What are your favorite phone or tablet productivity apps ?

[Harold Mansfield]

The first thing I do when I get any device is get rid of all of the stuff that I'm never going to use or are redundant, however I'm always interested in good apps and I usually discover them via articles or suggestions from other people.

Thought it would nice to have a thread of the different apps that people use in their day to day that help with work productivity or just make life easier. Obviously we're all on different platforms, but even better since your suggestion may be of interest to someone on the same platform and many are available in all platforms.

A new one that I just started using is Pushbullet (Beta)
https://www.pushbullet.com/
It's available for both Android and iOS.

My personal and business communications are a mix of email addresses and different phone numbers. Transferring things back and forth is usually a 3 step process that almost always requires plugging the phone into the computer or emailing from one to the other.

It makes it easy to wirelessly transfer images, files, and addresses from your computer to your phone with just a right click.
It also displays a caller ID notification window on your computer of incoming phone calls and you can respond to text messages right from the notification window.

What are some of your favorites?

[Wozcreative]

Mine is Wunderlist (great To-do list) and Quickbooks!

[Freelancier]

CompanionLink is not an app, but lets you continuously sync your desktop calendar/contacts with your phone. Highly recommend it.

My app of choice is Wordament for wasting time (it's the world's largest simultaneous game of Boggle). And SiriusXM during football season :) Everything else is just "bidness"...

[Jan2Van]

My favorite productivity app is ScanWritr. I am out of office a lot of times and this app allows me to digitize every single bill, contract etc. and save it to the cloud, send it via e-mail. I even used their faxing service.

I have it on my Android phone and iPad, but as far as I know, it also exists for Windows Phone.

[Harold Mansfield]

I'm also getting into the Google calendar. The just came out with a nice update.
I've been using it for all kinds of things from putting the schedules of my favorite teams in, to scheduled appointments and calls with clients.
Right now I'm building a few custom calendars to help clients with scheduled maintenance and some other projects that I'm working on.

I'm really starting to like it.

[Brian Altenhofel]

I use Google Calendar for all of my scheduling. I'm a big NASCAR fan, so every year I populate my calendar with the times of all televised events (including practice and qualifying). I'll admit that I mark those as "busy" when it comes to scheduling appointments.

I maintain one calendar with all my business stuff in it, another with my personal, and my wife maintains a personal calendar. Our calendars are shared, so we can see at a quick glance what we each have going on. Quite often we'll invite each other and RSVP to events on each other's calendars to make sure that the event is on our radar. Whether I plan to attend conferences or not, they are still added to the calendar as soon as I know about them and marked as "busy" when I commit. I'm still evaluating a good means to allow prospects and clients to schedule appointments on my calendar.

I use Trello for managing projects, and though it is technically a web app I'm counting it here since I use it mostly from my tablet.

I use DrawExpress on my tablet for planning site architecture, workflows, and access control, at least for a rough draft.

I connect to IRC using Quassel, so I use Quasseldroid to connect to my Quassel server.

And on the rare occasion that someone actually wants me to use Skype, I use Skype on either my mobile or tablet. I rarely ever have to use it, and it's even more rare that I use it on my desktop or laptop.

[Blackwingconsultants]

Google keep and google now are good enough for me.

[nealrm]

I like OneDrive for my Windows phone. All photos I take are automatically accessible on all my devices. I also put other files in there that I want to share.

Mint.com is another good app. It is for Windows, OS and Android. Easy keep track of spending and balances.

[vangogh]

I'm on the OS X and iOS side of this. Transferring files to and from devices keeps getting easier. It's not yet seamless for me, but it's getting there. There are different ways to have things on both devices. It depends on the specifics. For example contact information goes in the Contacts app on all devices. As long as you turn on iCloud on all the devices they just sync. It's not perfect, but the general idea is add an address to whichever device and the others are synced. The devices can also create an ad hoc network between them and sync that way too.

