Rain or Shine, Lookin’ Fine

Sorry for the massive delay, guys.  Unfortunately, I’ve been feeling under-the-weather lately and that led to a couple days (more like a week or so) of sniffling, constantly checking my temperature, hydrating, and resting.  Speaking of under-the-weather though, who’s heard of an app called Swackett. Known as a “different kind of weather app,” Swackett not only tells you the temperature, but also attempts to give you fashion advice.

Essentially their main goal is to tell you what it’s going to feel like.  Some people are good with numbers; others? Not so much.  I’m one of those people that if you tell me a temperature, I’ll be like cool! Now what.  So this type of app was a pretty good find for me.  (Also, it’s not that I’m incompetent with numbers—actually, I’m pretty good when it comes to numbers in math—but the whole idea of 68 degrees somehow feeling freezing for the summer versus 68 degrees being awesomely warm in the winter just bothers my mind.)

This app has multiple views: it’ll show you outfit options (for male or for female), has three “fun games” it rotates through, and shows weather data from AccuWeather.

Female casual fashion….seriously. what’s with the hair?

Female “meeting with the CEO” fashion…because we know that happens all the time

Male fashion (not a bad look, actually)

Male fashion #2. Ok, they did much better with the guys’ clothing than the girls…not fair!

Yeah, after I saw the app, I wondered what the camera icon was for, and apparently, you can change the sky background and move the little peep around (that’s what the little guy/girl is called, btw).  So, I guess alternatively…you could probably take a pic of yourself and move the peep to stand next to you and do like a side-by-side comparison of how much better you look than a 2-D model!  I bet that’d be a great ego boost!

There’s also a general plain-old-weather view that gives you a boring temperature and some details about precipitation percentages and what not, along with a detailed time view.

AccuWeather feed

Detailed time view

BORING TEMPERATURE VIEW

Something else I found cool is that it has an Insight view.  This is where it judges weather or not (Typo intended.) outside is good for different activities or different health conditions and stuff.

It’s a pretty good app, but it’s available just on iPhone for now. They have a couple things they could work on, maybe just a few bugs. But, the idea isn’t too shabby, and I could totally see it catching on!

P.S. – While it works well for a general idea of what to wear, I wouldn’t follow their fashion advice to a tee. (LOL GET IT, like to the tee-shirt. Oh, I’m so funny sometimes.)

Solutions for a Shopaholic

Here’s the thing: I shop a lot. Whether it’s for clothes, shoes, food, or technology, money is constantly leaving my bank account. And no matter how many sales I went to, I wasn’t actually saving money. Apparently 60% off is still spending 40% of the price 😦

I did however, find a solution to my “addiction.” I realized that awareness is key! I needed to know how much I was spending and where. And that’s where mint.com comes in play. Mint.com consolidates all your banking information and gives it to you in one app. You connect it to your banking accounts (and they have most of those popular banks and what not, so nothing to worry about). Once you’ve done all the connecting….boom! You’re set!

Mint.com will tell you where you’re spending your money. Every transaction on every credit card is recorded and displayed. Each transaction is sorted into a category (and they’re like 95% accurate when it comes to sorting). In addition to the whole sorting thing, you can set budgets on categories. I think the thing helps me most when it comes to Mint.com is how they alert you when you’re near your budget or they give you advice on stuff. They’ll give suggestions like…. “You go shopping a lot. Start earning 5% cash back.” and they’ll give you details about a certain credit card that does that.

They keep track of what your income is and how much you’re spending and keep you constantly up to date based on that….maybe if Isla Fisher had Mint.com, her whole credit card fiasco would have never happened.

P.S. – Mint.com is available as a web app, an iPhone app, an Android app, and I believe as of December,  it should be available on Windows Phone too!