Phone Apps

Note: I use an iphone; some of these apps may not be available for Android phones.

Way of Life is a simple tool for building and maintaining positive daily habits and breaking bad ones. I’ve been using it off and on since about 2016. Other habit trackers have more features, but I prefer the simplicity of this one. You just click yes, no, or skip for each action you want to do daily. Yeses show up as green and no’s as red. The app keeps track of your current streak, as well as your longest ever streak. It’s easy to make retroactive corrections. It’s possible to track both days that you’ve done a positive habit as well as days you’ve managed to avoid a bad one. The free version allows you to track three habits.

Sengram is a sentence-diagramming puzzle app. Believe it or not, it can be fun to learn and review the elements of sentence grammar! As a player, you’ll solve increasingly complex puzzles by placing grammatical elements such as coordinating conjunctions and noun clauses in the correct position on sentence diagrams. Brief topic guides and definitions are built in. It costs about $4 (CAD), which I’ve found well worth it, even though the supply of sentences is limited. It seems to have been designed for use in home and school classrooms, but I think anyone interested in English grammar would enjoy it.

AI tools

NightCafe is of the many AI image creation tools out there. I’ve tried various others and it’s not necessarily the leading app for this purpose, but I do recommend it based on my personal enjoyment, relative ease of use, the tools and options it offers, and the fact that you can do a lot there for free. I’m a word person who can’t draw but loves to play with colour and composition – thus I love NightCafe. For fun, here are some examples of images I’ve made there.

Chrome extensions

Text Blaze is a text expander that can save you the time and annoyance of manually typing out frequently used chunks of text. It’s especially helpful for preventing typos and misspellings in your go-to phrases, names and paragraphs. I also use it in my start and end-of-day routines, in which I set up lists to record what I got done that day, what I’m grateful for, and what I plan to do tomorrow. Instead of typing all that, I enter my chosen keyboard shortcut (e.g., #dtd) to generate these list headings already bolded and pre-populated with blank bullet points. It makes me feel like my day is off to a good and efficient start. There are many such programs – I happen to find this one easy to use. The free version suits me fine, but a more powerful paid pro version is available too.