Photograph: Nena Farrell
Meals is easy to start casually using to plan out your meals for the week, but if you have a bunch of homemade recipes you love, you can manually add them to the Recipes tab. Why bother with adding an entire recipe? Because then, when you add that recipe to your meal list for the week, the Skylight will ask if it should also add the ingredients to your grocery list over on the Lists tab. I didn’t love that every time I added one of my recipes manually it would ask if I wanted to add the ingredients to my shopping list, but it’s a reasonable flow of actions and one that could be more useful if I converted to Skylight being my sole grocery shopping list.
I really like the visual aspect of both my family’s calendar and the Meals page. I quickly typed in “Giant Meatball” for one of our dinners to represent a Costco dinner in our fridge and was able to assign it to Friday’s dinner. You can either add items to your meal plan on Calendar 2 itself or in the Skylight app, which provides access to all the same pages you see on the device. The Calendar 2 doesn’t seem to memorize any quick meals I write in, though; I’d have to save them to Recipes to use continually or mark them as a repeating meal on a specific day. I also love that if there’s an event on both my husband’s calendar and mine, the Skylight will only have it on the screen once and will put both colors for our calendars to indicate it’s a shared event.
The Tasks page also works fine if you want a list of tasks for each family member, but even for tasks I set a certain time for, I didn’t see any alerts on the device or my phone. Once I opened the Tasks page, I could see that I was two days late to “Bring Form to Dentist Appointment,” but I think these pages would be easy to ignore. It’s something you’d have to build as a habit and shouldn’t be relied on for a timed task you’d like to complete. Meanwhile, Rewards is linked to tasks, letting you set how many stars you need to earn by completing tasks to earn a reward you’ll set for yourself or other members of your house, such as your kids.
The Paywalled Garden
Photograph: Nena Farrell
My biggest complaint with Skylight is its paywall. Its calendar devices require the Plus Plan ($79 a month or $8 a year) to use all features, including the photo screen saver, which I think is a huge bonus for the device. While Skylight isn’t my favorite digital photo frame, and the 15-inch frame doesn’t have the perfect orientation for showing photos, having the screen saver option turns the device into a great multiuse screen that the entire family can enjoy.