My favourite apps

I can’t live without my iPhone. It has become an invaluable business and personal communication tool. Like most, I use the computing functionality of the device much more than the telephone. I suspect that I do most of my internet usage through it, rather than my laptop or iPad.

Like most, I suspect, I must have evaluated hundreds of apps over the years. Only a handful remain faithfully in my iPhone that I use on a daily basis. Here is my list:

Primary apps

• Evernote

This is my main application. I’ve got it running on all my devices and it receives my braindump on a regular basis. It also holds many in-progress projects; from scripts to blog posts as well as web clippings and information gems that I might require from time to time. Its beauty is extended in its integration into web browsers so much so that if I search for something on the web, it puts out any relevant search results on the very same page too. Absolutely brilliant product and a must.
• Dropbox

I do everything on the cloud, and Dropbox – which is an Amazon services front end – is where I put everything. Secure and safe. I don’t particularly care what happens to my computer or any other device as most of my files are stored on the cloud. The practicality of this is astounding. I’m at my desk, virtually, any where I sit at a computer or get a connection through whatever device.
• Reminders

A native app now in iOS and on MacOS; I find it very useful for creating lists of todos. Its beauty is that you get a list of current and overdue reminders at a click of a button, and you can assign priority and date/time for each item. I would have liked a third dimension to the Reminders; attaching notes or pictures would be nice, but I guess that’s where EverNote comes in.

Utilities

• 1Password

I don’t use any normal passwords and don’t bother remembering any. With 1Password I just use it to generate and remember 16 characters. Try breaking that!
• DocScanner

I use this to scan everything: invoices, receipts, magazine articles, my hand-written notes, etc and get them fed directly into EverNote as PDFs where I can further mark them up. EverNote of course has an intelligent OCR function which actually understands a lot of my scribbles. Makes it quite handy!

There you have it. My most important apps. Do you have any preferences? Please share.