Tinder, an app for meeting people, is all the rage among singles and used by millions of people everyday. But is it really just about meeting people, and what is it doing to modern dating?

A playful dating game really, or more specifically, my friends use it as either a hookup app or an addicting past time where within a simple swipe of the finger you can open, or close doors to potential suitors (or one night stands).

It’s like the smartphone ‘circle yes or no’ of note-passing, except not.

Tinder works by referencing your geographic location and then filters matches accordingly. When you open the app you immediately see someone’s picture, name, and age based on their proximity to you. Now the choice is yours: You can swipe to the right for yes, or left for no. And let the games begin.

A match (direct communication) can only happen when someone you’ve liked has liked you too, and if that magic key is turned, the message format opens up, much like a text message. The playful interface really boils down to a game of Hot or Not.

Their tag-line is as vague and off course as the apps original purpose: “Tinder is how people meet. It’s like real life, but better.” Since it’s inception, just 16 months ago in September 2012, the app is used by millions every day. The company claims that on on average, it processes 50,000 requests per second, and 4.5 million matches a day.

Online dating is a growing industry–reaching about $1 billion in profit, but how likely are you to meet your soulmate on the flipping screen, and what is Tinder doing to the singles playing field?

It’s as shallow as a dried up puddle, and represents more of a video game than a meeting space. Tinder is just another log fueling our culture of fast pleasure because once you’ve ‘liked’ someone that has slightly struck your interest, you are already forgotten about them and you’re on to the next.

I suppose the app is really just a game, and as mind numbing as a bad cosmetic commercial. But have we gone so deep into virtual reality that Tinder really is “like real life, but better“? Is this future of meeting someone new? Or will user look back and laugh only to file it with Tamagachis or Pet Rocks? But, of course, we are talking about real people.

image: Tinder

See Also:

25 Dating Dealbreakers and How To Spot Them
Cohabitation Survival Guide 5 Habits for Healthy Relationships
30 Quotes on Building Healthy Relationships 

The post Tinder: Real Life But Better? Or Real Joke on Real People? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Amid all the word games and photo-editing apps, we often forget that mobile technologies can also keep us healthy. Here are five mobile apps designed to keep the female reproductive system happy, all with a simple swipe on the smartphone.

1. Sexual Health Guide

For Android users, the Sexual Health Guide app provides readily accessible information on everything from the latest news to contraception, to male and female reproductive system problems. There is also a sexual health app for your iPhone, but it appears that this one focuses more on sexual problems that may arise in your sex life such as erectile dysfunction, concerns of infertility, and unplanned pregnancies.

2.  Sex Life 100+ Positions

While there are plenty of mobile apps which help you figure out which sexual positions to try, the Sex Life 100+ Positions app is less porny looking than the other apps in its category. This female reproductive system app provides options such as a random feature and a favorites, in case you want to mark something for later. The app does claim to be more contemporary than the other Kamasutra apps and boasts classic AND exciting sexual positions.

3.  My Pill Birth Control Reminder

Pulling out isn’t always an effective form of contraception, but neither is remembering a pill every day. There are tons of apps available to remind you take your birth control pill, but the My Pill Birth Control Reminder allows you to also track your period, set up discreet messages, and schedule yearly check-ups to help maintain a healthy female reproductive system.  This app also supports ring and patch forms of contraception.

4.  The Kegel Kat

Although probably not integral to keeping the female reproductive system healthy, kegels do play a part in keeping our systems happy. The Kegel Kat is actually a fun mobile app that reminds you to do your kegel exercises (because who remembers to do those anyway) and provides three modes: Daily Squeeze, Go Forever, and Dance Dance. You are able to earn points with different activities and can share your results with friends on Twitter. Kind of like Candy Crush, but more useful.

5.  Yoga for Better Sex

Yoga is well known for its sexual, mental, and physical health benefits. The Yoga for Better Sex app provides various yoga exercises, breathing exercises and information necessary in helping you relax and achieve better orgasms.

There are, of course, hundreds of other sex apps which claim to make our sex lives better, but in all reality, mobile apps are most useful in serving as reminders to stop for a second and focus on thoughts and activities designed to keep our female reproductive systems healthy and most of all, happy.

Related on EcoSalon:

Orgasmic Organics: 20 Tasty Aphrodisiacs to Put Sizzle in Your Sex Life

Have an Orgasm a Day Because it Keeps the Doctor Away

Image: GailJadeHamilton

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Tired of losing important files in the labyrinth that is your home computer? A new digital organization tool keeps it together even when we can’t.

