12 Must-Have iPhone Apps For Ad Creatives.
Apps, apps, apps. Everywhere you look, they’re there. Almost de riguer on digital briefs these days, like banners and MPUs were in the ‘old’ days.
It’s estimated that over 400,000 new apps will be released this year — as there clearly aren’t enough already…
So which of the current crop are actually useful to an iPhone-toting creative looking to boost their productivity or just find inspiration?
We only have iPhones at Ego Towers. The good news is that many of those listed below are available on other platforms too. Here goes…
1. Dropbox
You’ll know this already, no doubt. Google has ‘Google Drive’, Microsoft has ‘SkyDrive’. They all do essentially the same thing with a few minor differences — online storage ‘in the cloud’.
Store your files where you can access them any time you have internet access.
Dropbox lets you define which folders are public and you can share specific files with specific people.
Saves bloating everyone’s email with vast attachments and makes everything easier to file and find.
Dropbox has great integration with other apps making it easy to create files in other apps and save them straight into your Dropbox.
2. Evernote
This is the power behind The London Egotist. With day jobs to attend to and families waiting at home, the commute is where a lot of the legwork is done — and it’s done in ‘Evernote’.
It’s a relatively simple text editor that syncs with every browser you can think of (even Opera). Write your note and as if by magic, it’ll be waiting for you on your desktop machine. It also scores points for letting you work offline. We’ve had bad experiences with other apps with pregnant pauses while they wait for a data signal before they’ll let you carry on.
Formatting tools are simple and comprehensive and the autocorrect is mercifully accurate.
You can add voice and photos to your notes too if you’re that way inclined.
You can add tags to make files easier to find and it automatically geo-tags your notes, so if all you can remember is where you wrote your note, Evernote will help you find it on the map.
3. SwiftKey
iPhones have been lagging behind Android when it comes to keyboards. Swipe-style keyboards have been the exclusive preserve of the Google devices until Apple finally lifted the barriers to third party keyboards with the introduction iOS 8. ‘SwiftKey’ is free, it’s super-fast and it learns from you, to the point where it can predict the next word you’re about to type. Spooky.
Download SwiftKey for iPhone >
4. TED
“TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology. Entertainment. Design.”
If you don’t have this already, you need it — unless you’re that Steve Jobs — and we’re pretty sure no one is these days.
This is inspiration for creativity and technology with valuable lessons for humanity and sometimes marketing. Each video is downloadable, so you can benefit from the wisdom of Stephen Hawking and Sir Ken Robinson wherever you are.
You will feel surprisingly worldly and uplifted after every single one.
5. Rove
This is a great way to document your travels, be it holidays or shoots in far off corners of the M4 corridor. ‘Rove’ runs in the background and maps your trips , even pinning your photos to the locations you took them in and turning your day into a visual travelogue without any effort on your part. Great for reminding you where you were and what you got up to if your memory fails you (for whatever reason…).
6. Fathm
Timesheets have always vexed us, so anything that helps is more than welcome on our smartphone.
This is the prettiest apps of the bunch — though setting it up’s a tiny bit fiddly.
Once you’ve got past that, it’s just a question of remembering to let ‘Fathm’ know what you’re up to so it can keep track of the hours for you.
7. Snapseed
Exercise your inner re-toucher — and you know, Instagram filters are for amateurs. ‘Snapseed’ is one if the best, most feature-packed of the many mobile photo editing apps out there. And it’s free.
For example, Selective Adjust lets to make subtle changes to a selected area of your photo, while Tune Image gives you control over the white balance and other ambient colour effects.
Download Snapseed for iPhone >
8. Pocket
‘Pocket’ lets you save web pages to your iPhone so you can browse them offline when you’re underground or somewhere you can’t guarantee a good connection to the web. It can preserve the web page layout or you can choose a reader-friendly Article View if you prefer.
It’s as simple as bookmarking a page, syncing while you still have a data signal then you’re set. Plus you can bookmark pages on your desktop to save them to your phone. Smart.
9. Piikki
Freelancing is great but keeping track of expenses can be a nightmare. Admin is not the favourite pastme for a creative mind. There are many receipt-scanning expense apps out there and some are free. This isn’t but it’s cheap and it does everything, efficiently scanning your receipts, grouping everything by date and category and exporting it all to the cloud, including Evernote, Dropbox and Google, for safe (and book) keeping.
10. English OCR
OCR is overlooked but it can save you loads of time if you’ve only got a hard copy of a document but what you really need is editable text. Optical character recognition analyses a photo of text and turns it into real text you can actually do something with, saving you the hassle of typing it all out.
We would have recommended Ricoh’s ‘ImageToText OCR’ but it’s no longer available in the UK. Looking for a replacement, we found ‘English OCR’ to be the best of the bunch in terms of simplicity, accuracy and flexibility, allowing you to save the text in a variety of ways, including email and your clipboard.
Download English OCR for iPhone >
11. Pocket Lists
There are lots and lots of To-Do apps and this is one of them. What sets this apart is the ability to set reminders by time and or location.
Need to remember to call that production company back as soon as you get into the office? Easy. Just enter the reminder and your office postcode and you won’t forget.
It syncs with all your existing work and Google calendars so those reminders will find you wherever you are.
Download Pocket Lists for iPhone >
12. Snapguide
This is actually an app designed to help people share their step-by-step how-to guides using a sequence of annotated photos.
However, there’s no reason why you couldn’t use it to map out a TV storyboard on the move or an online user journey on the train home.
Download Snapguide for iPhone >
So that’s our top 12. What have we missed? Share your fave apps with us at london@theegotist.com
Read more at http://www.thelondonegotist.com
