It’s not the most powerful To Do task manager around but it is free and it did introduce the whole idea of location reminders. Oh, how I love those: “Remind me to go to the supermarket when I leave here”. Wonderful.
But I use that feature via OmniFocus, which ties in to it, rather than in Reminders itself. So I’m not a big Reminders user but here’s someone who is:
Tutorial- Reminders App from cmarcotte on Vimeo.
There’s a bunch of productivity apps that have just had price reductions. As ever, the price of these is rarely all that much so if you miss a sale, shrug and buy at the full price anyway. But if you’ve been havering over any of them or you just want to try a category of app out, this is a good time.
From all the ones I can see, this is what I’d pick out for you. Click on the titles to go take a look.
MindNode
Mind-mapping software that plays very nicely with outliners and To Do lists such as OmniOutliner and OmniFocus. It’s now £2.99 UK or $4.99 US instead of £6.99 UK or $9.99 US
Appigo ToDo
This was the app I lived in before discovering OmniFocus. There’s a huge amount to love in it and I did deeply love it, I’ve just found OmniFocus is a far better fit for me. Since I moved on, Appigo has released a range of versions and I get a bit confused – some have Cloud syncing, some are for older devices – so read the release notes before you buy. But this one is now £1.29 UK or $1.99 US instead of £2.49 UK and $4.99 US
iDatabase
Never used it. Never heard of it. But it went on sale today and I’ve already told three people it looks worth a go – and they’ve all bought it. One has bought and is sold: it’s just what she needed. Now 69p UK, 99c US instead of £1.49 UK or
Very important: this is for the iPhone version of iDatabase and you’ll benefit from having the Mac version too – and that’s on sale as well. It’s an even bigger sale: iDatabase for Mac is now £1.99 UK instead of £13.99 UK ($2.99 US instead of $19.99 US) and the second I found that out while looking up the price for you, I bought it myself.
Fantastical 2 for iPad
The app that finally got me to change away from the regular Apple Calendar on both my iPhone and my iPad. Buy the iPad version now for £5.49 UK or $7.99 US instead of the usual £6.99 UK or $9.99 US and you’ll be buying the iPhone one soon. Right now that is also on sale: £2.99 UK or $4.99 US instead of £6.99 UK or $9.99 US.
Launch Centre Pro and Launch Center Pro for iPad
Use this to set up one button that, say, rings your mother. Instead of tapping on the phone icon on your iPhone, then contacts, then scrolling to your mother’s name and finally tapping on whether you want to ring her mobile or her landline, you just tap once and your iPhone does the rest. Maybe that would be handy enough for you but LCP can get really powerful – also, disclaimer, I found it a bit confusing – and it can do all sorts of things for you. Ridiculously detailed things.
I recommend you take a look but, confession, I keep popping it back onto my iPhone home screen and taking it off again. The biggest use I had for it was rapidly adding a new task to OmniFocus and it was faster than going through OmniFocus itself and tapping on Add Task. But now OmniFocus 2 for iPhone is so quick, I just don’t find the benefit.
Launch Centre Pro and Launch Centre Pro for iPad (two separate apps) are both $1.99 US now instead of $4.99 US
Take a potter around the App Store’s productivity category for more, but these are the best ones.
Fantastical 2 for iPad and iPhone is today updated to version 2.1 and unless you’ve taken steps to stop it, the app has already updated itself on your iOS devices. Because it’s automatic, it’s easy to not realise that it’s a significant upgrade or actually to notice that it has happened at all.
But the maker says that this version:
ONE NEW APP, MANY NEW FEATURES
• Reminders!
– See your events and dated reminders together in the main list
– Add reminders directly from the Reminders list or new event screen – just flip the switch to toggle between events and reminders
– Set dates, times, and geofences (when I arrive/when I leave)
• Significant new parser features, including:
– Create reminders by starting your sentence with “reminder”, “todo”, “task”, or “remind me to”
– Expanded, expressive repeating events such as third Thursday of every month, every weekend, last weekday of the month, and more
– Create alerts with phrases such as “remind me tomorrow at 3PM”, “alert 1 hour before”, or “alarm 3PM”
• All-new event details, including a map to show your event’s locations and better repeating event options
• An elegant week view when you rotate your iPhone to landscape
• Background app updating allows events, reminders, and alerts to be pushed to Fantastical 2 even if you don’t launch the app very often
• An extended keyboard when creating new events or reminders, providing instant access to numbers and symbols for dates and times (only for 4″ screens)
• Birthday options – tap on a birthday to see contact information or send a quick greeting
• TextExpander support
• Many other refinements and improvements
I don’t use Fantastical 2 for reminders and this won’t change my habits. But otherwise I swear by this app and recommend it hugely.