The shift to a paperless world has already begun. After centuries of turning precious trees into magazines, utility bills, and medical files, we’re finally converting them to pixels instead. Stored in the cloud rather than a file cabinet, these documents can be referenced at will, but not destroyed by fire or getting lost in the mail. Unfortunately, it’s still possible to forget where you put them.

Just like a real filing system, digital documents have to be organized. Where did last year’s tax forms go? In which folder did you save the phone bill? With file storage on our phones, tablets, and multiple cloud storage services, these questions plague even the most organized among us. After all, digital files don’t stack up on the kitchen table, begging to be put away properly–they disappear from sight the moment we hit “send”, some never to be heard from again.

But don’t despair, a solution has emerged. Doo.net is a cloud-based organization app, allowing user to access all their documents–no matter where they’re stored–in a matter of seconds. Doo automatically extracts relevant information from electronic documents and uses it to create intelligent tags. Selecting and combining these intelligent tags, such as companies, document types, file formats, people, places, sources or individual labels, makes retrieving synced documents a cinch, whether they’re in Google Drive, Dropbox, or saved on your computer.

“The way we organize documents has basically not been relevant innovation since the ’80s. We’re still wasting hours every week cultivating complex folder structures and searching for documents,” said Doo CEO Frank Thelen. Built to be compatible with leading scanner brands, as well as smartphones and digital cameras, Thelen believes his product is the one-stop-shop for complete document organization, whether paper or digital.

If you want to find all your receipts from the past month, Doo searches its database. Your files aren’t moved or modified, so if a document was originally stored in Google Drive, it will open from there, explains Mashable. So instead of spending 15 minutes trying to remember what you named last year’s W9 or those photos from the family vacation, you can conduct a simple search in Doo and be on your way. Best of all? The service is completely free.

Doo works on OS X and Windows 8, and will soon be available for iPhone, iPad and Android.

Image: Lyssah

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Improve your car-free commute or daily dog-walking experience with mobile apps that help you find the best streets for strolling.

The free Web- and Android-friendly Walkonomics app ostensibly scores streets in eight categories — including how pretty, how steep, how dangerous, and even whether a sidewalk exists — based on open data from governments and ratings by app users.

Essentially, though, Walkonomics’s mobile, crowd-sourced cartography recognizes walking as a means and an end.

The streets between our Point As and Bs make up small stories written as we go, where wearing high heels or holding hands with a toddler, not just distance, can inform the journey. Tourists might look for the easily navigable streets; for joggers, streets with crosswalks; for everyone, streets with restaurants, parks, or stores.

Studying and facilitating walking is Walkonomics founder Adam Davies’s vocation. He blogs about walking’s effect on the environment, society and individuals, and vice versa. He tweets walking stats and stories almost daily.

To Davies, simply walking could solve so much. Purchasing has its power, but getting out the door is among the greenest things we can do.

“Things like rising fuel prices and the growing obesity crisis and Generation Y, my own age group, who long to live in urban areas and not have to own a car because it’s better for the environment … All of these different things feed into getting more people walking,” Davies said. “There’s no downside to making cities and streets more walkable.”

Swelling interest from the streets up could make walkability a high priority for local governments and businesses.

“Places like Los Angeles and Houston, some of those big, sprawling cities — as normal people abandon cars or hire cars like Zipcar, cities like that are going to have to change to attract people to live,” Davies said.

So far, Walkonomics covers every street in San Francisco, New York City, and all of England. Davies used “open data sets” — with info on streets’ cleanliness, for instance — released by governments in the past three years as well as app-users’ ratings. The latter could grow Walkonomics’s coverage exponentially.

“You can add a totally new street onto the system and start rating it yourself,” Davies said. “We’re still building the community. Once the crowd sourcing is working, it will be self-policing.”

Think eBay seller ratings, where mass feedback shapes appeal. With one out of five stars — do want to go down that road?

Davies expects Walkonomics for the iPhone to be available for download in a couple weeks. –Mackenzie Mount

This article appears courtesy of Sierra Magazine

Mackenzie Mount is an editorial intern at Sierra. She’s cleaned toilets at Yellowstone National Park and studied sustainable cooking at The Natural Epicurean Academy of Culinary Arts in Austin, Texas.

Top image: jessleecuizon

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We live in an increasingly toxic world, and labels don’t always tell the truth. Staying healthy requires a little bit of homework. These apps can help.

Despite safety standards and regulations, harmful ingredients linger in almost everything we touch. Over a lifetime, exposure to these harmful substances can put us at risk for serious illnesses and diseases. Even worse, toys and foods marketed to children are some of the worst chemical culprits, and too much exposure too early in life can significantly stunt physical and mental development. A 2011 study from the University of California, San Francisco revealed that 100 percent of expectant mothers are exposed to multiple chemicals; these toxic chemicals can effect our health before we even enter the world.

