I appreciated everyone’s comments to George’s recent query, “Whatever Happened to PDAs.” Like many of our readers, I haven’t decided to make the switch to a smartphone. As attractive as they are, I haven’t been able to justify the monthly cost of the data plan to my internal accountant. But since I spend most of my life being irradiated by in wi-fi coverage, I’ve discovered that I can get by with a relatively unremarkable phone and my iPod Touch. I’ve had my touch for 2.5 years now, and while it’s no longer as shiny as it once was, the apps that I’m able to run on it make it an indispensable part of my not-quite-always-connected life. Ethan’s been kind enough to let me break in on his series (see his previous installments on applications, WordPress plugins, and lecturecasting tools) to talk about the five iPod Touch applications that I couldn’t live without.
First, of course, it’s worth mentioning again that these are the tools that work for me. They just happen to match the workflows that are comfortable for me. You might very well have different apps that you like more. Please share those with us below. And second, I’ll note that I’m going to cover apps that work on the iPod Touch specifically. All of these apps run on the iPhone as well, but they work just as well on the iPod. As for the iPad, see Ethan’s post from yesterday about the five iPad applications he can’t live without.
So let’s see the apps!
Read It Later
I don’t think that I use any application more on all the different devices that I own as Read It Later (RIL). I’ve written previously here about how I use RIL to read asynchronously. But in short, when I come across pages that I want to read later, I just bookmark them with RIL in my browser (whether on the iPod or my computer). My list of things to read stays automatically synced across the different devices where I have RIL installed. What makes this a killer iPod app for me is that when I open it up, it will not only sync a list of bookmarks but also download the full page into my iPod’s memory. This means that I can read the articles or websites whether I have an Internet connection or not. I use RIL on a daily basis as part of my commute or whenever I’ve got a spare minute. Instead of sending links to Delicious, where they previously went to die, I actually get through the majority of things that I or my friends find interesting. Within the app store there are both free and Pro ($4.99) versions of RIL. The free version is almost as full featured as Pro, but I decided to purchase the latter to get the ability to lock the iPod’s rotation as well as to support the developer. (It’s worth mentioning that a similar app that many are devoted to is Instapaper. I found RIL first, and that’s part of my devotion. But I also prefer being able to see the website’s original formatting, if I want.)
Attendance
This last year I found myself teaching four courses in a row on Tuesdays and Thursdays. In the past, I’ve always been able to keep track of class’s attendance in my head; after class, I could go back to my office and add them to an attendance spreadsheet. This became impossible once I had 90 students without a break. The solution to my difficulties was the Attendance app, which Jason has reviewed previously. I purchased it ($3.99) on his initial recommendation, and I quickly found it indispensable. As Jason writes, “Attendance is dead simple to use: You open the app, pick the class, add a new date, and tap the list of students to mark them as absent, late, present, etc. At any time, you can e-mail yourself the record as a CSV file, readable by any reasonable spreadsheet program.” Most important to me, however, was a point that he doesn’t mention: you can add pictures of your students. Since Clemson had photos available to students on a Blackboard roll, it was not that hard to slurp them into the Address Book application on my iMac and connect them to the students’ names in Attendance. With the app to study from, I found that I could generally get everyone’s name committed to memory within one week of the semester starting. Finally, the developer, David Reed, is not only a professor himself but also an incredibly responsive source of help when learning to use the app.
Dropbox
We’re not bashful here at ProfHacker in our love for Dropbox. The dead-simple syncing application also has a dead-simple app that runs on the iPod Touch (as well as iPhone and iPad). What this means is that I can see my most essential files wherever I am. Of course, in order to see these files, you need to be connected to the Internet. What makes this app indispensable for me, then, is the ability to mark a file as a “favorite” within the app itself. Doing this saves a read-only copy of the file to your iPod Touch, so you can see it even when you aren’t connected. I used this feature throughout the previous two semesters to keep a copy of my syllabus on me at all times, which proved handy when needing to check a reading schedule or grade break-down. I could also have individual assignments ready to view when I was grading them at different locations without my laptop. I currently use the app to keep various shuttle schedules handy. “Favoriting” something doesn’t change the file itself or on any other Dropbox-connected device. For all of this magic, you’ll pay exactly nothing! A great app need not be free. But it certainly helps.
