This website boosts the 5 most useful Apps for DogsHEY WALKIES!How do city-dwelling dog owners find a dog park
that's outside of their own five-block radius? Anyone? Bueller? For New
York City dog folks,
Hey Walkies! has made the search a lot easier. Creator Chad Jackson produced Hey Walkies! as part of the city's
BigApps challenge, and with his interactive design firm,
Jackson Laycock, and design
partner Kettle, he's built a user-friendly app that's got great design as a bonus (uncommon in the pet app world, trust us).
Jackson
tells PEOPLEPets.com that Hey Walkies! will expand to include other
cities in the near future, and that his team is also developing a mobile
web app accessible beyond the iPhone. Hey Walkies! has already
incorporated Facebook Connect, which allows dog owners to converse with
each other. "There's that persistent little rumor about New York, where
you can borrow a cute dog and go to a dog park and meet a guy or girl
and fall in love," he says. "It's a great way to meet people." Who knows
— Hey Walkies! might just be the gateway to meeting your soul mate.
(Free)
FIDO FACTORNeed a one-stop indicator of which
city restaurants allow dogs and which local groomers do the best work
without ripping you off? Check out
Fido Factor, an app that bills itself as the
"Yelp for dogs." Still in its beta stage, Fido Factor
features information about
San Francisco, Boston, New York and Portland. It's working out some
kinks — a recent search for N.Y.C.'s dog-friendly restaurants yielded
results on Boston's Newbury Street. (Free)
iPET FINDERThis
one's for the animal lover who's always wanted Petfinder.com in app
form. While it's not the most cutting-edge — functionality isn't the
sharpest and the design is a little dated —
iPet Finder does
give a sense of the number of pets available in your area. Portions of
the proceeds go to the Cesar and Ilusion Milan Foundation. ($0.99)
PET DOSSIERCarrying
around a dog's vitals just isn't a reasonable thing to expect of a pet
owner. Who can keep track of vet records and ID numbers, especially when
there's more than one animal in the house?
YepYup's Pet Dossier
acts as a digital file cabinet of all your pets' records, and even has a
place for vet and groomer contact information. We promised useful,
right? Here you go. ($1.99)
DOG WHISTLER The
Dog Whistler
is what you might call an iInstrument — you can adjust the frequency
and pitch of a whistle sound to call your dog. Initial tests in the
PEOPLEPets.com labs didn't yield any positive results on an actual dog
(it may just be that she's particularly insubordinate), but as a free
app, it was still fun to try out. (Free)
ANY OTHER APPS OUT THERE YOU RECOMMEND OR DON'T RECOMMEND?