Mobile apps have become an embarrassment of riches for iPhone and
Android. In a world with over 500,000 iPhone apps and over 250,000
Android apps, the toughest part is finding the most useful stuff.
For iPhone users, I’m going to throw you an assist by sharing my top 20 (
this is an update of my 2010 iPhone list,
and I will update my top Android picks next week). My iPhone picks are
all third-party apps that can help you be more productive, streamline
regular activities, reduce the number of gadgets in your life, and take
advantage of the top benefits that mobile computing has to offer.
Dropbox is a great cloud service that automatically syncs a folder of
files between multiple computers (Windows, Mac, or Linux). This app
extends Dropbox to the iPhone and includes a built-in reader within the
app for PDFs, image files, and Microsoft Office files.
Once you get used to typing on a virtual keyboard (and it honestly
took me over a year to do it), then these devices are great for note
taking, and Evernote is a great note taking app. It is similar to
Dropbox in that it saves data locally but syncs it across all your
machines and devices.
There are a ton of to-do apps on iPhone but I prefer Due for its
simplicity and its audio alerts. However, this is an iPhone-only task
list. If you want something that can sync with your PC, Mac, or the Web,
then try
2Do or
Things.
I love Tripit. It is by far the best app I’ve found for keeping track
of all my travel itineraries. It is powered by some excellent backend
systems. You simply forward your confirmation emails (or use the Gmail
plugin to do it automatically) for your flights, hotels, rental cars,
and more to Tripit and it automatically organizes them into trips with
all your details and confirmation numbers.
For some reason Google doesn’t have an official app (for either
iPhone or Android) for Google Analytics. The best one I’ve found to go
deep into all of the data is Analytics App.
Even better than Analytics App for a quick-glance dashboard is Ego.
It shows basic data from Google Analytics as well as a bunch of other
sources, including Squarespace, Twitter, and Feedburner.
The official Twitter app (formerly known as Tweetie) is still the
best Twitter client on iPhone (although Osfoora is catching up). Twitter
itself is an amazing instant-intelligence engine. Two other great
social media apps for iPhone are
Google+ and
Foursquare.
Twitter has largely replaced RSS for me for finding and filtering the
latest news. However, I still track some RSS feeds and the best tool
I’ve found to do it with is Reeder. It syncs with Google Reader so it’s
easy to flip between the mobile app and the desktop, plus the app lets
you share to Twitter (and Facebook) and save to Instapaper and
ReadItLater.
I’ve never fully warmed up to the Amazon Kindle e-reader, but I’m a
big fan of the Kindle iPhone app. Since it was released I’ve read a lot
more books simply because my phone is always with me and I can pull it
out and read a few pages anytime I’ve got a couple minutes free.
Alternatives:
Nook,
iBooks, and
Kobo.
As much as I like the Kindle ebooks, I actually consume more books as
audiobooks via Audible. In the past you could download these and sync
them via iTunes. But Audible now has its own app, which lets you connect
to your Audible library and download over the air, and even gives you a
self-contained player optimized for audiobooks.
No comments:
Post a Comment