A bit over a week ago, Ben Evans posted a tweet where he was pointing to a recent presentation he put together as well under the rather thought-provoking title ‘Mobile is eating the world’. In that presentation he gets to talk (there are both slides and a video recording) about the impact of mobile in today’s (business) world, to the point where after you go through it there may well be very little doubt left as to how mobile phones, specially, smartphones, amongst several other technologies, have shaped the world into something completely different than whatever we may have had in the past. The fact that half the world’s population owns a smartphone nowadays is already rather remarkable on its own and equally mind-blowing as I am pretty sure we would all agree it’s just the beginning…
Now, I am not going to spoil it for you the rest of the presentation Ben created, but I can strongly recommend you take a look into it, if you are still questioning whether your business is ready for #mobilefirst or not. If that deck doesn’t convince otherwise, I don’t know what would, frankly. It’s a brilliant piece of work that can give us a glimpse of not only what’s coming, but also what’s already here and that we are experiencing day in day out. Really good work!
But since I am embarked already with this post into the existing series of My Top 5 iOS Apps of the Week blog entries for personal mobile productivity, I guess I will just stick to it and share along the next round of iOS Apps I would recommend that may well be worth while giving them a good try. Hopefully, there will be something out there for everyone! In terms of themes, in case you may be wondering, this week we have got Business (Task Management), Productivity (RSS News Feed Readers, Mindmapping, Curation) and, finally, as usual, Photography.
Thus without much further ado, let’s get down to it:
- Todoist: I think I have mentioned this already, but, just in case, here it is, once again. I’m hooked up to Task Management Apps, along with a couple of other categories as well, for that matter. I just love them all. Over the course of a good number of years I have used several of them and there hasn’t been a single one I may have dropped out to never use it again. They are all still there, in a lovely folder, where I have grouped them all together, ready to be used at my own discretion. Now, at one point in time, I will share with you all a trick that helps me make use of them all at the same time without having that feeling of clutter, burden, hassle, nor even overload. But in its due time…
For now though, I will want to share in today’s blog post another one of my favourite iOS apps for task management. In the past, if you remember, I have already talked about Trello, Clear, Productive, Asana, but in case none of them would tick for you here is another one I have enjoyed quite a bit over time: Todoist. And here are two things I enjoy the most from this app: the ability to use labels when creating different tasks I can filter through a specific tab at a later time and see what kind of work I have been doing all along in a nutshell is pretty nifty on its own, never mind as well the capability of filtering those very same tasks by both priority as well as who they have been assigned to. Then the option to have chatting along tasks can be pretty effective overall, specially, if you create group tasks for your team(s), as well as the one of being able to use your own voice to record tasks, work with documents, custom labels, etc. etc. Like I said, worth a try if you are still looking for an effective, user friendly and overall helpful task management app.
- Fiery Feeds: Ok, on to the next one. In previous blog posts I have been talking about RSS news feed readers (Yes, I know, I still read RSS feeds daily!) and how, at the moment, I’m using two of them for both my iOS devices as well as my MacBook Air: Feedly and Reeder. However, while both of them are rather good, they are not very advanced in providing you with some extended capabilities that would make it easier for you to work through hundreds of feeds at a time. So, my suggestion, in this particular case, is to perhaps point you to one iOS app that would allow you to handle hundreds of them relatively easy without having to ditch anything else, because it actually integrates it quite nicely. I am talking about Fiery Feeds. Just browse through the Web site and you will see why I’m recommending it as a superb app for RSS news feed reading for power users. Perhaps as good as it gets.
- iThoughts: I love mindmapping. It’s perhaps one of my favourite business productivity activities and for almost everything. There isn’t a single day in my work week where I don’t use mindmaps to jot down ideas on whatever the business topic and see where that would take me. Or to gather my thoughts on a specific topic to make sense of it before I may take whatever further steps. In the past, I have already talked about MindNode as the mindmapping app I use the most often, but there is another one, perhaps a bit more complex and advanced in terms of functions and capabilities, I tend to use for more complex work and that is iThoughts.
