Apps to Appreciate
March 16, 2016
At any given moment of the day, your phone is likely to be less than five feet away from you. Given our generations dependency on our phones, it’s only logical that we make the most out of these devices through the multitude of free applications they offer.
True to its name, 1 Second Everyday (1SE) sends users notifications to remind them to take videos throughout their day and crop them each to one second. The main purpose of the app, also called a minimalist diary, is to encourage users to look for special moments, even in the most ordinary of days, and collect these moments to view at the end of the year as a chronological personal 
movie.
Users are also encouraged to get creative and make movies consisting of one-second clips about certain holidays, life events, or special places to share with the 1SE community. Any video clips imported onto 1SE can be saved as a gif. 1SE is available on the App Store and on Google Play.
Rather than looking into the past, Sunrise is an app that helps you remember the upcoming events of your life. It allows users to sync their events from emails and other services such as Twitter, Facebook, iCloud and Google Tasks in a simple and aesthetically pleasing way.
The app
also enables you to customize your calendar with the schedule for a favorite basketball team, holidays from other countries, and many more events preinstalled on the app.
Sunrise features its very own keyboard, Meet, which can be downloaded on both Apple and Android products, allowing users to easily check their schedule and add events to their calendar when making plans over text. After the user selects possible times for the event, they can send the link to other users who can vote on the best time.
If a trip to outer space is on your calendar, Walkr is the app for you. With Walkr, an innovative take on the classic pedometer, it only takes a few hundred steps a day to beco
me an outer space explorer. Walkr encourages exercise by turning the user’s steps into “walking energy” that fuels a space ship used to explore the app’s virtual galaxy. Found on the App Store and on Google Play, the app also calculates daily calorie burn and recommends a daily goal for the amount of steps walked.
With over 50 intricately designed planets, and many more being frequently added, Walkr makes users the promise that they will get in shape and have fun at the same time.
Similar to Walkr, Plant Nanny incorporates ideas of personal well being into a fun game. The user begins with a seed that they must take care of until it becomes a fully-grown plant. When the user drinks water, they water their plants with the respective amounts, helping the plant grow.
Alternatively, if the user does not drink the daily recommended amount of water, their plant is at risk of dying. Simply by staying hydrated and taking care of themselves, users are able to grow a 
garden of healthy and cute animated plants.
Leaving the garden behind, you might want to head out on a treasure hunt. Geocaching Intro is the free version of the $10 Geocaching app, created by a community of people around the world who hide containers with small gifts (geocaches) in cleverly concealed locations for each other to find.
When the user opens the app, they are shown a map with all the geocaches in their vicinity. Once they chose their geocache, they are left to begin their adventure, guided by tips and hints left by the owner. Geocaching provides users with a way to explore new places through a different perspective.
If finding out about the news is your thing, an award winning app, BriefMe, offers users an easy way to stay informed. The app ranks each article with a BriefMe Score, which takes into account the veracity and timeliness of the article, providing users with the top ten articles of the moment, continually updated.
While reading an article in BriefMe view, the app removes any unnecessary distractions from the page, leaving clean text. The app also sends users daily notifications with the three top stories of the day.
