April 14th was the day I got married. And during the two years we spent arranging it, there were a few apps on iOS 15 that we constantly used to make sure everything was paid for and perfectly planned to play its role on the day.
Planning a wedding involves tasks that you would never expect to have to deal with – from agreeing on the music to play while signing the marriage certificate, to checking if the right wooden poles for the table have been picked up by the best man .
If we did not have our iPhones and apps at hand, we might have had to hire a wedding planner to avoid the many stressful moments we would inevitably have had.
But luckily, there were five apps that helped us manage big chunks of the wedding that I hadn’t expected when I proposed back in 2020.
Notes
Apple’s Notes app is one I’ve trusted since the first version of iOS. It is simple, useful and has always helped me to remind myself of what needs to be done for specific tasks.
For the wedding, its applicability went to another level, thanks in part to the ability to manage notes with anyone.
Letting us both add and remove checklists over the two years helped a lot, especially when an update can appear as a push notification.
Thing 3
While we had been arranging the wedding since 2020, the tasks only increased at the beginning of this year when a to-do app came in.
After trying other apps in this category, such as OmniFocus, Things 3 won thanks to the quick actions on the Today screen. I could add and remove sudden jobs and they would also appear in a useful widget on my iPhone.
Not only is it available on your iPhone for $ 9.99 / £ 9.99 / AU $ 11.99, it is also available on iPad for $ 19.99 / £ 19.99 / AU $ 24.99, and on Mac for a price at $ 49.99 / £ 29.99 / AU $ 59.99.
It was a great help to be reminded to pay for a photo booth or determine flower types in Things. In fact, it was so helpful that I’ve extended it to other aspects of my life, including my job at TechRadar and hobbies like embarrassingly weekly Fortnite challenges.
Shazam
Spotify and Apple Music are two apps I’ve been using constantly for the last decade. I still pay for iTunes Match, which is an annual service that allows me to host all the music content I owned on my iPod.
For the wedding itself, we found Spotify useful for arranging the entire playlist from start to finish, mainly due to the possibility of having shared playlists.
This allowed us to add and remove songs in a playlist we wanted, with our initials letting each of us know who added the most embarrassing song of the evening.
However, Shazam was most helpful in helping us discover artists and tracks that we would never have considered. When we went to wedding parties and stores, we heard a lot of music, and by using Shazam to find out what the titles were, we were able to add them to our Spotify and Apple Music playlists.
It is a handy app that can help strengthen your music library, no matter what music app you use, without being intrusive.
A recent update also makes it possible to configure Shazam as a shortcut in the Control Center on iOS 15, saving you time before the track stops playing.
Angry birds
For me, managing a wedding is like turning 50 plates while standing on one leg and reciting the alphabet backwards in Spanish.
And that can lead to moments where you just want to escape the planning and picking and paying, and just play a game instead.
It was here that I decided to revisit some games thanks to Apple Arcade and I rediscovered Angry Birds. It was an ideal choice to alleviate some of the frustration that arose with some suits in February.
The game’s maker, Rovio, has also re-released the original game on iOS and Android, which I immediately downloaded. Flipping the raging poultry across four worlds on my iPhone 13 Pro proved to be a great stress reliever while I was on a train to rearrange the suits or decide on the right type of chairs for the reception.
Monzo pots
Weddings cost money – a lot of money. If you want to make sure that the place or things you’ve had your heart set on for years can be a part of your special day, you want to hear the word security deposit much until the big day comes.
It’s also a great lesson in managing your money, and this is where a feature from Monzo came in handy for us. Pots are a way to move money to sections that cannot be used by your debit card. They are basically savings methods without setting up a savings account.
You can lock a pool to prevent you from withdrawing money from it, along with naming it what you want and putting it with a picture. If you want, you can set any transactions to round the payment up to the nearest unit where the reserve money is sent to this pool.
It removes a worry about how much you have ready for the wedding or other savings goals, along with making sure it is safe from temptations.