Organize your home life with family management app Picniic [App of the Week]

Keeping your home life organized is never easy.

There are meals to plan, rides to organize, chores to divvy up and important events to remember. With all that going on, it’s strange that there aren’t as many apps dedicated to organizing families as there are to organizing work teams.

That’s what Picniic sets out to rectify. The recently-released app was created by Canadian developer Michael Cole, who sold his first app Fit Brains to Rosetta Stone for $12 million, and is a little like team management tool Slack, except for families.

The app is a cheery grid of multi-colour blocks topped by bubbles for each member of your family that can be tapped to reveal personal calendars and to-do lists. Design-wise, it looks somewhat like the love child of iOS 9 and Windows 8, with a healthy dash of Slack’s design language thrown in.

There are six main segments of the app: a joint calendar, a section for to-do lists, a recipes library, a group events planning tool and family news, which is the main messaging feature. There family members can chat back and forth, and event reminders are inserted as well. For instance, if it’s garbage day on Friday, every week you’ll get a reminder in the chat.

A paid version of the app gives you access to more features. The $15 monthly fee gives you benefits such as a meal planner, family locator and a locker component for private information — like insurance plans, or medical contacts.

Additionally, those who subscribe get access to some third-party integrations, including the ability to synch in your work calendar and a recipe search feature that sources meals from popular websites like Jamie Oliver and Epicurious.

While those features are nice to have, all the core functionality of the app is available for free on iOS and online.