iPhone Wedding Planning, now that's cool!

 The Complete Wedding Planning app for the iPhone

iWedding Deluxe is the wedding planner app that will organize, guide and inspire you while keeping all the vital information at your fingertips. 

It is a feature packed planner with Todo lists, Budget Planning, Notes, Photos, recording of nearly every business detail imaginable, Guest lists, Seating Plans, Reception Wedding Entertainment, Wedding Guides, Inspiration, Blogs and even integration with Social Networks such as Twitter and Facebook.  

In short Bridezilla's, iWedding Deluxe the only wedding app you will ever need!!

Savvy Cinderella Reviews: iWedding Deluxe for iPhone and iPod Touch

Are you newly engaged but still running a busy life with work, friends, family, pets, and anything else piled on top of planning for your dream wedding?  We’re all busy, and planning an entire wedding can be completely daunting.  There are plenty of solutions out there to help a busy bride-to-be, but this one caught our eye.  It seems like our lives revolve around our cell phones—so what if your wedding planning could, too?

The iWedding Deluxe application for iPhone and iPod Touch promises to help you with all aspects of planning for your wedding.  At first glance, it sounds strange—why would you want, need, or be able to plan your entire wedding on your phone?  The more we looked into the application, however, the more it honestly made sense.  Do you have a long commute on the subway, train, or bus to work every day?  Odds are you’ll be checking your phone or iPod, anyway, so why not take a few extra minutes to add a few more relatives to your guest list?  Or browse for inspirational wedding dresses?  Or keep track of your budget (automatically or manually!)?  The list goes on.  And, there’s the added bonus of not having to lug around entire portfolios of your wedding planning inspiration, papers, magazine articles and photos, fabric samples, color swatches—you get the picture!  Check out some of favorite features from the iWedding Deluxe application below: 

• Easy-to-Use Homepage: iWedding Deluxe gets straight down to business, giving you the ultimate countdown to your wedding day in months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds.  Perfect for the micro-manager!  A checklist is presented right away, with options such as “Start the Guest List” and “Reserve Photographer.”  The homepage also offers quick access to the Quickview Binder of the app, which holds all of your information in easy, organized tabs.  The To-Do list is customizable, and can also update itself with scheduled items (say, reserving a venue on a specific date, or fitting yourself into a stylist’s schedule).

• Manual or Automatic Budget Control: iWedding Deluxe is on top of your spending, so you don’t have to be!  Your budget can be set and controlled automatically or manually.  If you choose to have it be updated automatically, the application will track the cost of every item entered in by you, and will log the prices accordingly.  Choosing to manually control your budget is just as it sounds: you have to enter every item into your budget by hand.  This may sound time consuming, but we imagine this could be quite helpful if your wedding is DIY-heavy; you will be able to distinguish between which parts of the wedding you’re doing by hand, and which parts are being done with outside assistance.  On top of all of that, iWedding Deluxe offers you budgeting assistance by giving you the approximate wedding industry percentage target of your budget and what percentage your selection actually is.  It is a quick, handy scope of the wedding market business, which can be quite the scary beast.

• Flexibility with Invitees: The designers of iWedding Deluxe obviously understood the complexities of a long wedding guest list.  The possibilities of how to enter a person as a “guest” at your wedding seem endless.  You can easily add guests (one by one or in multiples) to your list through your Contacts on your iPhone or iTouch, complete with their contact information, significant others, etc.  Guests can also be entered manually, and all guests can be recorded as staying all day or only for the evening.  iWedding Deluxe also makes it incredibly easy to track your progress with your guests, from whether or not you sent them an invitation, if they RSVPed, to the status of their attendance for your big day.  You can record their meal choice for the reception, if they are bringing guests, and where they should sit both for the rehearsal dinner and the reception.  For after the wedding, you can record what gift they gave you, as well.  The best part?  All of this information is exportable through email!

• What You Want is What You See: Planning a wedding is a vast array of categories, details, notes, receipts, people, and lists.  Thankfully enough, iWedding Deluxe recognized this easily, and brilliantly organized the application into modules.  These modules can be removed, moved around, and altered to fit what you want for the planning of your wedding.  Don’t feel the need to have the Inspiration module?  Then remove it from your lineup.  iWedding Deluxe flexes and changes to fit your needs and what you want or need to plan for your wedding—you aren’t locked into a set system of planning!