TweetDeck
I’m a big fan of Twitter (feel free to follow me), and perhaps the first rule of Twitter should be to get yourself a client that is not the official website. There are plenty of different apps for using Twitter on the Touch, and I can’t even pretend to have tried them all. But of all the ones that I have tried, I’ve stuck with using TweetDeck. TweetDeck is one of the most popular and most powerful desktop clients for Twitter, and the iOS app is no different. You can break your feed down into several columns for mentions, direct messages, as well as other columns for hashtag searches and more. With a TweetDeck account (free!), your columns will even sync across the different devices you use. You can follow conversations using the app, read links in an in-app browser, and manage multiple Twitter accounts. If anything, it might have too many options. But for something that is–once again–free, it shouldn’t be too much of a worry. While I don’t tweet all that often from my Touch, I can use this app to quickly and effectively see who’s talking and what they’re saying.
WeatherBug
When you’re traveling to another state to teach–whether by car or by plane–you quickly learn that the weather you are experiencing at home might not have anything to do with the weather you’ll find at work. Consequently, I’ve found myself relying on my iPod Touch to give me quick forecasts for where I’m traveling. There is a built-in weather app on the iPod Touch, and while it’s pretty, I found it a little too simple for what I needed. I’ve settled on using WeatherBug as my go-to weather app. WeatherBug has everything that you’d expect from a weather app–current conditions and forecasts–but it also includes humidity (I live in the South, this matters), wind speed, maps with different overlays, and even live camera shots of an area. What has made WeatherBug really useful for me is that it gets its data from a network of instruments that tend to be hyperlocal and attached to schools, fire stations, and small airports. What that means is that I get data that tends to be much closer to the place I’m going. Once again, the price is right with WeatherBug since it is free. It is supported by fairly unobtrusive ads that run along the bottom of the app. If they annoy you, you can buy the $0.99 WeatherBug Elite. There are other enhanced features to the Elite version, but I’ve never felt the need to upgrade.
My five apps are almost certainly not the same as anyone else’s, so now it’s your turn to share. For those of you who are devotees of the iPod Touch, what apps can you not live without?
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18 Responses to 5 iPod Touch Apps That I Can’t Live Without (And Why)
jmcclurken - August 5, 2010 at 8:22 am
I’ll focus on my top free apps here.1) Twitterrific–I use Tweetdeck’s desktop app, but I prefer Twitterrific on the iPod Touch 2) Amazon’s Kindle App (and Stanza’s not bad either3) Nike+iPod App — paired with a sensor, this is great for runs.4) I’ve used Instapaper Free, but largely for the same reason Brian uses RIL, I tried it first.5) Games — Scramble, Topple, and almost any crossword app6) Restaurants — nutritional information for most food/drinks at many chain restaurants. [Use this only if you are prepared to never eat some of your favorite foods again once you realize how bad they are for you.][I've focused this list on apps that
briancroxall - August 5, 2010 at 8:38 am
Thanks for mentioning Kindle and Stanza, Jeff. These are both great apps for finding free stuff to read, as well as paid things. I find that I have so much stuff in RIL that I don’t often turn to these two apps on my iPod. But it’s nice to know that they’re there.I do think, however, that I’m going to stay far away from Restaurants.