To protect ourselves and our families from dangerous substances like BPA (Bisphenol A), phthalates, formaldehyde, and chemical pesticides and fertilizers, we need to be educated about what to look for, the risks posed, and healthier alternatives. Unfortunately, we very rarely see these ingredients (or the companies who use them) discussed in the mainstream media.

Self-education is a necessity, but who has time to pore over ingredient lists or toxicology analyses? Here are a handful of mobile apps that you can download instantly and use to keep these health-threatening substances out of your home and life.

1. App: Dirty Dozen (Free)
Toxins Identified: Pesticides in produce

Created by the Environmental Working Group, the “Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce” app will help you determine which fruits and vegetables have the most pesticide residues and are the most important to buy organic. You can lower your pesticide intake substantially by avoiding the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables and eating the least contaminated produce.

2. App: findNano (Free)
Toxins Identified: Nanoparticles

Use findNano to discover consumer products that manufacturers claim to use or are enabled by nanotechnology in everything from sporting goods to food products, electronics and kids’ toys. And if you find a nano-product not on the list – no problem. Using the “submit new product” function, users can take or select a photo of the product and submit it for possible inclusion in future updates.

3. App: Cosmetifique ($0.99)
Toxins Identified: Chemicals in cosmetics

Cosmetifique shows you the quality of the INCI (International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients) of your cosmetic products. When you look for ingredients, the app displays results in different colors (green for good, yellow for acceptable, orange for not good and red for awful) that enable you to verify the risks associated with each ingredient.

4. App: Peaceful Nursery Guide ($0.99)
Toxins Identified: Chemicals in kids’ products

The Peaceful Nursery app features a quick and easy shopping checklist of all the right items to buy for the nursery, along with tips about what to avoid, and an explanation of what chemicals are often found in each product.

5. App: GoodGuide (Free)
Toxins Identified: Chemicals in food, personal care, and household products

The GoodGuide mobile app makes it fast and easy to find safe, healthy, green, and ethical products, instantly delivering the information you need, when you need it most — in a store and on the go. Use the handy barcode scanner feature to retrieve product ratings and information on your phone while shopping.

Top image: shawnzlea

The post 5 Mobile Apps For A Non-Toxic Lifestyle appeared first on EcoSalon.

Clutter is a constant threat to sanity and comfort, creeping into our homes, offices, and vehicles with alarming certainty. Apps may not be able to clean the kitchen for you, but the right online assistance can get you back on track to a clutter-free life.

I love my dining room table, but I rarely get to see it. Pick a random day of the week and you’re likely to find it covered in things that definitely belong somewhere else. Unopened mail, phone chargers, books I swear I’m going to read, and my favorite, coats and scarves slung over the chair backs.

Although we most often complain about physical clutter in our homes and vehicles, mental and electronic clutter can be just as frustrating. A million unorganized bookmarks, hundreds of notes to yourself about articles you want to read or errands that need to be run. These are all what a good friend of mine calls “mental parachutes”–digital clutter that’s only slowing you down.

Even though it’s only February, it’s never too soon to think about spring cleaning, and the first step is releasing yourself from the clutter tentacles spread all throughout your life. Here are five tech tools, including mobile apps and online services, that can help you get organized and energized in time for Spring.

Image via yerdle

1. Swap ‘Till You Drop

My partner and I have this rule when we do really serious cleaning: if we haven’t used or appreciated something in the last 12 months, it’s out. The question is, where’s out? Donating is OK but impersonal, and the landfill is just downright wasteful for things that aren’t at the end of their life cycle. Enter the swapping service. Companies like yerdle exist to turn your “trash” into treasure. Their mobile app makes it possible to snap a picture and list items in a matter of seconds. Other local users can then “want” your item and a pickup arranged. Still seem like too much effort? Try Swap.com’s Valet Service. Simply box up all your unwanted goods, and ship them to the company. They’ll take care of photographing, storing, and listing the items on their vast website. You set the price and then decide whether to trade or sell.

Image via iGo

2. Universal Chargers

There is nothing more frustrating than fighting with a tangle of charger wires when trying to stave off a low battery alert. The more gadgets we acquire, the more cords we add to the cluster. iGo’s Everywhere Universal Wall and Auto Charger offers a path out of the madness. This gadget features a five-foot retractable cord and can be fitting with a variety of interchangeable power tips that make it possible to juice up a  laptop, smartphone, and e-reader all from the same charger.

