If you’re that person who’s always asking for a ride or help moving, or you’re just too crazy busy to go grocery shopping or clean your own house, there’s a range of apps that could make your life a whole lot easier. Moving beyond the usual suspects like Uber and Amazon Prime Now, these city-centric apps streamline urban lifestyles, giving you assistance with things like transit planning, sharing rides, choosing a place to live, hiring people to assemble your IKEA furniture or getting liquor delivered to your doorstep.

Via Ride-Sharing App

Based in New York City, Via is a cab alternative in the vein of Lyft and Uber, but offers ride sharing, so you get into a car full of multiple passengers and pay less. The service charges a flat $5 fee for each of the first five rides and $7 thereafter (or still $5, if you buy the rides in advance.) Passengers are asked to meet their drivers on a street corner instead of being picked up at a specific location, and if you’re late, you have to wait for the next vehicle. It may not be the fastest way to get somewhere if you’re in a hurry, but it’s a cool alternative to city buses for everyday rides.

Urban Engines App

Which public transit route should you take at rush hour to avoid slowdowns? How did last night’s storm affect light rail service? Depending on what’s going on in the world, the flow of traffic changes. The Urban Engines app takes a variety of data points in big cities like Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Toronto and Los Angeles and uses them to determine which routes are best at which times. Best of all, it has an X-ray mode function that superimposes maps, bus or train routes and stops over the city as viewed through the camera lens of your phone, so you can easily find stops around you. It also continues working when there’s no mobile service as long as it has the right maps downloaded, so it won’t cut out underground.

Instacart App

Get groceries delivered from local stores (maybe even ones that aren’t included with Amazon Prime Now’s similar app service) via Instacart. The whole process is surprisingly fast, partially due to the fact that Instacart typically reserves its own checkout aisle at each participating store, ushering its shoppers through the lines. It’s pretty ideal for those times when you just can’t be bothered to leave the house (like when you’re sick, suffering from a hangover, or just really busy.)

Drizly App

Who doesn’t want wine, beer and liquor delivered to their door on demand? Drizly is an alcohol delivery app partnered with liquor stores in New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, D.C. and other cities, with a goal of building the biggest online catalog of booze available for delivery in the U.S.

Hello Alfred App

These days, you can even order housekeeping and butler services on demand. ‘Hello, Alfred’ is an app that connects you to ‘carefully vetted’ helpers who visit your home once a week according to your desired schedule, doing chores like cleaning, grocery shopping, picking up dry cleaning and shipping your packages.

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Whatever You Need On Demand 10 Apps That Streamline Urban Life

Whether you want to get to know your own city on a deeper level or explore secret spots in unfamiliar places, this collection of smartphone apps will take you on adventures you’d otherwise miss. Check out these scavenger hunts, walking tours, history lessons, interactive tasks that take you on random routes, user-submitted local favorites and other ways to interact with urban environments in fun and unexpected ways.

Derivé: Random Tasks Send You on an Adventure

Explore your city – or an unfamiliar city – in a totally new way with the Derivé app, which randomly assigns you a task to do, like “find your favorite building”, “follow a hat,” “sit for two minutes” or “find a tree.” Refreshed every three minutes, the task cards lead you on a single-person scavenger hunt that will encourage you to take routes you’d never take otherwise and experience your environment in a new way.

History Pin: See History in Real Time

This user-generated history map lets you see what cities used to look like thanks to submitted historical photographs, which are pinned onto their real-life locations. The app uses Google Maps and Street View technology to overlay the historic photos onto the live camera view. Just hold up your phone in the street, and it’ll give you a glimpse of the past.

Spotted by Locals: Get the Inside Scoop

When you’re traveling, it’s easy enough to wander randomly without the use of a smartphone or simply go by tourist guide recommendations, but finding out what locals love can be more challenging. The Spotted by Locals app tells you what’s popular in any given spot, and it’s constantly updated to keep track of business openings and closings.

Geocaching: Treasure Hunting Challenge

The classic treasure-hunting app that has explorers digging for cleverly hidden containers called ‘geocaches’ remains the most popular way to participate in the adventure. The Geocaching app shows you geocaches near your location, allows you to message other players for hints and log the treasures you’ve found.

Geo Street Art Apps for New York City & London

Available for major cities like New York City and London, the Geo Street Art apps feature hundreds of local and international street artists, pointing you to their work so you can see it in person. ‘Street Art London’ and ‘Street Art New York City’ provide a “comprehensive reference point” of the street art scene, including artist biographies. The London version boasts over 600 images from over 90 artists in 270 locations.

