New Phone? 5 Apps to Better Know Your Neighborhood

You want to walk back into the office after the holiday with all the cool new apps on that new device you were gifted. Here are five phone apps to keep you abreast of the latest happenings around town:

1) Patch App: We are very excited about this one! It’s free and you can download it for iPhone or Android here.

With the app, Patch users can scroll for the latest local news, bloggers and features on their phones. Post a blog update anytime, anywhere and it goes straight to the homepage. You can also easily post, share and comment on the go.

2) Dark Sky: This handy app will predict rain or snow at your location, down to the minute. It’s beautiful too, and allows you to see the path of the storm using the U.S. government’s doppler radar. I'm looking at it right now, planning the errand I'm going to run in 40 minutes when the precipitation has stopped.

3) Pizza Compass: With news and weather covered, the next priority is clearly pizza. As you may have inferred, Pizza Compass is a compass for pizza. Although the app has a map mode, with little pins indicating pizza parlors within walking distance, its coolest feature is the pizza image which, like a compass, points in the direction of nearby pizza.

4) Gravy: I was only disappointed for a moment that this app wasn’t the gravy version of Pizza Compass. Instead, Gravy has all of the 411 on what is going on anywhere in the U.S. You can buy tickets through Gravy when you come across something cool to do. And the app provides maps with drive times (it checks the traffic!).

5) CO Everywhere: Pick that part of town that you’re obsessed with and track everything coming out of it: Tweets, Instagrams, and events.

What apps do you use to keep on top of local happenings? Tell us in the comments or in a blog post.