1. Brides

This app is not your average planning app. It’s set up in a blog style with each section covering an every area of concern for a bride-to-be. With new content being added continually, you are sure to be inspired.

In the Healthy Bride section, you will find recipes and cleansing diets that will help you look and feel great on your wedding day. The Martha Stewart Guide is “A Good Thing” for great suggestions of unique and perfect wedding touches. In Broke Bride, you will find all things related to having a wedding on a budget. Find great ideas for inexpensive attire and DIY projects that will give you more bang for your buck. The Etiquette section gives you answers to all of those questions you want to know, but are afraid to ask! The Wed Plan News tab gives you news and articles with advice on everything from song suggestions to picking the right vendors for your big day. This app will keep you up to date on hot new wedding ideas! Best of all, it’s free!

2. Wedding Dance Songs

Everyone has been to that boring wedding that has bad music selections or exactly the same music as the last wedding you went to. This free app is perfect for helping you choose songs that have meaning for those special dances like your first dance and the father-daughter dance. Keep the party going with a fresh selection of songs to dance the night away.

3. Wedding Chatter

This free app is an eclectic mix of  inspiration. If you are a bride in search of something unique, this is the place to look! The Offbeat and Unique tab has an ever changing column showcasing various wedding ideas that are sure to appeal to the unique bride. In the Budget and DIY tab, you will find ways to be creative with your wedding budget and fabulous DIY designs for wedding decor.  This is also the first app I have seen that showcases an Eco-friendly idea section. It has some great Eco-friendly wedding planning ideas and ways to recycle things from your wedding (like your bouquet) in some really pretty ways.  There are additional tabs for Invitations, Music, Cakes, Flowers and Bridal Beauty making this the app to have for all things wedding related.

4. Wedding Budget Pro

This app will help you Keep track of multiple budgets. Customize them to fit your needs by giving each category an estimated budget. It will be displayed along with the actual total and remaining budget to help you see how much you have left to spend. $2.99

5. Pinspiration

This brand new app for 2012 is my favorite since I’m a huge Pinterest fan! Pinterest is a virtual pinboard where you can organize and share all the things you find on the web. Browse everything from photography, hair and makeup to wedding inspiration. With the Pinspiration app, you can browse various categories in Pinterest without having an account. If you have a Pinterest account already, you can upload pictures of things you love direct to your boards to share with others. Whether you are just browsing or have an account, this free app is invaluable.

Whether you need a budget, debt reduction plan or both, these great apps for Windows Phone 7 will allow you to be organized and stay on top of all your financial responsibilities.

Budgeting Apps

1. Spending Money

This is a great app for someone who doesn’t need a whole budget, but needs to manage money until the next payday. It helps you stick to a weekly or monthly spending allowance by being a mobile bank register. Enter the next payday, spending limit, and spending as it occurs. Then watch the tracker count down how much money you have left to spend until payday. When you want to see where your money went, simply view the chart by day or category.

2. My Budget

This budgeting app allows you to manage multiple accounts tracking expenses for work and home. Assign each transaction a category to see where you are spending most. In addition to scheduling bills and transactions on the go, you can track expenses with spending limits and scan receipts to keep everything organized. View daily, weekly and monthly charts of budgeted expenses, actual expenses, and bills by category. The easy to use control panel and at a glance balance viewing will help you stay on top of your financial goals!

3. Finance Helper

This full budget app allows you to create a recurring budget with fixed and variable expenses. After your fixed expenses are established, you will only need to create a monthly budget for items that vary. In addition to managing a monthly budget, this app has a built in calculator which will estimate your monthly loan payment as well as interest for existing loans. A full repayment schedule will be generated for the loans you enter and the extra payment calculator will show you what interest you could save by paying a little extra each month.

4. MoBudget

This powerful budgeting system can be used to track expenses, as well as organize incoming and outgoing line items. Not only can you set reminders for upcoming payments, incomes and bills, you can also pin live tiles to your start menu so you will never miss a due date again! The colorful budgeting graph displays actual balances versus budgeted balances so you will be more careful to stay on budget. If you are a poor manager of credit cards, use the credit card usage tool which displays credit card payment estimates and warnings. There is a free trial but for $1.99 the full version is a steal!

