Has the dog been fed?
If nobody wrote it down, the honest answer is that nobody knows. A fridge magnet flipped to FED tells you someone flipped a magnet. It does not tell you who, or when, or whether they flipped it before the meal or after — and it certainly does not tell you that this morning’s flip was never flipped back. In Our Little Paws the answer is a line of text with a name and a time against it: Breakfast, 7:42 AM, given by Anna. That is the whole difference.
What the fridge magnet gets right
More than most apps will admit. It costs a few pounds once. It never runs out of battery, never updates itself, never asks anyone to make an account. It sits exactly where the food is, which is the only place the question ever gets asked. Anyone in the house can use it without being taught, including a child and including the neighbour feeding the cat while you are away.
Any honest replacement has to be at least that easy. One tap, no reading, no setup — which is why ticking something off in this app is a single tap and nothing else.
Where it stops working
Four ways, and every household with a magnet has met at least one:
- It has no memory. A magnet knows about right now. It cannot tell you whether the evening dose happened on Tuesday, which is the question the vet asks.
- It has no name on it. Two people, one magnet: it says the dog was fed, not who fed her. When you both think the other one did it, the magnet is no help at all — and when you both think neither did, she gets fed twice.
- It has to be reset, by hand, every single day. The failure is not forgetting to feed the dog. The failure is forgetting to flip it back, after which the magnet is quietly lying to everyone who looks at it.
- It only holds one question. Meals, yes. The joint supplement, the flea treatment, the walk, the litter, the ear drops for the cat — that is a fridge covered in magnets, or a chart nobody updates.
Did you feed the dog? The sign, the magnet and the chart
They are all the same idea at different prices: a shared object in a shared place, holding one bit of information. The sign is the cheapest and the most easily ignored. The magnet is the neatest and the easiest to leave flipped. The printable weekly chart holds the most — and asks the most, because someone has to print it, hang it, and keep a pen next to it.
All three break at the same point: the moment the answer needs to travel. If the person who fed her is at work, the fridge cannot tell you anything.
What replaces it
Our Little Paws is the same idea, without the resetting. You tap a thing when you do it. The app writes down what it was, when it happened, and whose name was on it. Nobody has to flip anything back at midnight, because tomorrow starts empty by itself.
The part a magnet cannot do at all: everyone who looks after the animal sees the same record, on their own phone, wherever they are. The question “did you already feed her?” stops being a question you have to ask a person.
It is free to download and free to use every day. The full version — €4.99 a month or €19.99 a year — opens up the whole history rather than the last week, which is the bit a magnet was never going to give you.
Keep the magnet if you like it
One animal, one person, one meal a day — a magnet is a perfectly good answer and this app is not an argument against it. It is the second person that changes the problem, and the second question, and the day somebody asks what happened last Thursday.
Next: how to see who did what — the screen that holds the whole record.