samplereality - August 5, 2010 at 9:28 am
Brian, thanks for the great list and for starting off a conversation in which we’re all bound to learn about even more apps. Here are a few suggestions of my own:(1) For a to-do list manager I use Milpon, which syncs effortlessly with Remember the Milk, meaning I always have a local copy of my tasks, even when I don’t have a wifi connection. (I use RTM so that I can also access my tasks on my computer and my Android phone.)(2) 3Banana, a replacement for the built-in notes app. 3Banana syncs with the snaptic.com website, making it a more streamlined version of Evernote. I’ve imported all of my old notes from my Palm device into 3Banana, and it’s nice having access to them across many different devices.(3) 1Password for password management, and even cooler, for automatic entry of passwords into the Safari app, which can be quite painful when your passwords look like 77D3AthS!*r. The latest version of 1Password will also sync your passwords with Dropbox, which the desktop versions can also do, meaning you can share your passwords across computers and devices.And of course, there are all sorts of obvious apps to install: DropBox, EverNote, and [insert DoubleCapitalizedCompoundNoun here].
wcaleb - August 5, 2010 at 9:29 am
I’m an evangelist for Simplenote. It is basically a sleek replacement for the native Notes app on the Touch–it only allows you to take text notes, unlike Evernote. But it syncs all of your notes into a “cloud” account on Simplenote’s server, so you can also access your notes through a web browser on a desktop computer. And if you pair the app with the free Notational Velocity for Mac, you can then sync all your notes to your hard drive as well and easily edit them on your computer. Right now every note I make in Simplenote is automatically backed up in four places–on my Touch, on the Simplenote web server, on my hard drive once I launch Notational Velocity and connect to the Internet, and then on my external hard drive through the Mac Time Machine backup program.It’s also very easy to do a global search for words in your notes, and the results list is generated as you type, allowing me to get to, say, my bus schedule just by beginning to type “bu …” It’s a deceptively simple app (hence the name) but I use Simplenote constantly and recommend it. Also, it’s now completely free, though you can pay an annual fee for some premium features.
lincolnmullen - August 5, 2010 at 10:16 am
Thanks for the recommendations, Brian. Like you and other commenters, I use DropBox, Read It Later, and Simplenote on my iPod Touch. For task management, I use Things, which Ethan Watrall mentioned for the iPad. The other apps I use all the time are Osfoora (for Twitter), Rowmote Pro (for making the iPod a remote for my Mac), and Mint (for managing finances).
heatherwhitney - August 5, 2010 at 2:58 pm
For my iPod Touch, I love1. Brizzly for Twitter.2. Byline for pulling in my Google Reader feeds. 3. Public Radio Tuner for pulling in NPR (handy for when I want to listen to Morning Edition when it’s off the air in my area and I still want to listen to it; I pull up a West Coast feed.)*4. Wolfram|Alpha.*I know that one can pull up NPR shows on their own, but I like the interludes of local radio station information that are sprinkled in with the broadcast.
heatherwhitney - August 5, 2010 at 3:00 pm
And I should add that #5 is the Evernote app (although I wish it had a “push” feature so that I wouldn’t have to open the app to get it to update notes.)
sciman - August 5, 2010 at 9:57 pm
A shout-out here for OmniFocus. I’m not a time management freak, though I like the whacking of tasks to projects and found gtd (getting things done) principles useful for organizing my desktop and computer files. Though Omnifocus is designed primarily for those seeking more precision than I, where attention to “context” might be important, I have found a ton of alternative uses for the drag and drop small elements to projects strategy. OmniFocus has some wonderful “input” possibilities that I use all the time. I find myself with a note or idea often in the wrong place.. at night, or while reading. It’s a piece of cake to send an email to myself with a couple of dashes in the subject line.. which is all that it takes to wind up in my”inbasket” In fact with a quick reference embedded in subject line, the ‘item’ becomes a component to a particular project within your system. Items are displayed by title, but the body of the email is also included as an embedded object. This becomes a great way to forward web pages to myself, or even Safari 5 reader/pdfs to my archive by subject title! No matter whether I’m at the desktop, on a laptop, or out and about with my iPad, inputs are synched across all platforms through MobileMe. Steve
peril - August 5, 2010 at 10:44 pm
I think I have nearly 150 iPhone apps… to choose just 5… :PThe apps I leave on my home page, outside of categories are the most used, so that seems the best place to start:Read It LaterTweetDeckDropboxTaskaTouchPadSome good apps to look at: Dropbox – of courseAir Video (also for iPad) – stream all your videos over wifi/internetSimpleNote – just notes, but with awesome syncingSketchBookZinioComicZealResumeMindnodesMental Case 0- flashcards that don’t suckPaper TossChuck Norris the game (waht it’s funny)pullup fu100 pushupsCouch to 5Kclarus (pet health manager)FlixterCaster (also for iPad)Pet First Aid(Shazam)REDEpicuriousHowTo TieDeliveriesiHand LevelCovertbotRemoteKeypointHere File File!LogMeInGas CubbyRetroSketch (also for iPad)GWars:Touch (man that’s a fun game)Ok, that was a long list, but the fruits of a lot of time app hunting. Prolly wont need all of them, but those are some of the best I tell people about when I get asked for app advice at IT.
