‘Appy’ New Year: Apps to help you achieve your resolutions Learn an instrument

A common New Year resolution is a vow to read a new book every week and Bookout could keep your literary motivation high. You can set goals for how much time you want to spend reading (or how many books) and track your progress over the year. Its social features may also turn you into a bookworm bragger before the year is done. Bear is great for anyone looking to start 2018 with a fresh page. Whether you’re writing short notes, longer pieces or even that longplanned novel, its simple-but-slick interface helps you concentrate on tapping in your thoughts, then organising them so they’re easy to come back to at a later date. High-profile hack attacks were a feature of 2016, so one of your more useful New Year resolution might be to improve your online security. 1Password generates strong passwords for you to use online and stores them securely, accessible through a single password (hence the name). If you’ve tried and failed to establish a daily diary habit, Momento may be worth trying. It does some of the work for you, pulling in your posts from Facebook, Instagram and other social apps. You can write extra notes and save important photos, building up an archive of what you’ve done, where you’ve been and what you were thinking at the time. A vow to learn an instrument is a common New Year resolution and a new wave of apps can teach you not only the basics of piano, guitar and other instruments, but also “listen” to your efforts and highlight errors. Yousician is an excellent mix of video lessons and game-like practising. It’s free to try, with a £14.99 monthly subscription for full access. If you want to jog yourself out of cooking the same five meals in 2017 – and find some healthy alternatives – Kitchen Stories is a good place to start. It’s a collection of recipes with new ones to try every week and video tutorials that are an excellent way of gauging how difficult a recipe is before you start making it. Gluru is a fascinating spin on the to-do list genre: it claims to use AI technology to dig into your email and productivity apps, and create tasks for you, predicting what you will need to do next. It’s early days for this technology, but it is worth a try.

Stick to your reading goals Organise your writing Sort out your security Keep a digital diary Try out new recipes Let AI help you get organised Spend less time on your smartphone

BreakFree (Android/iOS – free) The irony of a roundup of apps for New Year’s resolutions in 2017 is that many people might be trying to spend less time lost in their mobile. But BreakFree may be able to help: it tracks how much you’re using your smartphone and presents you with the evidence that (hopefully) helps you to spend more time in the real world.