Most productivity apps are aimed at professionals, and often seem to be aimed at top-level executives. This is not surprising, both because those types of consumers could use as much technological help as they can get, and because the apps they find useful tends to influence the purchasing decisions of others -- peers, employees, or entire enterprises.

On the developer's side, it's also likely due to programming bias: there's already a well-developed ecosystem of code and systems built for professionals, so the basics are already there. But there's always something that could be done better, or more bells and whistles that could be added to make your app stand out.

Shifts: The First Calendar App Built for Shift Workers

Shifts, a specialty calendar app for iOS, is different.

As its name implies, it's designed entirely to make shift workers' ever-changing schedules easier to track, share, and alter. Life for those professionals just got a whole lot easier.

(Photo : iTunes App Store: Shift)

Shifts works by letting you create a customized template of your various work, school and other activities by type and time. You can load up as many shifts as you need in the "Shift Types" menu, and label them with a header and an icon for quick reference.

Say you work at a restaurant a few times a week while going to school at night. Just set up those particular shifts and the times at which they take place, and you can schedule them into your week with a simple tap on the calendar. But suppose you pick up a night shift at the restaurant on the weekend occasionally. Enter the scheduled time of those shifts, give it a different icon, and whatever week you happen to pick up that extra shift, add it into your calendar -- once again -- just with a tap.

It's incredibly simple, and that's what makes it so valuable to shift workers. Realistically entering one-off shifts every week, while also trying to program, update, and keep recurring events on your calendar -- the way most calendar apps work -- is far too complicated if you have to alter it weekly. Or every few days, as shift workers know is more likely the case.

Rather than recurring events (which still happens to be an one of the most awkward features of most calendar apps, even for the easier to accommodate nine-to-five professionals), Shifts lets you set up recurring shift rotations that apply over a custom range -- not just a week or month.

(Photo : Shifts)

Hospital workers, EMS professionals, police officers: This is the calendar feature you've been waiting for.

It lets you set up a repeating schedule that actually tracks with those strange "12-on, 12-off, 12-on, 48-off" work schedules, and you can program Shifts to track weeks at a time and repeat on the months-long scale that those shifts actually repeat.

And like all virtual calendars, you can add your personal calendar, add notes, set up reminders, and share your schedule -- which is the most important thing for the families of shift workers.

Downsides: Not Built for Shift Workers' Families (Yet)

Before recommending this app, there are a few bugs to complain about -- not in the programming of this well-made app, but in the way it's currently set up by the developer of Shifts, "Built by Snowman."

Apparently the snowman that built Shifts felt it was important to make the app in English, Spanish, Italian, German and French (which is great), but not to find a way to let users share their work schedules to other calendars like Google or iCloud, in an integrated fashion.

This is the Achilles' heel of Shifts at the moment. Getting an email or Facebook message with all of your partner's shifts for the week is great; Getting an integrated reminder from your own calendar an hour before each of one their shifts begins would be killer. (If you also happen to think this feature is important, you can email the developers here).

The other problem with Shifts is more an oversight by -- and drawback for -- the developers trying to sell Shifts: Right now, it's only available for iOS, and on top of that, it only works on iOS 8.

"Built by Snowman": It doesn't make sense to create a productivity app designed for shift workers (Thanks! Finally!), but then make it only work with the devices that all of the other aforementioned professional productivity apps are marketed to.

A lot of shift workers have iPhones, but some of them can only run iOS 6 or 7. And a lot of shift workers use Android phones. Doesn't it make sense to include support for the devices your app is most likely to run on?

Tap That App

With those (easily fixable) caveats out of the way, we recommend Shifts for anyone with an up to date iPhone that doesn't work just the nine to five.

Whether you're in school, making some extra money on the weekends, or one of the tens of millions of professionals whose career involves a schedule that doesn't conform to the standard workweek set up by 19th-Century industrial workers, Shift can make your life, and the lives of your loved ones, much easier.

As mentioned, it's only for Apple devices running iOS 8. It's normally about $5 on the iTunes App Store, but since it debuted less than two weeks ago, it's on sale for $2 (at the time of this writing), so jump on it fast if it sounds right for you!