briancroxall - August 6, 2010 at 10:14 am
@samplereality: Thanks for the recommendation of Milpon. I’m not a RtM user, but I know plenty of people who love it. And the fact that it’s web-based means that it isn’t platform dependent in the way that Things is (although Things gets much ProfHacker love and @lincolnmullen mentions it here as well). It’s free, which is great as well. I’ve heard great things about 1Password as well. Have you had a chance to look at LastPass, which Ryan reviewed recently? Is it worth the big(ger) bucks for 1Password?@wcaleb: Thanks for the recommendation of SimpleNote. One of the failures of the standard Notes app on the iPod/iPhone is the lack of good syncing without a MobileMe account. I don’t use the Notes app all that much, but syncing would make it much more useful. I’m checking out @samplereality’s suggestion of 3Banana as well.@lincolnmullen: Thanks for the recommendation on Rowmote Pro. One of the apps that didn’t make my list was the standard Remote app by Apple, which I use in conjunction with my computer, Airport Express, and home stereo. This looks like it could be a nice complement.@heatherwhitney: Thanks for the mention of Public Radio Tuner. This is one that was totally off my radar but is exactly what I’d like to have for while I’m traveling.@sciman: I appreciate the explanation of how you use OmniFocus for your work. It’s interesting that we’ve seen so many productivity/time management apps mentioned here. I’m going to preserve my own good use of time by not playing with all of them. But I’m glad to get a better vision of the lay of the land.@peril: Thanks for all of these suggestions. One of the problems with the App store, as I see it, is that it introduces a different model of software evaluation. For most software, you can try the full version for a few days/hours before you have to decide if you will purchase it or not. Apps, on the other hand, tend to make you pay for them up front. Sure, there are the descriptions and reviews in the App Store, as well as videos and descriptions on the developers’ websites. But they don’t give you the experience of really using the app and knowing whether or not it will be useful. The closest we get is with “Lite” or “Free” versions of apps; but these too fail in that the Pro versions always incorporate aspects that are not present in the free one but are yet supposed to be the reason why people should pay out the money for the new ones. What I’ve recently suggested to two schools is that they devote a small amount of money to an “apps lab,” where they purchase several apps in categories that matter most to faculty. The faculty can then experiment with the real apps and decide which ones will work best for their own work flows. I’ll report back when I know how it’s working.
heatherwhitney - August 6, 2010 at 10:39 am
@briancroxall: did you see the announcement about Apple’s try before you buy section? http://www.intomobile.com/2010/08/05/apple-debuts-try-before-you-buy-section-in-iphone-appstore/
samplereality - August 6, 2010 at 10:40 am
@Brian: To clarify, I’m using the free 1Password app, not the paid 1Password *Pro* app. The free version is ad-free and nag-free and does everything I need it to do, plus syncs with the desktop version (which, again, I’m using the free Windows version).
