I have one confession to make.
I’m addicted to the idle pastime of hunting for productivity apps — not for any useful purposes, but because of the sole need to make it look like I actually have reason to use my phone. Also because I feel the need to subtly point out the fact that yes, indeed, I have better taste than most people in terms of background and app selection. (I’m kidding.)
It’s a savage activity, honestly. Completely goes against what I believe in. I pledge to being a productivity junkie (love me some studyspo), but I’m more than willing to spend a few hours looking for productivity enhancing apps than actually doing work.
But, whatever, right? Praxis tends to diverge from theory… right?
Through my labourous travels in the fine universe of the App Store, there have been several standout findings that I’ve actually used on a regular basis. We’ll call these the essentials. I’m a lowkey app hoarder, I’ll admit it. I intended this post to be a master list of all the apps I’ve tried out and liked, but you’d get bored, so here are 5 of the best FREE apps that keep me sane.
Inbox by Gmail is a gorgeously designed emailing agent with all of the organizational tools you would ever need. I’ve hopped on the Inbox route for a few months now, and I am completely in love with the harsh functionality that it provides. Bundle is a feature I particularly enjoy, along with Highlight — these features consolidate mail with similar content into groups and then display snippets of information without requiring you to open the actual email. Inbox enables mass deletion of emails based on group (so you can swipe right and get rid of all those pesky Promotions and Social alerts). Basically, if you’re into effortless organization, Inbox is perfect with its great tagging abilities.
Evernote is basically what I use instead of Google Drive for pictures, PDF files, and tidbits of information that aren’t essential enough to end up in the clutter of digitized academic papers. I probably haven’t used Evernote to its full capacity, but I can say that I’ve exploited the heck out of the Photo to Document function. This is a feature that allows users to take a picture of a document, and then convert the image to what looks like a scanned file. Great for sending notes — it eliminates shadows and leaves your clean text.
Ah, the plight of the avid iPhone camera user. I always run into a certain annoyance while on vacation. There’s a significant sort of sacrificial despair that I’ve come to correlate with taking iPhone pictures, because inevitably, I’ll find myself in a spot having to mass delete photos and apps to make room for more pictures. Worry no more, Dropbox called. Carousel is an images only extension of Dropbox that backs up your iPhone library and then removes the images from your library over Wifi or 3G. Huzzah!
Mint enables you to link your bank account and create monthly budgets to manage your income and spendings. It looks great, automatically updates your expenses, and really is a universal tool everyone should have.
Timeline looks just like another news app with bolded Helvetica headlines, but it goes beyond the scope of traditional reporting by providing the reader with an in depth look at the historical context surrounding the issue. It’s reminiscent of explanatory journalism from the New Yorker (i.e. Malcolm Gladwell), but more historically grounded. Keep in mind, it’s a little US-centric but the World news section is a great resource of quick information I personally would find very useful to know for Social class.