From party planning to productivity, these apps will make your life easier

Let’s admit it—even if there is an app for everything, there is always room for a few more. App developers have gotten into solving more and more micro tasks, giving us handy apps for things we didn’t think we needed, and sometimes there are simply too many new apps out there to try out. Lounge compiled a list of apps, from little-known ones to those that have won awards, worth exploring today for task and notification management, taking better photos, getting new recommendations, and exploring open social networks.

Karo

To-do apps are a dime a dozen, but Karo is useful for your own tasks and also for reminding your friends, family, or co-workers. Made by Indian developer Mustafa Yusuf, the iOS app automatically sends a reminder to the person you tag in a task on WhatsApp. You don’t need to have the Karo app to look at the task or mark it done. The app also has an AI assistant, which helps you create a list in natural language. Yusuf has also developed a WhatsApp bot to create tasks and has plans to develop an Android app as well.

Partiful

You can easily create invitations to events on Google Calendar or any other scheduling app. But where is the fun in that? Partiful lets you design fun and customizable invites for anything ranging from house parties to a picnic. The app, which won the best app award of Google Play Store for 2024, lets you create an invite with different themes. You can add title, date, hosted by, place, number of people allowed, and cost per person. Plus, the invite can have details related to events, including a themed playlist, dress code, link to gift registry (useful for weddings or birthday parties), and a custom link. The app also allows you to send reminders and photos related to the event.

Also read: All the wellness tech worth taking note of in 2025

Halide

Halide is a popular premium app for manual photography amongst iPhone enthusiasts. The app provides Pro controls for users to control different aspects of the camera, including exposure, shutter speed, and ISO. The makers of the app introduced a Process Zero mode this year, which omits any kind of image processing used by Apple’s computational pipeline. In a time when companies are racing to add more AI to image capturing, Halide wanted to move away from that. Using the Process Zero option means your images will show natural grain. This mode might not be helpful for low-light conditions. The app costs ₹269 per month or ₹1,999 per year. You can also pay a one-time fee of ₹5,900 to get all future updates.

Pinnit

Getting a ton of notifications on your phone can be overwhelming, and you also tend to swipe them all off if they are piled up. Android app Pinnit is a notification history keeper, so you can look back on notifications to check if you missed an important one. You can search for notifications or filter them by apps as well. You can pin a notification to act on it later or remember a task. You can add custom notifications, and in the future, the developers plan to add location-based notifications. Pinnit has a one-time fee of ₹170 after 14 days of trial.

ElevenLabs Reader

It’s tough to get through your reading list regularly because of lack of time. In this case, apps like ElevenLabs Reader can help you sift through your saved articles and PDFs by listening to them. The free app, available on both iOS and Android, uses its vast library of AI-generated voices to read documents, books, articles, and texts. The company has also onboarded iconic voices such as Dr. Maya Angelou, Burt Reynolds, James Dean, and Judy Garland. Plus, the app has the ability to turn long articles or documents into a conversational podcast with two AI voices. The reader app also has a library of free audiobooks from authors like Thomas Hardy, Jane Austen, and Oscar Wilde.

Hypelist

Life is a circle. You wake up and scroll the apps to decide what to eat, where to go, what to watch, and you go to sleep. Hyeplist, made by ex-Squarespace employee Alfonso Cobo, aims to make the middle part a bit simpler by creating a social network around different kinds of lists, including music, movies, workouts, places to explore, dishes, and restaurants. You can make any kind of list on the app — including “Best burger places in New Delhi” and “Top movies of 2024″ — and there is an AI assistant to help you build the list. What’s more, you can follow other creators to look at what recommendation lists they have created.

Openvibe

2024 was a year where more people started talking about decentralized and open networks while experiencing them too. The tricky part about building a following or finding communities on networks like Mastodon, Threads, Bluesky, and Nostr is posting across these platforms. Openvibe is an app that helps you publish your posts across all these networks. Plus, you can view all the people you follow on these networks in a unified timeline.

Also read: Why Deepak Chopra is not afraid of AI

Source link