You’ve brought home your new bundle of joy. Your home is now filled with a new sense of harmony and you can’t wait to share your happiness with your family and friends. Before they come over, you have to decide on an outfit. But which color? Which color of skin should you put on your new BlackBerry?
Oh yeah, the baby is crying too…
Obviously we all know which is more important. This month our little boy celebrated his first birthday. We looked back at all of his milestones to date, and remembering that we made sure all of the dates were correct. We have a baby journal to record everything, but you can’t always take it with you.
I use Ascendo Photos on my Berry to show him off, and now I can show off his stats too, as though he had his own Baseball card. Baby FollowUp is a new arrival to the CB store, so let’s cut the cord, smack the bottom and love it to pieces.
It’s a boy, no a girl…. I can’t tell…
Baby FollowUp is the brainchild of Infodev Technologies, the same folks that delivered Employee Tracker, ColorXp and Password Manager. With all of this experience, they KNOW how to stay organized.
As with raising a baby, it’s best that you keep on top of this application if you want it to work for you. I spent quite a while entering in all the information from this past year. So to all of the future, expecting or very new parents, jump on top of this now. It has a potential to track an unlimited number of babies, definitely handy if you’re Jon and Kate plus 8.
There are six main categories you can use:
don’t forget to capture every moment
Baby Details – Here you can enter stats like birth date, Nickname, blood type, place of birth, weight, “happenings” and notes. My favorite field is Gender, as you have the options Male, Female or Others....Others? This could be for twins, but I would rather have an entry for each baby.
Others? I’ve love to see that..no wait…
Growth Details – Track your baby’s growth rate month by month using Head Circumference height and weight. There’s no option to switch or even use metric or imperial measurements. As you can see by my entries, the fields do overlap which makes it difficult to take a quick view.
enter growth details
a little hard to read but the data is there!
Health Details – Keep notes on name of Doctor, Prescription, Date and Symptoms.
Health Details
Vaccine Details – In this field, you can enter in the name of the Vaccine, given by, date scheduled and whether it was completed or not. The completed entry is handy, as you can enter the information in before and mark completed afterwards.
Vaccine Details
Food Details – Input your baby’s food, quantity ate, and date. I found this category confusing and generalized as you can see by the image. There’s a date field but no time field.
Food Details
Activity Details - Capture when and where they took their first steps, said their first words or when they get excited to see a broom (yes it does happen).
Activity Details
To offer more personalized information storage, each Category is equipped with a “Notes” section. You can add personal info to every entry such as, Zodiac sign, outfit worn to doctor’s office or even their reaction to strained peas. As you increase your entries you can sort them by ascending or descending order.
I didn’t find the interface very user friendly. If a selection reads “Manage Vaccine” I should be able to MANAGE the vaccine entries, not just view them. In order to input anything I have to go through “Manage Baby.” I would have expected some sort of summary or graph report, especially for the growth section for Baby FollowUp.
As mentioned before in the Growth Details, there’s no mention of whether to use imperial or metric. Depending on the font size, some tables may overlap and make for a confusing mess. Luckily you can change that in the settings, as well as font face, style and background/foreground colors.
Changing the Final Diaper
Despite the much needed tweaks, I still love the idea of this program. One major ability that it’s lacking is to add images of your baby. You will grow to love it as the one you love grows. It’s always best to have a physical memento in the form of a journal to pass down. Buuuuut if my son is anything like me, he would probably want to see it on my BlackBerry. As this is version 1.0, I can’t wait to see this app grow. I may even offer to babysit ;-)
You Adopt Baby FollowUp v1.0 from the CrackBerry.com store for $15.99
Pros
- easy data entry
- personalize each entry
- easily retrieve data
Cons
- new interface needs tweaking
- confusing fields
- easier to use if you don’t have to back log
Download