Many apps work the same as long as it's the same app on each device. For things like contacts and email I stick to default Apple programs in large part because the information will sync across devices. There are a variety of 3rd party apps that are on all devices and some will sync through Apple's system and some will create their own.

It works pretty well with information that essentially remains in a single app and just needs to be synced. It's more challenging to move files and images back and forth. The latest upgrades to OS X and iOS change the situation in a lot of ways. iCloud is now iCloud drive and it works like Dropbox or Google Drive or any of the same from other companies. It appears as another folder on the OS X side. iOS still has no filesystem to access, but any app that has registered saying it can handle the type of file can open it, edit it, etc.

I'd still like to have a way to directly access the filesystem, but the more I've been without one, the less I feel the need. I find as long I can move files between different apps to work on them I'm fine. In the last few years a lot of the apps I use on my Mac will save their files in an internal database. it limits access to them unless the developer has provided, but I have to say it's much easier managing the files.

Apple has added new APIs for developers so apps can share a lot if the developers build the sharing in. It's only been a couple of months so not every app is sharing yet, but the list keeps growing. Apps can also share parts of themselves with other apps. For example you might working in a document that has an image embedded and you want to edit the image. If a image editing app is sharing you can use that portion in the app you were working in to edit the image.

Again, it's only been a couple of months so I'm describing more how the situation will be than it currently is.

I'm hopeful the issue is going to go away. It has always been one of the challenges of owning multiple devices. It's hardly perfect and I'll be the first to say it doesn't always work as advertised. A certain amount of moving things or syncing them still goes through iTunes. On the bright side, plug the device in once and your computer should recognize your devices wirelessly after that. Here or there the connection stopped being recognized and it was back to plugging in.

There are more ways to share and move things, but my laptop is a generation too old. It doesn't have the right version bluetooth. My iPhone and iPad recognize each through and have been able to transfer things back and forth between them for a few years.

[Harold Mansfield]

All of my devices are backed up to my computer which is backed up to an additional external hard drive.

But between the iCloud that apple gives you, the One Drive that MS gives you with Office, Google Drive for your Android and Google account stuff, Dropbox and all the others...it's too much. It would actually be easier for me not to use any of them and just keep my own back ups, than it is to have music, documents and images spread all over the proverbial cloud under different services and passwords.

But it's too late. I guess I'll appreciate it if I ever need to retrieve anything from them.\

Been thinking about getting one of those personal cloud storage systems. I'm still old school in the sense that I'd really like my stuff to be where I'm the only one with control of it and not on someone elses servers.

[vangogh]

I hear you about all the different services. Naturally all these companies want you to use their service exclusively, but I don't think that matches with how real people use the system. I've mostly stuck with iCloud and Dropbox. I have everything backed up here locally, which is fine assuming nothing happens to my home. With things like music and movies, I typically but through iTunes so the purchases are accessible from anywhere.

Part of the solution is really thinking about which data you have that's important to have backups for and which isn't. I have a few hundred GB of data and while I wouldn't want to lose any of it, I know much of it isn't all that important. Purchases can usually be re downloaded. On the work side every site I work on has a backup beyond my network as they live on someone else's server. I could lose documents I've created, but I don't think there's anything that's absolutely vital to save.

One of the best app purchases I made last year was 1Password. Aside from helping you keep more secure passwords, I can access everything in the app from anywhere. You can keep more than login information in the app too.

I think it's inevitable that most of our data will eventually live in the cloud somewhere andI get the feeling the cloud will always remain a vague and fuzzy term. Most people won't think much about where their stuff is specifically stored as long they can access it when they need to.

[Harold Mansfield]

I just started using Samsung Wallet. It's an app where you put all of your rewards cards and mobile payment information.
Went to the grocery store the other day and used my phone to scan my rewards card, put in a coupon, and pay. It was actually pretty cool and very easy.

In case you're wondering, yes my phone is encrypted, locked with a finger print scanner, and all new Android phones come with the ability to lock down, wipe clean or disable completely if lost or stolen but I also have additional security on it as well.