Saturday, May 11, 2013

Four Favorite lesser known convenience apps

As the Chief Technology Officer for a PointSource, a business which concentrates in building mobile applications, I often get asked what some of my favorite apps are.  I find people are usually looking for the little known apps which can solve "problems" they don't worry about - in other words convenience apps.  Here are 4 of my favorite recent finds:

MobileDay



Some people are getting better about formatting phone numbers in your calendar to easily dial in from mobile phone, but no app that I have found makes it easier to dial into conference calls than
MobileDay.  Give MobileDay access to your calendar, and it reads it and creates a big touchable button to dial into the call.  It doesn't matter whether people formatted the call for one click, if they identified the call-in number and passcode it makes life simple.  I wish I would have found MobileDay when I worked at IBM and had 12-15 calls on some days.


Leafsnap


When outside doing some landscaping, I have several times wondered questions like
"What is this tree?"
"How big will this get?"
"How and when do I prune this?"

Leafsnap has made it easier to figure out what some trees, bushes and shrubs are by taking a leaf, placing it on a white sheet of paper, and taking a photo of the leaf.  Leafsnap then searches its database and gives you lots of info on your new find.



Vivino


I know less about wines than I'd like and I have a horrible memory for wine names - particularly correlating names with whether or not I liked those wines.  Vivino is the way I have started to try to remember and organize wines.  It allows you to snap a label of the bottle and enter a rating.  Often I have had fix the year, but it hasn't missed a label for me yet.



Untappd


Similar to Vivino, this helps you remember beers you drank but with more of a social aspect around sharing your favorites.  I haven't found this as useful yet but it is a cool concept for sure.