As I mentioned last week, if you own any Apple iOS product, the Apple apps store has quite a few worthwhile apps for you to look at, try out, and to proselytize. Unfortunately, the app store is likely to lump together equivalent and sometimes even some seemingly identical apps together (if you search). There are few opportunities to deal with apps as constituent parts of a suite of related apps.
Last week I presented some of the free social networking apps I use on my iPad, this week I will present some general business related apps which have use on all of the iOS products (for me, both iPad and iPhone).
To start off with, this is an area where the more integration you have with your gear, the better. For instance, with a DropBox account (on all of your devices, home PC’s, Word PCs, smart phone, iPad, iPod Touch, android phones, etc.) you are almost halfway there. The Plaintext app is one of these simple but incredibly useful tools. It is akin to a notebook app which resides in DropBox. This means that you can write a short note on any of your computers or phones, and it is instantly accessible from any of the others. For specific, short, and important notes and ideas this could be a game changer…
For the iPhone (and android phones too) The Bump app is an electronic business card. If you meet a business acquaintance with Bump on his or her phone, you merely need to open up the app and shake it…your particulars are then sent wirelessly to the other phone. You can set up Bump with your address, phones, emails, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn information.
Another app I use on both my phone and iPad is Documents To Go®. This app is the best Microsoft Office replacement (currently) for the iPad and iPhone. It is also cheaper than the Apple apps… I can get it to access my Google Docs and DropBox online directories, to save Word documents as .docx, and it has a simple and clean user interface. For important documents on any of my iOS devices, this is the best and easiest way to write, edit, and read spreadsheets, word processor documents, and even presentations (ala PowerPoint). Minimally this is a worthwhile tool to have for double checking documents and presentations (before the fact…when presenting to a customer…).
Finally I have GoodReader. This app is my ‘Swiss Army knife’ in that it can open up almost any kind of document. This comes in as especially worthwhile when checking email attachments on a smart phone. This also brings up the instated value in using DropBox, in that Plaintext, Documents to go, and GoodReader are all integrated with this tool. As a consequence I can deal with almost any kind of document from any of my devices…
While I can see that there are plenty of valuable business reasons for using these apps, I can also see that if you interact with other people; if you use textual information; if you use multiple computer/cell phone devices that these apps might be of real value to you too
