Stay Healthy With These 3 Free iPhone and iPad Apps

As an entrepreneur, you're probably so busy taking care of your business that you skip taking care of yourself. Not such a good idea, especially if you're being treated for a medical condition.
Your business can't afford to lose you, so here are three free apps from Apple that can help you take control of your healthcare so it doesn't take control of you.
1. Mango Health
If you're on medication, Mango Health for the iPhone or iPad can not only help you remember to take your daily dose, but it can even reward you for taking it safely and on time. Simply list all of your medications and when you need to take them. When it's time, the app will send a push notification and an alert tone to your phone. If you're busy, there's a snooze button that will continue to remind you at 10-minute intervals. Every time you take your medicine, the app rewards you with points that can be redeemed for gift cards and charity donations.
When you enter a new medication, the app also checks for potential interactions with your other meds or certain foods or drinks. Can't remember if you took your last pill? A quick look at the large dashboard will let you know if you're on schedule.
Mango Health recently updated the app to include a "how are you feeling" button on the medication reminder. Pick from a set of emoticons that range from awesome to sick and the app saves your choice in the history. You can also jot down notes about symptoms or side-effects so you'll have a clear record of your response to a given medication.
2. Symple - Symptom Tracker & Health Diary
If you're dealing with an ongoing medical condition, tracking your symptoms is vitally important and Symple can help you do that. Symple for the iPhone or iPad is made up of two components: symptoms and factors.
Every day you rate up to 20 potential symptoms on a five-point scale that ranges from none to severe. Then you check off any outside factors that may have influenced your symptoms, such as a 30-minute walk, alcohol consumption, travel or a stressful day at work.
The app produces a set of graphs so you can compare the effect a factor had on your symptoms over time or compare the severity of two symptoms. You can also download the data to a spreadsheet to share with your doctor.
To complete the picture, there's a journaling section where you can write notes for your doctor or store photos related to your condition.
3. Hello Doctor
If you're seeing multiple doctors, Hello Doctor for the iPad can help you manage all of your medical records. The app uses Smartlists to categorize your reports into areas such as blood tests, prescriptions, and specialists. You can write notes on any part of any document so you won't forget what you wanted to ask when you have your next doctor visit.
Add new records by photographing them with your iPad or pull in scans from Dropbox. Or, you can email your records to the Hello Doctor team and they'll tag and load them for you.
Need to share records from one doctor with another? There's an email or fax option if your doctor is old school and can't handle an iPad.

The Benefits of Flat Design

While a digital user interface can be beautifully shaded with gradients and rounded corners, there's something a little more honest about flat design, an aesthetic that eliminates drop shadows and other attempts to create a sense of three-dimensional physicality.
The desire for a tactile-seeming experience made sense in the early days of the digital revolution, when consumers needed visual guidance to understand how to use their new iPhones and other devices. But now, with near-universal gadget penetration, many companies are turning to flat design as a more practical option for their websites and mobile platforms.
"Flat scales well to smaller screens," says Bradley Falk, CTO of New York City-based beauty startup Poshly, which revamped its website with flat-design principles. "This is because use of white space is important, but buttons are uncluttered and big--easy to identify on mobile, faster to render and have smaller payloads. Flat really helps here, because I can spend less time designing pages specifically for a mobile device."
In addition to its optimization for multiple platforms, flat design's clean, modern look is appealing to many businesses. But there's more to it than that, suggests Brian Casel, a Connecticut-based designer and entrepreneur. "I don't think that ‘going flat' should be the sole reason for a redesign. Flat-design techniques should be used to support a larger set of goals. Those goals should be about meeting the needs and wants of your users," he says.
Casel's company, Restaurant Engine, provides website development to restaurants. Aiming to redesign his own website with an emphasis on ease of use, he concluded that flat design was the best approach. "I needed to find ways to simplify it and make it easier to guide restaurant owners through the aspects and benefits of our service," he says. "By utilizing flat-design techniques, such as simple monotone boxes around testimonials or use of white space to lay out the navigation, I think we achieved our goal."
While flat design can alleviate technical issues--it requires fewer images and less-complicated coding, resulting in a faster site--it does add challenges, such as color selection. For example, unlike with traditional web design, a light-colored button may not be easy to discern on top of the white space that is the norm in flat design. "I couldn't use pastels, but since we use purple a lot as part of our identity, that was easy," Falk says. "If you already have corporate colors that are not bold, flat likely won't work for you."
A major redesign can offer big wins: Poshly's site revamp has driven a 20 percent increase in user engagement. "While the look of the old site wasn't superficially dated, it wasn't always clear what the purpose of each screen was," Falk says.
What is clear? Flat design--with its emphasis on white space, bold buttons and clear typography--has the potential to let products shine, with fewer distractions to get in a customer's way.