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Urban Adventuring Apps 13 Interactive Ways To Explore Your City

You don’t necessarily need skills to be a food artist these days, now that smartphone apps make it possible to do things like print custom designs on your breakfast. A gadget called the Toasteroid (a toaster on steroids?) caters to those who demand more than just the browning of bread from the typically simple kitchen appliance, boasting that it also functions as a personal weather forecaster, private messenger and doodle pad. If Kickstarter is any gauge, there’s been a long-simmering demand for just such a device.

The Toasteroid comes with a companion mobile app, and you connect your smart phone to the toaster via Bluetooth. Choose from a collection of templates available within the app or draw your own design, which will have to be fairly simple and pixelated by virtue of the way the toaster works. You can also request that the toaster prints today’s weather right onto your breakfast. There’s a fairly sensitive brownness control, and if you don’t feel like fussing with it, an ordinary lever on the side lets you use it like a normal toaster.

If you know somebody else who has a Toasteroid, you can send them a private message via toast. Presumably, the app will prompt them to stick a piece of bread into their own toaster so they can receive it. The makers also note that you can leave yourself or a loved one a reminder that’s hard to ignore – at least, until you stuff it into your mouth. Probably the most useful function is pleasing picky kids who demand that their favorite cartoon characters be visible on every conceivable surface.

If you’re still asking why, Toasteroid is ready with an answer: “Because why not.” Sure, not everything in our homes should be a needlessly complicated smart gadget, but the Toasteroid does have all the same functions as any high-end toaster and costs less than a lot of them if you get in on the pre-sale. 

Remodeling your house, decorating a room or designing an entire structure gets a lot easier with a range of mobile apps that let you draw to scale, save measurements on top of photos, access thousands of inspirational images and more. These 12 handy tools will ensure that you ever buy a piece of furniture that’s too big for your space, lose the ideas you scrawled on paper or stand around staring at bedding wondering whether it’ll clash with your drapes again.

Photo Measures

Save measurements right on your photos with the Photo Measures app. Snap images of rooms or objects and immediately save their exact dimensions so you can be sure whether furniture will fit in a given space, or give contractors all the info they need for a renovation.

Phaidon Design Classics

You can buy the 10-inch-thick Phaidon Design Classics book for $175, or just get the iPad app for $19.99. Either option will give you access to 1,000 iconic design projects, but the app is definitely more portable. It’s a handy reference for anyone trying to style an interior, providing visuals for everything from Eames chairs to antique glassware.

Remodelista

Sort through thousands of inspirational interior design images, save them to your own customized folders and share them with the Remodelista app for iPad, iPHone and Android. It puts the entire archive of Remodelista.com posts at your fingertips, along with a list of products featured in each post.

Penultimate

Want the ease and comfort of writing on paper, with the search functions and shareability of digital? The Penultimate app is a replacement for your physical notebook, allowing you to write and sketch with a stylus. Even better, you’ll never lose another important note again – everything you create in the app is synched to your Evernote account automatically so you can view, search and share them across a range of devices.

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Apps For Architects 12 Handy Digital Tools For Home Design

Need to quickly calculate square footage, design a building digitally using its real-world setting, match an exact shade or sketch out an idea? There are apps for all of those things, whether you’re a casual homeowner looking to redecorate your living room or a professional architect. This collection of tools for iOS and Android mobile devices gives you easy access to all sorts of functions, wherever you may go.

Paper

The Paper app by FiftyThree, Inc. makes it easy to capture your ideas as sketches, diagrams, illustrations or notes and share them on the internet. It’s a simple and intuitive app built specifically for the iPad’s display. The company recently announced the introduction of a ‘pencil’ stylus that connects to the iPad via Bluetooth.

Graphisoft BIMx

Available for both iOS and Android devices, BIMx is the ideal app for architects using the ArchiCAD program to present or share designs with clients and contractors.

MyPantone

Need mobile access to the entire Pantone catalog of colors? Check out myPANTONE, which includes over 13,000 Pantone colors and makes it easy to create and share color palettes.

Dream Home

Get inspired for interior design and home renovation projects with Dream Home HD, an app for iPHone and iPad that offers high-resolution photos in a wide range of design styles. Save your favorite images, share them with friends and upload your own.

Photosynth

The Photosynth app by Microsoft makes it easy to capture and share interactive panoramic images with not only left and right but also up and down, creating an entire sphere. That could be especially helpful when you’re assessing a building site or thinking about how to renovate or decorate an interior space.

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14 Apps For Architects Interior Designers Homeowners