Plus, for a brief introductory period, the new version 2.1 is reduced in price by 50%. (Just like the Mac version.)
So that makes Fantastical 2.1 for iPhone currently cost just £2.99 UK or $4.99 US and Fantastical 2.1 for iPad now £6.99 UK or $9.99 US.
They’ve got to be good to be worth buying for cold hard cash when you already have Apple’s own apps that do exactly the same thing. Yes. They are. This is Cult of Mac round up for nearly half a dozen such very good apps.
I’d like you watch this even if you have previously had no intention of replacing your existing free apps with new paid ones. Because I was like that, I thought I was still like it: since my iPhone comes with a calendar, for instance, and I actually find it fine, I resisted changing.
But now of the five they mention here, I’m already and regularly using two; Dark Sky and Fantastical 2. See why, and what else might go next:
It’s a small thing – well, probably a big job for The Omni Group to implement, I don’t know – but there is a strong chance you just squealed. I know I did.
TextExpander lets you type a short code like a couple of letters and have sentences, paragraphs or more complex text appear magically. It is great for things you repeatedly but actually it’s only really great on Macs: it works everywhere on Mac, everywhere, it’s perfect and I think mandatory. On iOS, it’s only able to be great if the app you’re using directly supports it.
Now OmniFocus 2 for iPhone supports TextExpander. Fantastic.
Very many of my tasks in OmniFocus start off as email messages that I get. I’ll routinely forward them to OmniFocus to deal with later but often I don’t bother to do anything more to help me out. If the subject is the famously useful “Re: re: re: re: re:” then maybe I’ll change it to something else. But often I don’t and later I’m not sure what the task was. With TextExpander, I can have a snippet – as it’s called – where by typing something like “aaa” will expand out to “Ask Angela about” and then I can type the rest or it can be the existing email subject.
I wish OmniFocus for iPad did this too but that’s being updated so I think you can be safe in assuming that TextExpander support will be in the next release.
Here’s OmniFocus in all its forms on the official Omni Group website. And here’s TextExpander.
They beat me to it: I can tell you now that the productivity tip in this Friday’s The Blank Screen newsletter will be to do with TextExpander. But today the MacPowerUsers podcast released an entire 90-minute episode devoted to it.
Katie Floyd and David Price were the final straw for me, the final reason it took to get me to try this software that they – and everyone – claims speeds up your typing. I like typing and I’m fast, I don’t want or need speeding up. But I tried it a year or so ago and now I am everyone. You need this.
One example: I regularly get asked for a link to my The Blank Screen book and obviously I love that. But at first I would go to the Amazon page and copy the URL for whoever asked. Then I got smart and did a shorter one that didn’t break in their email. But that short one is this: http://amzn.to/1dO1nue.
That’s for the UK. If you were an American asking me for it, I should instead remember to give you http://amzn.to/1756A8y which I think you will agree is far easier to trip off the tongue.
But with TextExpander, I found the link once and now just have a little shortcode for it. If I type the following, without the quote marks, “;tbsauk” TextExpander instantly springs that out into the full link for The Blank Screen, Amazon UK edition. Or “;tbsaus” does the US one.
Full disclosure: I use that several times a week on my Mac and it is exactly as quick and deliciously handy as it sounds. But I’m writing this to you on my iPad and that is different. TextExpander needs to get its feet under the table to work and Apple doesn’t allow that on iOS. There are ways it can work on Macs so it does, but for iPhones and iPad, TextExpander only works if the app you’re using allows it. None of Apple’s do. But an increasing number are and there is also the iOS TextExpander app. That’s for organising the stuff, writing new snippets as they’re called, but it also expands this stuff for you.
So I did nip over to that app to expand the “;tbsauk” and “;tbsaus” snippets.
That’s not as lightspeed fast as it is on Macs and consequently I use far fewer TextExpander snippets on this iPad, but in this case it was still quicker and easier to do than to go research the full links from Amazon all over again.