Manage Debts and Property

A budget is only the first piece of the puzzle when it comes to personal organization and fiscal responsibility. Sometimes we have extra income and don’t spend it where it can best be utilized or we are the ones lending money or personal items never to be seen again. We get busy and as time goes by, we forget who borrowed what. There are great apps for tools to manage those type of debts as well.

5. Quick Snowball

This app is based on the Debt Snowball Method in which you pay the minimums on everything and attack small debt items first. Just enter your debt and interest rates and you will have a calculated balance along with a goal payoff date.

6. Debt Control

This is a great tool to manage borrowed money and items. Fill in the person’s name, contact info, and what they borrowed from you. You can attach a picture of the item so you can see if there was any damage done to the property upon it’s return. The “My Debts” page will display who borrowed what, a picture of the item and how long it has been borrowed. Then, you have the option to call the person about the item’s return. No more forgetting who you lent that book or money to.

As you roll into 2012, what are you going to do to take control of your money and personal property?

Image credit : alancleaver_2000

1. Text To Chat

This feature allows on the fly conversion from texting to Facebook chats so you have the ability to text and chat at the same time! Talk about multitasking!  Go to either the “me” tile or go to the “people” tile. Select your picture then “set chat status“, which is where you can change your chat availability. To see if someone is online to chat with, select the “message” tile then select the person you want to chat with. Tap on the “double arrow icon” on the bottom of the screen and you will see a display with a text option and their Facebook chat availability.

2. Link Inboxes

If you have more than one email service linked to your phone, they each take up a tile space on the start screen. Now there is a cool feature where you can link your inboxes together into one tile and see all your messages in one place. The really cool thing about it is you don’t have to link ALL of the email accounts together. You can leave a work email tile only, with two other generic email accounts linked or any combination that works for you. To do this, open an “email” tile and tap on the … icon at the bottom of the screen. Select the “link inboxes” option and it will open a list of your email accounts. Tap each one that you want to link together and like magic, they merge into one tile! Additional side features to that is the ability to rename the tile or pin individual folders to your start screen so you can see only what you want.

3. Camera Features

The update features to the camera include automatic detecting of faces when you’re uploading pictures to Facebook or Windows Live – just tap, tag, and post. It also now allows you to pin whole albums to your start screen including albums from Facebook and your camera roll with an option to also delete all contents of the album if you “long press” on it.

4. Interrupted Task

I can’t tell you how many times I have been in the middle of an email or text and I flip over to something else for a second and I have lost everything I was typing. I was used to the iPhone which allowed you to switch between tasks without losing what you were doing so that was a pet peeve of the Windows 7 phone for me. With the update, you can now get back to what you were doing by simply “long pressing” the “back button” and slide the screen until you find the task you were last on.

5. Voice Texting

This is by far one of my favorite new features because I am constantly on the go and communicate with most people by text. I don’t like the Bluetooth ear piece or have the hands-free option in my car so this has been very handy. If you go into “settings” then “speech“, you can select how you want to receive your incoming texts. If you use Bluetooth or wear a headset, there is an option for that or simply select the “always on” option. When a message comes in, it will tell you who the message is from and give you the option to read it aloud or ignore. After it is read, it will give you the option to reply or be done. If you chose to reply, speak your message and say send. Simple hands free texting is faster and safer!

6. Bing Features

I have always been a Google user but since getting this phone, I have embraced Bing. Some neat features include the ability to not only search for a shopping mall but go even further and view an indoor map of the mall! No more wandering around looking for a directory only to find that it is now an advertisement for a store you don’t shop at! You can also be listening to a song on the radio that you want to know more about. Hit the Bing “music icon” and it will recognize the song, produce the album art, song title and link to the Zune Marketplace so you can purchase it.