You may be wondering what makes it special, right? Well, you can import and export pretty easily different document formats and mindmaps, so you can continue already existing work without having to start from scratch. You can multitask with it having side by side windows, or you can use the hand off option where you start a mindmap in one device and finish it off in another one almost instantly. But you can also use this app for task management to keep track of the progress you make within your mindmaps. You can also multiple different formats, layouts, icons, styles, filters, etc. etc. making iThoughts perhaps one of the most advances mindmapping apps for iOS. Totally worth the money, believe me. I can highly recommend it, specially, if you are a mindmapping power user.
- Nuzzel: There used to be a time where I was rather fond of Nuzzel to curate interesting and relevant content I would bump into from different Twitter sources, but at one point in time something happened in one of the updates where, to me, they pretty much destroyed the overall user experience making it much more cumbersome and unnecessarily complex to keep up with what you were interested in. Fast forward to 2016 and it’s fast developing into becoming one of my favourite apps to discover new interesting articles and publications not only matching my own interests but also what others may find relevant to them. And the capability of creating your own newsletters through it makes it rather engaging, because, in a way, it feels as if you are building and curating your own magazine of interests, themes and topics. Really cool!
And if you use Nuzzel on an iPad Pro with all of that screen resolution available to you, my goodness! All of a sudden there it is your Sunday morning news paper over a lovely cup of coffee right at your fingerprints! Simply brilliant! I tell you, if you haven’t used Nuzzel in a little while, it may well be worth while taking a look into it, once again. I suspect it will be worth it for you as well as it has been for me so far. I’m really glad I didn’t remove it back in the day, because when I started this series of blog posts I decided one day to open it up and haven’t walked away from it ever since! Worth checking it out once again, in case you haven’t!
- Picky: And, finally, the last iOS app recommendation of the week is, yet again, a photography app. Like I mentioned, I have got a couple dozen photography apps on both my iPhone and iPad Pro and I just can’t help it recommending one after the other week in week out, because they all have got something to offer. Take a look into this week’s pick. It’s called Picky.
It comes with a twist! This one: ‘Picky makes your best photos always ready. It is a trained eye, a virtual artist that lives in your phone. With Picky, you get an intelligent, AI-powered photo curator that scans your photos, selects the best ones, and automatically enhances every detail, from color and light adjustment, to skin correction and toning. It prepares them for sharing as individual pictures, or combines them into a dynamic collage.’
Yes, I know, … Whoahhh! Well, it gets even better. It pretty much nails it altogether! I have been having tons of great fun with this app over the course of last few weeks as it’s helped me time and time again to make the best picks and editing effects on plenty of the pictures I have shared across in different media tools and I’m quite enjoying the overall outcome. Effort required from yours truly? Not much, just open up the app, select what kind of production you would want to embark on and then let Picky do the rest. What an amazing app altogether! This is a must-have app. Without a single doubt, I’m certain it will blow your mind right from the very first moment you get to use it. It’s that good! Take it for a spin and see what you think… Ohhh and in case you are worried about your privacy, here is where Picky excels. To quote: ‘Picky values your privacy. It is an offline app and we never upload your photos to a server without your permission.’
Just wish other iOS apps would treasure and appreciate my privacy with my photos as this one does! Simply stunning!
And that’s it, folks, for this week’s My Top 5 iOS Apps of the Week blog entry. Next week I will be back with another round of recommended iOS apps although I may post it earlier in the week as opposed to over the weekend. We shall see … For now, I hope you folks may have enjoyed this week’s suggestions as much as I have so far and, again, if there would be an iOS app out there you would want to recommend I should try out, as usual, leave a comment below or reach out to me via Twitter at @elsua. I will be more than happy to take those suggestions for a spin and then let you folks know how it went and whether they would still stick around with me.
Till next time! Have a great one everybody!
