about StitchMinder. It would make anyone twitch.

What StitchMinder does is allow you to tap the screen as you finish rows, and it remembers even if you shut off the app. When you return to the app, there are your numbers, sitting there like angels, awaiting your next session of knitting. You don't have to make hash marks on paper, or use the silly dot system like I did above.

When my IM buddies are all in one placing using one app, my knitting projects are nice and neat, and my patterns are hash-mark free, it's a beautiful world. Things line up, everything has its place and the knitting rage monster doesn't have to come out and fix things.