Image via Instapaper

3. Instapaper

I’m a reckless bookmarker. Spending at least six hours a day working on the internet, I come across (or am sent) links to dozens of articles I’d like to read. Or companies I’d like to check out. Or recipes I’d like to make. All of these are dumped unceremoniously in my “other bookmarks” folder, which is now so out of control, I’m afraid to open it. Developed by Marco Arment, who also helped create Tumblr, Instapaper is a clean, simple and straightforward way to save online articles to read later. Simply install the Instapaper app and download (and organize) your unread articles when you have Wi-Fi or 3G coverage, then you can read them anytime: on the train, on the bus, in an airplane, at the bank, or in your favorite chair.

Image via Captio

4. Captio for Business Receipts

If you’re an entrepreneur or freelancer, you know that retaining proof of your business expenses is extremely important, still it can be hard to keep all those nondescript receipts and other bit of paper straight, especially when you’re working on the go. Available for Apple products, Androids and Blackberry, Captio lets you capture an image of your receipts wherever you are, using your smartphone. Pertinent information is then automatically stored for later analysis and can be used to generate expense claims.

Image via Stylebook

5. Control Your Closet

Disorganized closets mean most of us only wear 20 percent of our wardrobe, sometimes re-buying things we already have! The Stylebook iPhone app offers more than 90 features to help you get the most out of your closet. Import images of your actual clothes, create magazine-style outfits, plan what to wear and track your style inspirations with this totally customizable app. Can be of immense help if you’re a fashionista who’s having a hard time deciding what should stay and what should go. If you uncover designer clothes, bags or accessories that haven’t been in the regular rotation for awhile, consider selling them to Rent the Runway, or Bag, Borrow or Steal.

Top Image: smashmedia

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Mobile devices are our constant companions, especially when traveling far from home. But smartphones and tablets can do more than entertain us on long flights. Here are five must-download apps to help you save money, time and energy while on the road.

Traveling is stressful, which is funny, because we’re often trying to get away from the everyday obligations that stress us out! Whether it’s a solo business trip or a spontaneous road trip, traveling requires the seamless coordination of many variables. Between flight times, packing lists, hotel reservations, rental cars and that nagging need to check our email, it’s no wonder we often dread travel rather than looking forward to it.

This doesn’t have to be the case, though. Assembling a low-stress, efficient trip can be as easy as picking up your smartphone. We’re surrounded by gadgets that are supposed to make our lives easier, but sometimes they need a little help. Here are five free or low-cost mobile apps that will help you plan and execute your next adventure with just the touch of a button.

Airbnb – a peer-to-peer marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the world — online or from a mobile phone.  Available for both iPhones and Androids, this app puts unique properties in 33,000+ cities and 192+ countries at your fingertips. From guest bedrooms to entire homes, use this app to browse Airbnb’s curated collections showcasing exceptional Airbnb properties, communicate with prospective hosts and guests from your Airbnb inbox, access your itinerary and host details, and get one-click directions to your destination. Free.

PackingPro – The best way to avoid forgetting your underwear or a warm sweater is to make a list. PackingPro is an app for the iPhone and iPad that offers  recommended packing lists for all sorts of trips. Just select the list that’s right for your destination, and tick off items (including extra items for babies, kids, pets, sports/activities, cooking, etc.) as they go into your luggage. You can also save lists from previous itineraries and schedule reminders, like watering the plants before you leave. $2.99.

TripIt – Losing the hotel address or forgetting a vehicle reservation number is a traveler’s nightmare. Instead of trying to keep track of five different confirmation numbers, addresses or contact numbers, TripIt can help you organize all pertinent information into one master itinerary. Available for nearly any mobile device, this app makes it easy to organize maps and directions, travel notes, photos, recommendations, and share details with relatives or coworkers. Free.

Wi-Fi Finder – Unless you’re traveling with your own mobile hotspot, or really like spending money on coffee, available Wi-Fi networks can be hard to come by. Wi-Fi Finder puts close to 500,000 free and paid Wi-Fi hotspots in over 144 countries right at your fingertips. Available for iPhone and Androids, this app delivers Wi-Fi hotspot details and makes it easy to call the location, get directions to it or add it to your favorites. Free.

Spotcycle – Looking for an alternative to rental cars and taxi cabs? Major cities around the world are launching bike-sharing programs, temporary rental services that make it possible to reduce your carbon footprint while getting a unique view of your destination. Available for just about any mobile device, Spotcycle makes it easy to search for and sort bike stations near you that have bikes available for rent. It also displays bikes paths and lanes in select cities. Free.

Image: Katerha

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