Days are getting longer, and these bitter cold days are becoming numbered. As we get ready to say goodbye to Winter 2015, it is time to prepare for the sunnier, warmer days that accompany music festival season. From when you get up to take on the first day to kicking back after seeing your all-time favorite artist, here are a few apps to make some of the best festival days even better…. – Madison O.
9am – Wake up and Step Out of Bed!!
Whether it’s the first day of a music festival or a typical morning, waking up is just plain difficult. For those faced with a similar attitude and needing encouragement, consider an alarm clock app that will not shut down until you get up. With the Step Out of Bed! app, you set the time and music you want to wake up to the following morning. Here’s the catch: the app will not turn off until you take a predetermined amount of steps, forcing you to get out of bed and start your day. After a few nights of camping out after spending hours on hours running from stage to catch your favorite bands, you’ll appreciate the extra motivation to get moving on time.
11am – Make each step count with Charity Miles
At the end of the day when your feet are aching from bouncing around a festival, you might find yourself trying to estimate how far you walked. Skip out on the guess work and turn on the Charity Miles app. Using your GPS location, this app will give you a fairly accurate count as to how many miles you walked that day. Cool, right? What’s even cooler is for every mile you walk, you earn money for a selected charity. With over two dozen charities to choose from, you can help out a cause you care about by simply turning on the app and embarking on your awesome music-filled day.
12:30 pm – Free some memory with Carousel
Although I am not a proponent of taking tons of pictures and videos during a band’s set, music festivals do provide many perfect opportunities for memorable photos. While trying to capture all of the awesome moments you’ll have during the 2015 festival season, there is a good chance you will run out of memory on your phone. This is where Carousel kicks in. Owned and coordinated with Dropbox, this app automatically syncs your photos to the app and into Dropbox. Upload your entire photo library beforehand and you will clear space to document anything and everything that goes on that weekend.
Unlike many other storage apps, you can access the photos stored in the app without using data. You’ll be able to access your old photos through the app to show all the new friends you meet while having free space on your phone to take new pictures with them later.
2:00 pm – Become your own Directr
Directr acts as a guide in helping you shoot awesome short-length films with absolutely no experience (or creativity) necessary. The apps offers tons of storyboards in varied categories to help you get the best movie for any situation. In each storyboard, each shot is accompanied by a set of instructions and examples as to what to do to get the right look. Upon completion, the app compiles the video for you. Whether you want to save it for posterity or upload it to your social media, you’ll have a cool souvenir to reminiscence about your time in any music fan’s paradise.
5:00 pm – Afterlight, not your average photo editor
Dusk is approaching and the sky is creating a beautiful backdrop of orange, pink, and purple hues against the main stage and sea of fans. Time to break out Afterlight. This app is not by any means new, but it does provide some of the best and easiest photo editing for a mere $0.99. While offering a large selection of filters, it also has a bunch of options to edit the photo itself, including the ability to alter highlights, mid-tones, and shadows. Taking after its name, it includes several different types of sun flares to add to your photo, giving it a cool look. It definitely takes the average Instagram filter up a notch.
7:00pm – For the Last Message before your phone dies
Your phone is almost dead, and you forgot your external phone battery back at your campsite. Don’t fret, Android users. Last Message has your back. Most useful in this scenario, you can configure this app to use the last seconds of your battery life to send a text to your best friend you split up with and let them know that your phone is dead and where to meet. You can spend the rest of the battery continuing to snap photos, looking up set times, and enjoying the music and not being concerned with not being able to find all of your friends later that night.
10:30pm – A Unique PHHHOTO experience
Another photo app – I know – but there are a lot of cool things that your little phone can do to document your festival season. You might be familiar with PHHHOTO through its GIF booths that have been popping up at music and social events around the world. Now, you can pack all that power into your own mobile device, making GIFs in real time and immediately uploading them to social media through the app. With the headliners taking the main stage around this time, the lights, confetti, beach balls, even fireworks will make it the ultimate GIF. While others might try to snap shaky videos from the crowd, you can capture movement in less time and a more unique way. Quick shooting and efficient uploads cut the amount of time on your phone in half.
12:00am – Giving you a Heads Up
Making new friends at the campsite is one of the best parts of music festivals. Yet, as your nightly hangouts grow in size, so do the limits on fun games that can incorporate everyone. With Heads Up, the game is as fun with four players as it is with fourteen. Think reverse Charades – the group acts out the item or character and the person holding the phone has to guess. While trying to guess as many “cards” as you can in a minute, the app uses your front-facing camera to record your friends acting out the scenarios. Play it back to show the group just how creative (and funny) they get!