5 Can’t-Miss iPhone Apps You Should Download This Week

It seems like hundreds of new iPhone apps pop up every week, but which ones should you bother trying? We explored the App Store and found five apps actually worth downloading.

Canopy

With curated shopping websites like Woot! slowing down, the developers of Canopy have decided to take the helm. Canopy is an app that curates items and breaks them down into different categories, or presents them by brand, allowing you to purchase them on Amazon. Canopy encourages users to make a series of impulse purchases, and if you have money to burn and are a profoundly indecisive human being, Canopy is the app for you.

Canopy is available free on the App Store.

Facebook Groups

Facebook recently released Groups, a standalone app that allows users to stay in touch with small batches of friends. The streamlined design makes it simple to create groups for different interest, as well as invite different friends to join you. However, Facebook Group’s most useful tool by far is that the app creates an individual icon on your homescreen for your favorite groups, making it so that users don’t need to go directly through the app to access important information.

Facebook Groups is available free in the App Store.

Loose Leaf

A sort of sharable Evernote, Loose Leaf makes it easy for users to take notes and send them to friends. Whether it’s important notes from a doctor’s appointment to be shared with family members or a ridiculous drawing to be sent around as a poorly-timed gag during the middle of a work day, Loose Leaf can be used for just about anything—even annotating photos from your library or from online.

Loose Leaf is available for $4.99 in the App Store.

Stringer

Stringer pinpoints an oft-overlooked problem with the standard iTunes shuffle button: The app takes a shuffle function and turns it into a playlist. If users want to hear a song from a particular album, Stringer can throw it into the shuffle-mix; if Stringer starts playing a song by an artist, users can request that related tracks be played as well. Stringer sits somewhere between a shuffle function and an actual playlist, making easy to go through other albums in your library and select different tracks to play without deactivating your shuffle mode.

Stringer is available free in the App Store.

Mail to Self

This app is one of the more innovative ways of overcoming human procrastination and forgetfulness. For too long have notes sat ignored, forgotten, and forlorn in the iPhone’s notepad. For too long have we thought it would be easy to remember the most important ideas and notes if we simply tapped them out into our phones. But more often than not, they are never looked at again until the next time we have a bright idea. Mail to Self inserts a button into a variety of apps that, simply put, allows you to email a note to yourself.

Mail to Self is available free in the App Store.