briancroxall - August 6, 2010 at 10:56 am
@heatherwhitney: Thanks for this link. Someone else pointed it out the “Try Before You Buy” section on Twitter as well. I think that there is a problem with Apple’s approach, however, since this is basically a storefront for the “Lite” apps. Those free apps normally give you a good sense of what the “Pro” version will be like, but they don’t give you the full experience. And that’s important when you’re asking a person to pay $5 for something sight/experience unseen.@samplereality: Thanks for the clarification. Although I don’t find a free version of the app in the App Store anymore. Can you link us? It’s also useful to know that 1Password is moving into Windows. The beta is free and open to everyone that is interested.
wcaleb - August 6, 2010 at 3:29 pm
@briancroxall: Agreed about the native Notes app for iPod Touch–I never use it, and not just because of the Marker font and busy UI.In addition to syncing more easily, one of the things Simplenote allows me to do (when I use it with Notational Velocity on my hard drive) is sync every one of my notes to my computer as an individual RTF file. That means my notes are never locked into a database or special marked-up file. I can read any of my notes on my computer either with Notational Velocity or with any standard text editor or Word Processor. And because NV lets me opt to read notes from a particular folder, if I edit any notes in that folder, NV will automatically update the changes to the Simplenote server, and then to my iPod, even if I did the editing with TextEdit or any other RTF editor.Now that I think about it, too, my notes are actually backed up FIVE times over, because I keep that folder of the RTF files that underlie my Simplenote notes in Dropbox, so they are all available for read-only through Dropbox too.The other nice thing about keeping all my notes from Simplenote as RTF files on my computer is that I think I could conceivably do Automator actions like “find and replace” across files using these text files.Another thing I like about the Simplenote interface (though the native Notes program can do this too) is the ability to make my own easy hashtags. For example, whenever I make a note about my book manuscript in Simplenote, I add “@bn” to the end. Then, whenever I want to pull up all my book notes, I just enter “@bn” into the search field, and a list of all my book notes is immediately generated, sorted with the most recently modified notes first. I have other hashtags that make navigating through a lot of notes very easy. For example, whenever I see a book I want to check out at the library, I paste the call number into Simplenote (or NV if I’m on my computer), and add the hash tag “@lib.” Then, when I’m at the library, I can easily pull up all the books I wanted to get there.Basically what Simplenote has become for me is a very easy way to dump any and all writing ideas I have into a place where I can easily access it later–it’s perfect for total capture of little snippets of ideas, questions, rough drafting paragraphs that I can easily lay my hands on later and don’t have to worry about losing. And I like that, unlike Evernote, it only deals with text because there are minimal distractions or other types of media mixed in.I also should have mentioned that Simplenote is built to work on the iPad too. The interface on the iPad is beautiful–when you hold it in Portrait mode, you basically get a pared down, totally full-screen text editor, where everything you type will be immediately synced to your cloud account. I have Pages for iPad but I find myself drafting things in Simplenote more often, because I don’t have to export or email the file I create to myself–it automatically syncs to my account, and then to my NV on my hard-drive, where I can copy and paste the text into the word processor or text editor of my choice. Right now I’m using Simplenote on my iPod to type this comment on the bus (using a bluetooth keyboard). When I get to the office, I’ll just connect to the Internet, and then I can copy and past the text from NV to the Profhacker site–no middle man steps like emailing the text to myself.Sorry for the gushing–like I said, I’m an evangelist.
brianborchers - August 8, 2010 at 6:52 pm
I’m a big fan of “Lose It!” for calorie/exercise/weight tracking.
tee_bee - August 10, 2010 at 12:11 am
Just a request–could we see some recommendations for good Android apps later this year? I know the selection isn’t as good and broad as for iPhones/iPod touch, but this is what I roll with now. Although I am sorely tempted to get an iPad touch just for the video capacity–something to keep my kids occupied on the road.
tee_bee - August 10, 2010 at 12:23 am
Sorry, I mean iPod touch. I am confused by all this iP products.
george_h_williams - August 10, 2010 at 8:32 am
@tee_bee: Yep. We’ve got just such a post in the works already.