Holiday Planning Made Easier With Smart Apps

The Holiday season tends to bring the year to a happy end. However, planning the holiday could itself be a panic-inducing endeavor. To avoid such a scenario and keep things simpler, here are some great apps to help you plan your holidays.

Keeping track of gift packages

Whether you like it or not, the holidays are a time of buying gifts. While online shopping has helped make this a little easier on your nerves, one thing that still bothers folks about buying stuff online is shipping. During peak holiday season, when the number of orders skyrocket, retailers tend to go slack on the delivery part, perhaps inevitably.

This is why a single app to help you track all your deliveries would be a good idea.

Enter Arrive — an app from Shopify. You would have to give it access to your email account for it to help you. Once you grant the app the access, it would scan your inbox for tracking messages from retailers and delivery companies. Using this information, the app tracks those deliveries for you.

This way, you could know if the package is to arrive early or late. If needed, you could arrange for someone to be at home to pick it up. Also, you could send queries to a retailer or arrange returns using the app.

The minimalistic and user-friendly screen navigation on the app is an added bonus.

Arrive is currently available only on iOS.

Cooking the perfect dinner

You are spoilt for choice when it comes to cooking and recipe apps — whether you are an iOS or an Android user. But two of the smartest choices are Pepperplate and Yummly.

Yummly, for instance lets you access more than a million distinct recipes. Also, you could sort through recipes based on tastes, allergies etc.

The app also has a grocery list manager using which you could buy all the necessary ingredients for preparing your meal of choice. And if you like the preparation, you have the option to save it as a favorite recipe in the app.

Pepperplate, on the other hand, has a lesser number of recipes but more planning tools. For instance, you could pick ingredients and draw up a grocery list for up to 20 guests. Also, once you start cooking, it gives you instructions and also provide timers so that you wouldn’t under-cook or overdo things.

Yummly and Pepperplate are available on iOS and Android

Organizing the month

During the holiday season, it’s normal to feel overwhelmed by the number of things you need to get done, from buying gifts to visiting people and everything in between.

Evernote is a great app to help you get organized. Not only does it help you store files, web links, images and text; you could also group them in folders as you see fit, and label them.

Evernote is available on iOS and Android.

Simplify commuting

Come the holidays and there would surely be events to attend and loved ones to visit. Google Maps and Apple Maps are both great tools to avoid traffic and also gauge the length of your journey beforehand.

These apps are already massively popular. But in case you have never used them before, there’s no better time than the holidays to start trying them out.