An App for Everything. {And a $100 Giveaway!}

The AppLife.

It’s addictive, it’s easy, and it’s how I live.

When Noah was a baby, I used an app to track breastfeeding, sleep, and diaper changes (which was a great improvement over my strategy with the first baby, The Creeptastic Notebook.) I have an app to track my womanly cycles (my husband has been known to ask me to check it to see if it had an explanation for my current mood.) I have an app that gives me a laundry list of every inappropriate word or scene in any movie so that I can decide if my kids (or myself) should watch it (the word list is also pretty entertaining, such as “6 scatalogical terms, 1 with the use of ‘bag’ and 1 with the use of ‘storm’.”) I even have an app to turn off my bathroom electrical outlet, in case I get fifteen minutes away from home and freak out because I might have left my curling iron on (which I never actually do. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean you won’t one day burn the house down with a hair implement.)

But now, oh, now. My life is complete.

That’s right. I have an app to ensure that I never have excess popcorn waste again. Minimized unpopped kernels, Maximized popped perfection.

Perfect Pop, by Pop Secret, is a free app that listens with an expertly trained ear to tell you exactly when to turn off your microwave. (If I were as smart as Sheldon and Leonard, I would find a way to hook that app with my outlet-switching-off app and get the popcorn app to tell the outlet app to shut off at the exact right second so that my microwave would die in obedience. But then I’d have to reset my microwave clock every time I popped a bag of popcorn, and that seems like it might overwrite the convenience of not having to turn the microwave off myself.)

So. You turn the app on when you start the microwave, and the cute little kernel goes through a bunch of cartoony changes as it listens carefully for pop-progress.

(You need to have the phone’s bottom speakers as close to the microwave as possible, so I took advantage of my superior Game Show Vixen hand flourish.) At the exact right second of perfect poppage, the app congratulates you and instructs you to turn off the microwave.

And the results are delicious. No burnt pieces, and hardly any waste.

I poured out my entire bag and sifted through to quantify that the app did, in fact, reduce the number of unpopped kernels. Here’s what I found:

Only eighteen kernels.

That just has to be below the national unpopped average. I hereby challenge you to pop a bag of popcorn with less than eighteen unpopped kernels. Download “Perfect Pop” on the App Store* by searching for “Perfect Pop.”

In celebration of their groundbreaking new app, the kind people at Pop Secret (you can follow them on Twitter here) have offered to give one of you a $100 Visa Gift Card!

For a chance to win, leave a comment and tell us: Before Pop Secret made it easy, what was your popcorn strategy?

Rules:
No duplicate comments.
You may receive (2) total entries by selecting from the following entry methods:
a) Leave a comment in response to the sweepstakes prompt on this post
b) Tweet (public message) about this promotion; including exactly the 
following unique term in your tweet message: “”#SweepstakesEntry””; and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment on this post”
c) Blog about this promotion, including a disclosure that you are receiving a sweepstakes entry in exchange for writing the blog post, and leave the URL to that post in a comment on this post
d) For those with no Twitter or blog, read the official rules to learn about an alternate form of entry.
This giveaway is open to US Residents age 18 or older. Winners will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail. You have 72 hours to get back to me, otherwise a new winner will be selected.
The Official Rules are available here.
This sweepstakes runs from 6/3 – 6/30.
Be sure to visit the Pop Secret brand page on BlogHer.com where you can read other bloggers’ reviews and find more chances to win!

*Apple, the Apple logo, and iPhone are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc. Apple is not affiliated and does not endorse, sponsor or support this third party app and sweepstakes.