** This post originally appeared at iPhone Life Magazine where Adam is a featured blogger.

We’re in the dead of it now, iPhone Life-ers!  It’s winter and it’s colder than a polar bear’s nose out there!

I was walking to my car the other day, and my eyes literally iced over! I thought I might be blinded for life!  I’m wearing ski goggles all the time from now on.

Winter Wake Up

Know what I really don’t like?  Waking up at the regular time only to discover that I need a pickaxe to get my car door open. Digging out is not a fast process, so I kind of love the idea of the Winter Wake Up app. It’s a simple app that works like an alarm clock with a twist. It wakes you up earlier if there’s going to be a nasty weather surprise waiting for you. This way, you can clear the ice off the car, shovel, and deal with the messy commute that awaits and not be late for work. You can decide for yourself how early you want to wake up depending on what conditions you’re going to face.

Wake N Shake

Speaking of waking up, Wake N Shake is awesome when you just can't seem to drag yourself out of bed and into the cold.  It works by forcing you to shake the living heck out of your phone in order to turn off the alarm.  I dare you to be sleepy after trying to get the darned alarm to shut up.  This also has the added bonus of giving you a little workout first thing in the morning.  It's a thing of beauty, really.

Swackett

This next one is cool mostly because of its design. It’s called Swackett, which is short for “sweater, jacket or coat?” It’s a wildly popular app with more than a million users and over 2,500 5-star ratings!

What Swackett does is it interprets weather data and translates it into simple, easy-to-understand weather reports. It combines the weather report with very fun people symbols called “peeps.”  The peeps are always dressed in the perfect outfit for the weather.

Now, I can decide what to wear for myself, so I don’t really have a whole lot of use for the functionality of this app, cool as it is, but as a person who’s married to a graphic designer and who does a lot of app development himself, the design of this app is very nice. I can see this being very fun for a college student or high schooler to play with. In fact, I think it should be a requirement. If I see another teenager walking around outside without a coat on, I’m going to stop the car and make them install this app immediately. Match the corresponding outfit to the corresponding weather, Jackwagon! 

When did I become my grandmother? 

Winter Survival Kit

I do a lot of driving around to meetings, and in the Northeast, we don’t cancel things because of a little snow. We just run out to the store to buy milk and bread in case things get real. In that same spirit of preparedness is the Winter Survival Kit app. If you find yourself stranded in bad weather, you can figure out your exact location, notify your family and friends of your whereabouts, or call 911. You can also calculate how long you can run your car engine before you run out of gas or risk carbon monoxide poisoning.

Every half an hour, the app will sound an alarm to remind you to clear snow away from your exhaust pipe so you don’t succumb to fumes. But it doesn’t stop there; Winter Survival Kit gives you a list of other ways to stay safe when you’re stranded in a storm. Surprisingly it does not tell you to run out and buy milk and bread. Must be just a Rhode Island thing…

iCooking Slow Cooker

Winter doesn’t have to be all gloom and doom and frozen eyeballs! Crummy weather can give you an excellent excuse to stay home and veg out in your jammies with a nice bowl of something warm and comforting. And there’s no better way to do that than to dump a bunch of stuff into the slow cooker. Try iCooking Slow Cooker for a ton of really tasty and comforting recipes. I haven’t tried a single one that I don’t like so far, and I love that I can add recipes I’ve collected from other places to it. The photos are great and the instructions are very clear, but I have to stop talking about it now. It’s making me hungry!

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go thaw out now.

What are your winter survival secrets, iPhone Life-ers?