My Favorite Productivity Apps so far

Apple just created a new geek like culture in the form of Applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. Sure, Treos had this, but, the sleek begging for interactive design of the iPhone is perfect for discovering how it can be morphed into your personal whatever the heck you want it to be.

All of the sudden us poor Mac owners are dealing with something only their PC counterparts have to deal with. A flood of applications. Within two days the app store went from 500 applications to 700.

I am in love with the App store. Sure, they suck my battery down like Leslie Fisher and a bottle of even year vintages of Switchback Cab, but, they are fun, keep me in touch with my friends and dare I say are productive, sometimes.


My favorite (non game non sport) Applications.

If I had to name only 10, theses would be them:

1. Twitteriffic Premium: This is just a silly clean slick looking twitter client. You can take pictures and have it automatically feed to twittpics complete with your GPS location. Direct twitts and private messages show up in your main feed colored separately from the rest. I adore this feature and twittering has never been so easy.

2. ToDo: (the pay for version). I am a lister. A huge lister. If you are not, head to my third pick and enjoy my top 9 list. I use a web site called Remember the Milk. If you want to try the web based version, its free. Its perfect for people who like to dos with categories, alarms, and a pile of extra list loving goodies. However, it lacked one critical thing, the ability to update it offline. Not anymore. Todo has a Sync feed into Remember the Milk. The downside was I had to pay $25 a year for Remember the Milk and then $10 for this app but hey, its worth it and the developers of RTM are really cool. Now, I can update my to do list anywhere. Life, so good.

3. Loopt. This should be first on my list if it was everything I was hoping it would be. The application still rocks and is still the most clicked application on my phone, however, it can be at times the most frustrating. Loopt uses GPS to track your location and share where you are with the people you allow to know this information who are also running loopt. They seem to be using a different engine than the iPhone. So, when my phone puts me within 20 feet of where I am, loopt has me miles away. Also, some wonderful features on their website (like alerting you when someone is with within a specific mile range) does not exist on the iPhone client. You do get a proximity warning but that's it. I really hope they get better at locating me and more importantly, my buddies. Once they do, this thing will be fun. It will get great once Apple allows background updating. Right now you have to run the app to update your location.

Edit: Loopt recently updated their software. They really cleaned up their location services. It finds me much faster now and puts me exactly where I am. Its even faster than the Maps application now! Nice work Loopt!

4. SmugShot: Allows a very easy way to take photos and screenshots from my phone and store them on my smugmug page. Screen shots you say? Yes! Hold down the home button and then click the power button. You will see a flash of white light on the screen. Do not walk into the light! Just head to your camera icon and you will see the photos listed there.

5. Evernote: It would make sense that the lister would want to keep track of little tidbits along the way. Evernote you ask? Its the ability to capture anything via photo, web clipping, camera phone, screen shot and place it in one central location on your portion of the Evernote server. Evernote will then do OCR on the object so you can even do text searches. You can organize your information on the web via albums and even make them public so other people can see them. I use this all the time for business cards, receipts and wine labels of great wine I find at a wine dinner. Now, with this iphone app, I take the picture from my iphone camera and it is uploaded to my server space on Evernote.

6. Yelp: Standalone, this should go higher in the list, but, its also part of Loopt, so, act like its 3rd! Yelp is my favorite foodie website. Simply type in a city or even a specific address and it will begin to list establishments near you. Its mainly restaurants, but, I have seen everything from doctors, markets and dry cleaners listed. The reviews are customer driven by members. It reminds me a lot of Amazon. So, you have to weed out the dorks from the rest. You can also type in specific food and it will widdle the list down to your specific cravings. I love the feature that shows me what is within walking distance. Really handy for when I am out of town. I already mentioned that this is integrated with Loopt, so, Loopt will display the closest reviewed locations to wherever the heck it thinks you are.

7. Shazam: If this was a list of coolest applications, this would not only be first but it would be nosing the other applications below it because well, nothing is s cool as Shazam. Ever listen to music and wish you knew what the song was? How about you know the song but you keep forgetting to buy it in the itunes store because your brain seems to flop out of your head once you get out of the car? Well, run shazam and hold your iphone as close to the music source as you can get. It will then identify the song. Once it gets it, it will find video links on youtube as well as links on itunes. You can then save this information as a tag for easy retrieval later. I have been very surprised how many songs this thing knows and how well it can even pick up ambient music. Its free now, but, Brits pay $4.50 a month for this service.

8. Remote: This poor app is suffering from the fact I have not really kicked its tires yet. I am sure it deserves to be higher. Remote lets you control your Apple media from your phone. iPhone, Pod, Tunes, TV, etc.

9.AIM: This app stinks yet it makes my list. When it works, its only ok. It has some interface issues. Right now, I just click on the app and it crashes back to the main screen. Still, its nice to have at least one messaging client on my phone.

10. Where to? Already does what Yelp and Google Maps does. It also costs money and has not reviews. Still, its one of the nicest implementations of location GPS I have seen for the phone. In fact the company, tap tap tap has some other nice applications due out soon


My top Application I so want to see on the iPhone

1. Adium: Where, oh where are you Adium? Please, bring unto me chat from Google, Yahoo, AIM, MSN, ICQ etc etc to the iPhone. Have you seen AIM chat for the iPhone Adium? Enough said. Show up in this market and take over the place, please.

2. TripIt: Travel some and do not know about TripIt? Head to www.tripit.com. You can thank me later. How cool would it be to access my itineraries via an application and not via the web? I could then send new itineraries to it as well as sync to the tripit.com website. I emailed them about this idea and it sounded like they had no idea there was even applications on the iPhone now. I am not holding my breath, but, I am dreaming.

3. 1Password: A central password application that I (and many others use) to keep all of their passwords secure and in one place for easy retrieval. They announced the app is in the works. yay!

4. Any calendar better than the built in calendar. Gimme icons! Gimme colors for the date boxes!


The two apps you would be surprised I removed from my iPhone

1. Jott: What the heck? Ok, this is 1.0 but, this app is silly. I love Jott. I use Jott all the time to call twitter or Remember the Milk to keep my feeds and to do list updated. However, this app is simply a tape recorder. I have yet to figure out if it actually goes to jott! I am hoping for a new version soon.

2. Facebook: Love the concept, but, this app is really skinny. Even Facebook says so. So, download it but keep the web version handy on your phone. They do promise to keep updating it at a quick pace.

Update. Since I wrote this, both applications have been updated for the better. Jott has a record option which know will do a transcription straight to your to do list. However, I cannot figure out how to have it head to Remember the milk. Facebook has added many of its missing features as well. Enough so that I am not using the web version anymore.