• Social Media Integration: Do you enjoy sharing all of the juicy details of your wedding planning with close family and friends? iWedding Deluxe allows you to do so easily with Twitter, TweetPhoto, and Facebook integration.  Tweets can be sent out whenever you make a big decision, such as selecting a venue or dress, along with direct links to pictures—or, your Facebook can be updated instantly, photo albums can be made and uploaded quickly, and your wall is updated with all of your latest planning choices.

Overall, we loved what we saw in iWedding Deluxe.  It is truly the most comprehensive, easy-to-use wedding application on the market, and, as their website so boldly states, their goal is to make sure iWedding Deluxe is the only wedding planning application you will ever need!  This application truly has it all, and is even showing promise to be utilized as a tool by professional wedding planners (though their only complaint thus far is that you can only plan one wedding at a time in the application!).  With an endless list of features that makes planning your wedding stress-free (well, reduced!) and portable, an easy-to-use interface, and a savvy price of £5.99 on iTunes’ App Store, there’s not much to complain about.  Serendipity App Company has certainly hit the sweet spot with this powerful little tool!

Like what you’ve seen so far?  Read more about iWeddingDeluxe:

iWedding Deluxe Website

iWedding Deluxe Blog

iWedding Deluxe on iTunes

iWedding Deluxe Review on APPlesauce

iWedding Deluxe Review on appsafari

// NO WEDDING REGRETS // Ceremony

Wedding Ceremony Tips

The choice between a civil and religious ceremony is a very personal one and, in reality, is usually very clear cut for the majority of people.  Wherever and however you choose to say your vows, the important thing is that you both want to say them isn’t it?

 

Civil

More and more venues are able to offer couples the opportunity to get married either in their grounds or within one or more of their rooms. This has really opened up the options available when choosing where to hold your wedding and often means that the ceremony and reception take place in the same location - making transport and travel problems a thing of the past! The main thing to watch out for with civil ceremonies is that the atmosphere can sometimes be lost if the preparation has been neglected: special care and thought needs to go into making a day-to-day room feel like a magical place. To really transform the room, think about the 5 senses and make sure that all of them are covered:

1)  Sight: using chair covers, creative lighting and a little bit of thought no-one will even recognise the room! Ensure that unsightly items (such as projectors or whiteboards if it’s a conference room) are removed or hidden.

2)  Hearing: you’ll no doubt have music played at various points so ensure that you know how this will be played and who is controlling it! This may sound pedantic but you should hear your registrar prior to booking them if possible as there are a few with dreadful accents that will ruin the feel of your ceremony!

3)  Touch: your chair covers will automatically help with this one and perhaps a pretty order of service on every other chair too.

4)  Smell: add a drop of scent to the candles to add to the room’s atmosphere. Your flowers will provide a lovely fresh smell too.

5)  Taste: OK, so you’re not going to hand out sweets but let’s use taste in its other sense! A classy, tasteful room that makes people tingle as they walk in... that’s what you’re aiming for!

With care and attention, a civil ceremony can be stunning and moving... you can even write your own vows!

Religious

Religious ceremonies are still extremely popular and couples have various reasons for choosing this option: some opt for it because of tradition, some to please a family member, some because religion and God play a real part in their lives. Whatever your reason for choosing to marry in church, you will find the organisation side less stressful than a civil ceremony in that the building itself is probably already magical and atmospheric. My top 5 tips for a religious ceremony are:

1)  Meet the priest/vicar in person and also hear him ‘in action’ – you need to like him/her if you’re going to buy into what he/she says during the ceremony.

2)  Check the church rules i.e. is confetti allowed, can the ceremony be videoed and/or photographed? If a video of the service is important to you but the church doesn’t allow it then you may want to look elsewhere.

3)  Find ways around things! Although you are supposed to marry in your parish church, there are ways around this! If you find that your priest/vicar is very awkward (or that their rules are unfair) then take your business elsewhere: it may seem harsh to call it ‘business’ but when you see the price that churches charge you’ll appreciate that it really is. I speak from experience here!

4)  Add candles, flowers, scent and floral pew ends to really create something special.

5) Choose hymns wisely: there is no point choosing something obscure that no-one knows as it will simply result in quiet mumbling throughout the song. Choose something that people will be comfortable singing aloud and, if you’re worried that your guests will chicken out, invite the church choir or even a few of the parish regulars to pump up the volume!

The best thing to do is close your eyes and picture the way that you’d like to feel when standing at the altar... that should tell you if your choices are right.

 

Enjoy It!

Whichever type of ceremony you opt for, be sure that you’ve chosen for yourself and that you’ve thought through the details... they’re over in a flash! Whether it’s a church, a hotel conference room, a beach or a conservatory you’ll enter as a single girl and exit as a married woman... make it special!