3 Life Changing Apps
In life, it’s the little things that make all the difference. Here are three apps that do just that.
Life Changing App #1: Dark Sky
In a city whose inhabitants are constantly on the go, usually without the protection of a car, usually running late, usually dressed with purpose, usually either intentionally traveling light or unfortunately overloaded, deciding umbrella-or-not can be difficult.
Consider weather apps. Weather sites. Weather forecasts, the weather channel. All overloaded with information not pertinent to the big question: Will it rain? And the minor questions: Will I get wet? Do I need an umbrella? A raincoat? Perhaps, a hat? Will it rain hard or gently? And for a long time or a short time?
Enter Dark Sky, the app. It tells you what the current conditions are (as I write this, “Mostly Cloudy, 50º”) and what the conditions will be in the next hour (as I write this, “Mostly Cloudy”). To wit, no rain today.
Dark Sky can also be configured to pop a notification that will alert you to upcoming inclement weather. Just yesterday, I got a notification saying “Light rain starting in ten minutes.” I hopped into my boots and was ducking into the subway station nine minutes later just as the raindrops were falling. Without an umbrella, I might add, because Dark Sky also told me the rain would last 20 minutes and then be clear for the rest of the day. In my case, it was going to rain while I was taking the subway downtown and then no more. And that’s just the way the day played out.
Dark Sky, in the App Store, for about $4. http://darkskyapp.com/
Life Changing App #2: Say & Go
Brilliance is fleeting, I’ve found. Witty rejoinders, great jokes, inspired ideas, deep thoughts, amazing insights — all can blast into our brains without notice and be just as easily forgotten. And we all know how impossible it is to “try” to remember something.
The original patent for the cocktail napkin describes a device intended to capture these thoughts, and the cocktail napkin has indeed been the go-to memory capsule of ideas, sketches, phone numbers, names and so on for decades. The secondary and tertiary effects of the cocktail napkin (keeping your hand warm/drink cold, and collecting condensation) were merely side effects.
In today’s digital age, we have many ways of remembering our ideas on the fly. Oddly, most of them stink. People send themselves emails, put ideas into calendars for follow up, fumble with the Notes app. All of it, garbage. I had a friend years ago who maintained a voice mailbox that he rented out of the back of the Village Voice for no other purpose than to call it and leave voice memos for himself.
Say & Go records audio, seven seconds of it, immediately upon opening the app. The end. You have seven seconds to blurt out your idea and then get on with life. It’s a twist on simplicity that makes it all that much more effective.
You can’t edit, there’s no start button, there’s no filters. You can’t record for 10 seconds, but you can record less than seven. The absence of options is just what makes this so wonderful.
The finished recordings are archived in the app, can be shared and archived via messages, mail and Dropbox. Also, for some extra flair, you can swipe right on a finished recording to be reminded of it minutes, or days, later.
A simple app that captures the moment in a streamlined way.
Say & Go, in the App Store, for about $2. http://www.sayngo.dafterapps.com/
Unibox is a laptop/desktop email app that brings a whole new way of processing email to your life. The key insight is that it organizes email in the forms of conversation, organized by contacts. Listed day by day.
So, on the left I get a list of people whom I am communicating with today (that is, emailing back and forth with), and on the left, the conversations themselves. This simple UX hack makes email seem much more like instant messaging and far less like Microsoft Exchange — a blessed relief.
The beauty isn’t just that we’re now operating in an inbox that’s uncluttered, easy to understand and navigate — the beauty is that it rehumanizes your conversations. The emails become conversations, conversations with humanized people. Emails start behaving like sentences and an email chain that goes long is handled like a long chat with a friend.
It’s a human-centric approach to email. Simply, email is fun again.
Unibox, in the Mac App Store, for about $10. Desktop/Laptop only at press time. http://www.uniboxapp.com/
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