The Daily Dot’s weekly app round-up brings you new, or newly updated, apps for both iOS and Android that are well worth your time and attention.
Spot Angels
Spot Angels
When you live in a major metropolitan area the esoteric nightmare of parking regulations will quickly come to haunt you. A spot might let you park on a Monday from 10AM to 9PM, except between the hours of 4PM and 5PM and for six minutes at the strike of noon, but never on a Tuesday. Also, make sure you remember street sweeping on Wednesday or you’re going to get a ticket. Honestly, no matter what you do you’re going to get a ticket. It’s confusing on purpose, but that’s where Spot Angels comes in.
Spot Angels uses your GPS to detect when you’ve parked and will send you push notifications when it’s time to move your car. It covers street cleaning schedules, metered spots, tow away zones, residential parking restrictions, and other odd parking minutia. I tested the app in Santa Monica and was pleasantly surprised by how effective the app’s parking detection software is.
At the moment the app’s major downside is the limited number of cities the service can be used in. Currently Spot Angels only works in New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Santa Monica. We’re looking forward to seeing them expand in the future. Until then, be careful with your parking, or thank god you live in the suburbs.
Scanner Pro 7
Scanner Pro 7
Everyone needs a scanner sometimes, but few people need one enough to justify the expense of buying one. Thankfully Scanner Pro is here to give you powerful scanning solutions for the budget price of just $3.99. Documents can be saved as JPEG or PDFs, and then emailed or uploaded to your favorite web services directly from the app.
Scanner Pro’s latest update has introduced a powerful new text recognition feature, allowing you to create searchable PDFs of your documents. Text recognition supports 12 languages: English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Dutch, Turkish, Polish, Swedish and Norwegian. For students or researchers, text recognition makes this app priceless. No longer lug books to the copier machine; just sit down at the library and archive your research digitally.
Whether you’re looking for a business solution or simply a way to easily archive your doodles, Scanner Pro 7 is worth the investment.
Service
Service
Sometimes you need to complain to a company. Your flight gets delayed, a product you bought is defective, a delivery was late; petty inconveniences happen. Sadly, automated phone services have made it so filing a complaint means waiting through an unending series of phone menus and robots who won’t just let you talk to a person. Service would like to fix that.
Utilizing a little personal information, Service’s dedicated support staff will reach out to the company that has wronged you and try to make things right. This allows companies to avoid angry social media disasters and you to avoid wasting time on the phone being angry.
Now no problem is too small to just let go. Let Service deal with your issues, and get back to living your life. Service is currently free, so get in on the ground floor.
(Not)Recipes by Food52
(Not)Recipes
Home cooking is often just as much chaos as it is science. Sometimes you look in the fridge, throw whatever leftovers you have in a pot, cross your fingers, and magic happens. Now you can harness the power of those happy accidents via the cloud and the (Not)Recipes app by Food52. (Not)Recipes is a crowd sourced cooking app that allows people to share their own home brewed cooking ideas and recipes with the world.
Users can search hashtags for ingredients they have around the house, upload photos of their finished products, or read a curated list of recipes for Food52’s editors. Ingredients are automatically detected, providing you with an easy mini-grocery list if you’re utilizing the app on the go. (Not)Recipes encourages users to keep adding content with weekly contests based on themes ranging from “bagged lunches” or “what to cook when you don’t feel like cooking.”
Whether you’re a college student cooking on your own for the first time or just trying to cut back on eating out, (Not)Recipes is a fun and easy introduction to the world of cooking.
How Many Saturdays
How Many Saturdays?
How do you measure your life? In minutes? Seconds? Days? Farts? How Many Saturdays wants you to know the numbers of your life, even if you’ve never thought of them yourself. How many seconds until you die? How many times will lightning strike the Earth in your remaining lifetime? Just input your date of birth and use the handy slider to guess the day of your death, and How Many Saturdays will put your mortality into numbers.
While some readers might see this app as a ghoulish celebration of the macabre, How Many Saturdays is actually a celebration of life. It lets you know just how much life is ahead of you in silly metrics you might not have considered. You’re not going to die in 60 years. You’re going to die in five cat lifetimes or after 15 million strikes of lightning, so get out there and live dang it.
How Many Saturdays might not find a long term home on your mobile device, but it’s a lovely oddity to spend a weekend with. Think of your death in a lighthearted way this weekend, then get started living on Monday.