Listen to much more, and I think rather better explained, on the latest MacPowerUsers podcast episode. And then get TextExpander from the maker’s official site.
Some of these are free up to a point and then is worth your paying cash. But it is worth that. Macworld’s David Price has picked out a good set that I think is free of the biases one usually sees: it isn’t packed out with games, it isn’t a selection of deliberately obscure or geeky apps that are fun to fiddle with. Instead, it’s 42 apps that if you’re not already using, you could well find become deeply important to you.
Case in point: of this 42, I use 16 regularly, 5 of them many times today and overall I’ve tried out 28.
I loathe doing this: I think the maker of the new app Moment for iPhone has worked hard to make a slick-looking app and I don’t doubt that it was done to scratch an itch, to do something its creator genuinely wanted an app to do.
But I just ran a story here about how to get a refund from the App Store and I only found out the way to do it because I so wanted a refund on this particular app.
Moment tracks your usage of your iPhone. It does that in time, how many minutes and hours you’ve used it today, and it does a little map of where you went. I was curious about this because I’ve wondered how much I actually use this thing. And – this was entirely my mistake, purely my fault – I believed Moment gave me more detail about what I did. I can only apologise for that: it was a thick misunderstanding of mine and I don’t criticise the app for it.
However, the app costs £2.50 UK or $3.99 US. There is then a paid in-app purchase that gets you a premium edition and for some reason that purchase is free. So I bought it.
Unfortunately, that adds the ability to set limits on how long you use your iPhone and it lets you set how often you get little alarm notifications of how long you’ve been running it. And the unfortunately is that there is no way to switch these off.
And more unfortunately, the app’s primary and nearly sole function of telling you how long you’ve been running your iPhone today is just a pretty version of what the phone already tells you.
Here. First, Moment for iPhone. It’s got a lot of whitespace and I want you to see how good it all looks so, sorry, there’s what looks like a gap before the next bit below:
And now the same information at the bottom there in this screen grab from iOS 7, exactly what you’ve got on your iPhone right now. Have a look on yours by going to Settings/General/Usage:
You definitely can’t miss that Moment says I’ve been using my iPhone for 21 minutes. Very clear, very good. But look at the system one: that says 36 minutes. I took these shots only a minute or two apart.
And I knew the system was more correct.
So the primary/sole function of the app is already available to you on your existing iPhone and Moment gets it wrong. I believe the accompanying map is accurate, but for the 40 minutes (according to iOS, 23 minutes according to Moment) that I used the app, I was in the same spot.
Sorry. I do believe this app was built from the finest of intentions, but I asked for a refund partly to get my money back, chiefly to send a message to the developer.
Have a look for yourself if necessary, here it is on the App Store.
If you blow a whole 69p on an app that end up not using much, live with it. If it’s a few pounds or dollars, come on: the coffee you drank at lunchtime cost more than that and you ain’t getting the money back from that.
But.
It is possible to buy apps by mistake. It is also possible to be misdirected into buying an app that isn’t what you thought.
So when you do feel the need for a refund, this is how you do it.
1) Go to iTunes on your Mac or PC
2) Go to the Store
3) Sign in and click on Accounts
4) Click on Purchase history
5) All your purchased apps are listed in lines grouping them together by date
6) Click on the arrow next to the one that includes the app you want a refund for
7) You get a detail page for the apps on those dates plus a Report a Problem button. Click.
This is easy to miss. The page with the Report a Problem button changes to a new page that is almost exactly the same: close enough that you can believe it hasn’t changed. But now next to each app on the list, there are the words “Report a Problem”. Click on that.
8) You get to choose one of the common reasons for a refund and there is space for you to write your reason.
Hit Submit and away off it goes to Apple.
This is more of a curio, I think: it’s the top 5 productivity iOS apps from someone who clearly prefers Android. He has that Android fiddle-with-new-toy-itus where the ability to root your phone is more interesting than getting any work done.
And he says iOS is less interesting because you’ve heard of all the best productivity apps for iOS already. O-kay.
Herewith, then, five you haven’t heard of. I think that knocks the word ‘top’ off the description but I only disagree with one – I’d recommend 1Password over LastPass, though doubtlessly for the same reason he does, it’s the one I use myself – and there’s only one I have never heard of. Find out what in the world 30/30 does here: