I got married this week, and these five iOS apps helped reduce our stress levels

April 14 was the day that I became a married man. And during the two years spent arranging it, there were a few apps on iOS 15 that we constantly used to make sure everything was paid for, and perfectly scheduled to play its part on the day.

Planning a wedding involves tasks that you would never expect to have to sort out – from agreeing on the music that would play while you sign the marriage certificate, to checking if the right tree logs for the table have been picked up by the best man.

If we didn't have our iPhones and apps at hand, we may have had to hire a wedding planner to avoid the multiple moments of stress we would have inevitably had.

But thankfully, there were five apps that helped us manage big chunks of the wedding that I was not expecting when I proposed back in 2020.

Notes

iOS 15 Wedding Notes

(Image credit: TechRadar)

Apple's Notes app is one I've relied on since the first version of iOS. It's simple, useful, and has always helped remind me of what's needed to be done for certain tasks.

For the wedding, its usefulness went to another level, thanks in part to the ability to manage notes with someone.

Having both of us add and remove checklists across the two years helped a bunch, especially when an update can appear as a push notification.

Things 3

Things 3 Wedding list on iOS 15

(Image credit: TechRadar)

While we had been arranging the wedding since 2020, tasks didn't really ramp up until the beginning of this year, which is where a to-do app came in.

Having tried other apps in this category, such as OmniFocus, Things 3 won out thanks to the quick actions of its Today screen. I could add and remove sudden jobs, and they'd also display in a helpful widget on my iPhone.

It's not just available on your iPhone for $ 9.99 / £9.99 / AU$ 11.99, it's also available on the iPad for $ 19.99 / £19.99 / AU$ 24.99, and on the Mac priced at $ 49.99 / £29.99 / AU$ 59.99.

Being reminded to pay for a photo booth or to decide on types of flowers in Things was a big help. In fact, it was so helpful I've expanded it to other aspects of my life, including my job at TechRadar, and hobbies like, embarrassingly, weekly Fortnite challenges.

Shazam

iOS 15 Shazam Playlist

(Image credit: TechRadar)

Spotify and Apple Music are two apps I've constantly used for the last decade. I still pay for iTunes Match, which is a yearly service that allows me to host all the music content that I owned on my iPod.

For the wedding itself, we found Spotify useful in arranging the entire playlist from start to finish, mainly due to the ability to have collaborative playlists.

This allowed us to add and remove songs in a playlist as we pleased, with our initials letting each of us know who added the most embarrassing song of the evening.

However, Shazam was most useful in helping us discover artists and tracks that we never would have considered. Going to wedding fayres and shops we heard a lot of music and by using Shazam to discover what the titles were, we could add them to our Spotify and Apple Music playlists.

It's a handy app that can help bolster your music library on whichever music app you use, without being intrusive.

A recent update also allows Shazam to be set up as a shortcut in Control Center on iOS 15, which saves you time before the track stops playing.

Angry Birds

Angry Birds Classic on iOS 15

(Image credit: TechRadar)

For me, managing a wedding is the equivalent of spinning 50 plates while standing on one leg, and reciting the alphabet backward in Spanish.

And that can lead to moments where you just want to escape the planning and the picking, and the paying, and just play a game instead.

This is where I decided to revisit some games thanks to Apple Arcade, and I rediscovered Angry Birds. It was an ideal pick for alleviating some of the frustration that occurred with some suits in February.

The game's maker, Rovio has also re-released the original game on iOS and Android, which I promptly downloaded. Flicking the irate fowl across four worlds on my iPhone 13 Pro turned out to be a great stress reliever while I was on a train to sort out the suits again or deciding on the right type of chairs for the reception.

Monzo Pots

iOS 15 Monzo Pots

(Image credit: TechRadar)

Weddings cost money – lots of money. If you want to make sure that the location or items you had your heart set on for years can be part of your special day, you're going to hear the word deposit a lot until the big day arrives.

It's also a great lesson in managing your funds, which is where a feature from Monzo came in handy for us. Pots are a way of moving money into sections that can't be used by your debit card. They're essentially saving methods without creating a savings account.

You can lock a pot to stop you from withdrawing any money from it, alongside naming it whatever you wish and setting it with a picture. If you want, you can set any transactions to round up the payment to the nearest unit, with the spare change being sent to this pot.

It removes a worry about how much you have ready for the wedding or other saving goals, alongside making sure it's safe from temptation.

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I got married this week, and these five iOS apps helped reduce our stress levels

April 14 was the day that I became a married man. And during the two years spent arranging it, there were a few apps on iOS 15 that we constantly used to make sure everything was paid for, and perfectly scheduled to play its part on the day.

Planning a wedding involves tasks that you would never expect to have to sort out – from agreeing on the music that would play while you sign the marriage certificate, to checking if the right tree logs for the table have been picked up by the best man.

If we didn't have our iPhones and apps at hand, we may have had to hire a wedding planner to avoid the multiple moments of stress we would have inevitably had.

But thankfully, there were five apps that helped us manage big chunks of the wedding that I was not expecting when I proposed back in 2020.

Notes

iOS 15 Wedding Notes

(Image credit: TechRadar)

Apple's Notes app is one I've relied on since the first version of iOS. It's simple, useful, and has always helped remind me of what's needed to be done for certain tasks.

For the wedding, its usefulness went to another level, thanks in part to the ability to manage notes with someone.

Having both of us add and remove checklists across the two years helped a bunch, especially when an update can appear as a push notification.

Things 3

Things 3 Wedding list on iOS 15

(Image credit: TechRadar)

While we had been arranging the wedding since 2020, tasks didn't really ramp up until the beginning of this year, which is where a to-do app came in.

Having tried other apps in this category, such as OmniFocus, Things 3 won out thanks to the quick actions of its Today screen. I could add and remove sudden jobs, and they'd also display in a helpful widget on my iPhone.

It's not just available on your iPhone for $ 9.99 / £9.99 / AU$ 11.99, it's also available on the iPad for $ 19.99 / £19.99 / AU$ 24.99, and on the Mac priced at $ 49.99 / £29.99 / AU$ 59.99.

Being reminded to pay for a photo booth or to decide on types of flowers in Things was a big help. In fact, it was so helpful I've expanded it to other aspects of my life, including my job at TechRadar, and hobbies like, embarrassingly, weekly Fortnite challenges.

Shazam

iOS 15 Shazam Playlist

(Image credit: TechRadar)

Spotify and Apple Music are two apps I've constantly used for the last decade. I still pay for iTunes Match, which is a yearly service that allows me to host all the music content that I owned on my iPod.

For the wedding itself, we found Spotify useful in arranging the entire playlist from start to finish, mainly due to the ability to have collaborative playlists.

This allowed us to add and remove songs in a playlist as we pleased, with our initials letting each of us know who added the most embarrassing song of the evening.

However, Shazam was most useful in helping us discover artists and tracks that we never would have considered. Going to wedding fayres and shops we heard a lot of music and by using Shazam to discover what the titles were, we could add them to our Spotify and Apple Music playlists.

It's a handy app that can help bolster your music library on whichever music app you use, without being intrusive.

A recent update also allows Shazam to be set up as a shortcut in Control Center on iOS 15, which saves you time before the track stops playing.

Angry Birds

Angry Birds Classic on iOS 15

(Image credit: TechRadar)

For me, managing a wedding is the equivalent of spinning 50 plates while standing on one leg, and reciting the alphabet backward in Spanish.

And that can lead to moments where you just want to escape the planning and the picking, and the paying, and just play a game instead.

This is where I decided to revisit some games thanks to Apple Arcade, and I rediscovered Angry Birds. It was an ideal pick for alleviating some of the frustration that occurred with some suits in February.

The game's maker, Rovio has also re-released the original game on iOS and Android, which I promptly downloaded. Flicking the irate fowl across four worlds on my iPhone 13 Pro turned out to be a great stress reliever while I was on a train to sort out the suits again or deciding on the right type of chairs for the reception.

Monzo Pots

iOS 15 Monzo Pots

(Image credit: TechRadar)

Weddings cost money – lots of money. If you want to make sure that the location or items you had your heart set on for years can be part of your special day, you're going to hear the word deposit a lot until the big day arrives.

It's also a great lesson in managing your funds, which is where a feature from Monzo came in handy for us. Pots are a way of moving money into sections that can't be used by your debit card. They're essentially saving methods without creating a savings account.

You can lock a pot to stop you from withdrawing any money from it, alongside naming it whatever you wish and setting it with a picture. If you want, you can set any transactions to round up the payment to the nearest unit, with the spare change being sent to this pot.

It removes a worry about how much you have ready for the wedding or other saving goals, alongside making sure it's safe from temptation.

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A new iOS to-do app wants to get rid of the stress of completing tasks

There are countless to-do apps on both Apple's App Store and the Google Play Store, but there's never been apps in this category that have focused on the basics – the jobs that are most important for the day ahead.

This is where Bento comes in, an app available for iOS for $ 5.99 / £4.99 / AU$ 6.99, and its creators want you to have this either as a companion to popular apps Things 3 and OmniFocus, or as a quick go-to app for the tasks you have for the next few hours.

The app focuses on the Bento methodology – three steps of Pack, Flow, and Focus to help you complete what you need to do. These are then compartmentalized into Bento Boxes, which can help lay out the time needed to achieve the tasks.

Created by the team at Keep Productive, a well-informative YouTube channel for advising you in improving your workflow, the group clearly wants to make sure that it makes an impact in its looks and how it follows the Bento methodology.

With this in mind, we tried it out this week to see how it acted as a companion app for the day.

Doing less in style

Bento app for iOS

(Image credit: TechRadar)

Once you launch the app, you're greeted with a helpful introduction to what the Bento method is, followed by a helpful article by the team on using the app further.

The app has a colorful layout that makes it a prime candidate to be both an iPad app, and a screensaver for an Apple TV. Some of the backgrounds you can choose from are animated, adding some extra personality to help make those three tasks more appealing to achieve.

Using Bento over the course of a day, we used it to do a job that we would have otherwise used Things 3, Reminders, or Notes for. It can be confusing to set a timer on some tasks, as when we tried to, we more often than not arrived at the screen where we would change our Bento, when trying to activate it. If a toggle was here, it could help make the timer more obvious that you can tap something to count down.

But otherwise, it does what it says on the tin, or the Bento box. While there's an Android version on its way, it would be great to see widgets in a future iOS or iPadOS update to better see your Bento boxes.

The design and its color scheme would look great on an iPad Pro, and with its simplicity, a Bento box contained in a widget feels like the natural next step for the team.

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