7. Music

The only problem I had with the music feature, was having to unlock the phone every time I wanted to forward past a song or pause it. If you want to have a new music experience, follow these steps! Go to “settings -> lock -> wallpaper” and select “show artist when playing music” to ON. Now when you play music, the artist appears as your wallpaper and all the controls are right there as well. No need to unlock anything and it gives a nice user experience with the changing screen.

8. Copy & Paste

In all the reviews about the Mango update, nobody mentioned copy and paste! This was the main feature I missed from the iPhone and I am so happy to have it back! You can copy and paste about anything you want. I mostly use it to copy a text I sent someone and send it to someone else or copy into email. Simply “long press” on the message and select “copy“. Go to the application you want to paste it to and tap the little “clipboard icon” to paste it.

As such, several developers have taken advantage of this to introduce alternative user interfaces for Windows Mobile devices. Given that the platform (while under supported in recent years) is the most versatile of all the flavours of mobile available, this shouldn’t be too much of a surprise.

Key among these developers is Spb Software, who over the last few years have released a succession of mobile shells for Windows Mobile. The latest of these is Spb Mobile Shell 3 which is available as a free 14 day trial from Spb Software, full price $29.95.

Configuring Spb Mobile Shell 3

Spb Mobile Shell 3 is the most popular of the Windows Mobile user interface enhancements, mostly due to it being so user friendly, easily configurable and requiring minimal resources. Once installed, there are several things that you may wish to do – such as manage your contacts or organise your mobile desktop.

Finger friendly and capable of being used almost exclusively without having to resort to any Windows Mobile index menus or settings (other than Pocket Outlook screens), Spb Mobile Shell 3 offers a smooth and well presented layout of all of your vital mobile information. A three-screen-wide desktop allows for the effective arrangement of favourite applications, tools and contacts, while a variety of different functions (address book, calendar, settings and others) can be accessed via a carousel system.

The Desktop

The first thing to do once you have installed Spb Mobile Shell 3 is to setup your desktop. There are two choices of desktop:

• The standard “Professional” look that displays time, calendar, upcoming appointments, weather and any email/SMS/missed call alerts,
• The “Lifestyle” layout which can be configured entirely to your requirements.

Spb Mobile Shell’s Lifestyle desktop offers the three-screen-wide option, allowing email notifications, widgets for launching favourite applications and much more to be displayed at the required position and size.

For instance to add a widget of your favourite Windows Mobile game to your Spb Mobile Shell 3 desktop view, press the Menu button on the lower right of the display, go to Add Widget and browse Applications -> Games. Once placed on the desktop you can also resize and reposition the widget before confirming the addition.

Desktop Background

A range of standard widgets are available to begin with, such as analogue and digital clock types, calendar, messaging notifications and it’s also possible to change your desktop background.

To do this, press the Menu button on the lower right of the display and select Change Background. From here you can browse through images in the Spb Mobile Shell folder on your Windows Mobile device and select an image that suits. If you have images elsewhere on your phone to use, they will need to be copied to the Spb Mobile Shell folder which can be found in the Program Files folder on your phone.

Alternative Spb Mobile Shell 3 backgrounds can be downloaded from the website – 40 alternatives from the included 6 are available offering a range of scenery.

Add a Contact and Manage Widgets

Adding a shortcut to one of your contacts is simple too – press the Menu button on the lower right of the display and select Add Widget -> Shortcuts -> Contact.

The required contact will then appear on your Spb Mobile Shell 3 desktop – but if they haven’t got a photo assigned you’ll just see an outline and the contact name.

As with all desktop widgets in Spb Mobile Shell 3, you can move the contact to a different screen of your finger friendly scrolling desktop display, and resize it.

To do this, open the Menu again and select Edit Layout. From here, select the widget you want to change – you’ll see that it is now highlighted with a heavy white outline and a down-pointing white triangle. Touch the widget you want to adjust – a new menu will offer options to move it to a left or right page of the desktop, to display a text label for the widget or to resize it.

Spb Mobile Shell 3 is a superbly configurable interface for Windows Mobile devices that completely re-states what it means to use a Windows Phone device.