Keeping New Year’s resolutions is hard. Who has the willpower? Here’s 10 iPhone apps that might help.
Quit Smoking
Featuring UK clinical hypnotherapist Max Kirsten, Quit Smoking Now is a highly-rated quitting app. It includes several hypnosis sessions to help you kick the weed, and is endorsed by actor Ewan McGregor. $7.99. More info here.
Lose Weight
The free Lose It! app is one of the most popular apps on the App Store — a combination food and exercise tracker that can be linked to Twitter, Facebook and the FitNow website.
Stop Chewing Your Fingernails
Stop Bite is a $0.99 motivational program to support you in the battle with chewing your nails. Keeps track of the nail length and provides benefit and motivation feedback.
Cut Back on Drinking
The $1.99 Drink Less — Alcohol Tracker app helps you keep a personal drinks diary, calculates alcohol units and tracks drinking patterns over time.
Pay off Debt
The $2.99 Pay Off Debt app helps you create and use a debt snowball, a systematically method for paying down debts.
Volunteer
The free Catalista: Volunteer Locally! app lists more than 250,000 local nonprofits to help you find ways to volunteer. Connects to Facebook and tracks hours for work or school credit.
Save Money
Mint.com Personal Finance is a free app to help you keep track of your money via the highly-rated Mint.com website. Very easy to see where you are spending your money — and where savings could be made.
Keep a Diary
My Diary is a highly-rated, $0.99 journaling app that can be password protected and allows you to write in landscape mode.
Get Organized
Pageonce’s $6.99 Personal Assistant Pro is a popular app for tracking your online life, including banking, credit cards, cell phone minutes, itineraries, air miles, and even your Netflix queue. Get organized!
Get More Sleep
The $9.99 Pzizz Sleep app claims to cure insomnia by creating unique sleep soundtracks on the fly. It’s the number 1 download in the Medical category in several countries.
Leander Kahney is the editor and publisher of Cult of Mac.
Leander is a longtime technology reporter and the author of six acclaimed books about Apple, including two New York Times bestsellers: Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products and Inside Steve’s Brain, a biography of Steve Jobs.
He’s also written a top-selling biography of Apple CEO Tim Cook and authored Cult of Mac and Cult of iPod, which both won prestigious design awards. Most recently, he was co-author of Cult of Mac, 2nd Edition.
Leander has been reporting about Apple and technology for nearly 30 years.
Before founding Cult of Mac as an independent publication, Leander was news editor at Wired.com, where he was responsible for the day-to-day running of the Wired.com website. He headed up a team of six section editors, a dozen reporters and a large pool of freelancers. Together the team produced a daily digest of stories about the impact of science and technology, and won several awards, including several Webby Awards, 2X Knight-Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and the 2010 MIN (Magazine Industry Newsletter) award for best blog, among others.
Before being promoted to news editor, Leander was Wired.com’s senior reporter, primarily covering Apple. During that time, Leander published a ton of scoops, including the first in-depth report about the development of the iPod. Leander attended almost every keynote speech and special product launch presented by Steve Jobs, including the historic launches of the iPhone and iPad. He also reported from almost every Macworld Expo in the late ’90s and early ‘2000s, including, sadly, the last shows in Boston, San Francisco and Tokyo. His reporting for Wired.com formed the basis of the first Cult of Mac book, and subsequently this website.
Before joining Wired, Leander was a senior reporter at the legendary MacWeek, the storied and long-running weekly that documented Apple and its community in the 1980s and ’90s.
Leander has written for Wired magazine (including the Issue 16.04 cover story about Steve Jobs’ leadership at Apple, entitled Evil/Genius), Scientific American, The Guardian, The Observer, The San Francisco Chronicle and many other publications.
Leander has a postgrad diploma in artificial intelligence from the University of Aberdeen, and a BSc (Hons) in experimental psychology from the University of Sussex.
He has a diploma in journalism from the UK’s National Council for the Training of Journalists.
Leander lives in San Francisco, California, and is married with four children. He’s an avid biker and has ridden in many long-distance bike events, including California’s legendary Death Ride.
You can find out more about Leander on LinkedIn and Facebook. You can follow him on X at @lkahney or Instagram.
