We all know that the smartphone is great for whiling away your time (Twittering, Facebooking) when you’re waiting to see the doctor. But if you’d rather use that time to catch up on some work, these apps can help boost your productivity, and relieve some stress too.
By: Sharlene Tan
Good Reading
The iPhone doesn’t make it easy to read PDFs, but GoodReader does. It wraps text to fit your screen perfectly (which means you don’t have to scroll left and right to read the text) and can even handle documents over 1GB. Besides PDFs, GoodReader (Price: US$0.99) lets you efficiently view other types of documents such as MS Office files and high-resolution images.
A To-Do List You Actually Use
What is a smartphone if you can’t keep track of your to-dos on it? There are many task management apps out there, but Toodledo is one of the easiest to use. Add a task, give it a priority rating (high, medium, low), and add fields such as due date, notes and tags. Its interface even resembles the mail app on your iPhone, making it quite intuitive. If you’ve only got a few hours to complete your tasks, use The Scheduler, which will analyse your deadlines and tasks and Toodledo will pick tasks that make the best use of your time.
Read News Offline
With Instapaper you can create offline copies of newspaper articles, making it convenient to read when you’re on an airplane or just some place with bad reception. It’s a great way of reading long articles It does require a bit of planning ahead though, as you’ll need to save the web articles using the Instapaper link. But once you do so, you have a list of all the articles you’ve saved, for reading at any time.
Picture Perfect
It’s not just for note-taking. Evernote can be useful for your business contacts. Use the camera on your smartphone to snap a photo of the business card and Evernote indexes the text in the photo and makes that info searchable. You can use it to easily keep track of your receipts and bills – just take a photo on Evernote. It’s automatically synced, so if you upload it on your iPhone, you can access it online or on your desktop. The basic account is free (and should be adequate for the casual user) but a premium account is $5 a month or $45 a year and offers more upload capacity, more file types, and better security.
Blend Your Boss
There’s the boss, there’s the blender. You can imagine (perhaps with glee) what will happen next. While we are not condoning violence, Joe Cartoon’s Blend the Boss will provide some stress relief and entertainment for those days when work gets you down. You can even upload a picture of your boss and make a boss smoothie. Blend away!
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