alainlatour.com

This one was pub­lished at Medium Magazine.  Below I’ve pasted the entire text, in case the magazine’s site can’t be accessed.

Note:  I wrote this a while ago, so some of the apps no longer exist (I think Wesabe passed away) or I’ve since moved on to other apps.

MANY LAUGHED WHEN THE IPHONE WAS FIRST RELEASED. NO KEYPAD? APPLES GONE MAD, THEY SAID.

Things look quite dif­fer­ent today. In the final three months of 2009, Apple sold almost 9 mil­lion iPhones, just over twice as many as it sold in the same period the year before.

Sure, many peo­ple got it only so that they would look cool. (Why else would you get it with­out a data plan?)

I don’t mean to com­pare iPhones with BlackBerrys or other smart­phones. The fact remains, with so many users out there, devel­op­ers rushed to their com­put­ers and cre­ated over 100,000 apps that are now avail­able in the iTunes app store—making the iPhone the most ver­sa­tile tool you can have. Here’s a list of apps that stu­dents will likely find use­ful (all are free, unless oth­er­wise noted).

COMMUNICATION

Skype in your pocket. Enough said.

Fring lets you chat from your MSN, Yahoo, and Google Talk accounts. For free. What else is there?

Twitter user? Download Tweetie 2.0. It costs $2.99, but it’s hands-down the best Twitter app out there. And what else can $2.99 buy you anyway?

Tired of your BlackBerry-brandishing friends and their con­stant blab­ber­ing about their abil­ity to pin each other for free, regard­less of long-distance or data charges? Download Ping!, a free app that lets you do exactly the same thing with other iPhone users.

FINANCIAL

I’ve tried using dif­fer­ent money-management apps before, but they all had the same prob­lem: they required you to input data from dif­fer­ent sources. Bought a latte for $2.50? Took $40 out of the ATM? You had to write it down, then type it at home.

Wesabe solves this by link­ing to your bank account. (Yes, I know. More on that in a sec.) That way, when­ever you buy any­thing using a credit card or debit card, it will auto­mat­i­cally show up in your Wesabe account, leav­ing you to man­u­ally enter only cash trans­ac­tions. Wesabe gives you the abil­ity to cat­e­go­rize your spend­ing, set finan­cial goals, and has forums where you can com­pare your expenses and sav­ings to the user average.

Another plus: you can access that info from either the Wesabe web­site or its iPhone app. On the down­side, many peo­ple hes­i­tate before giv­ing a third party access to their finan­cial info. It took me a while to make up my mind. But with its impres­sive record of cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion, pos­i­tive reviews, astrin­gent pri­vacy pol­icy, and its own Data Bill of Rights, I found it hard to resist Wesabe.

WRITING AND READING

Documents to Go is  another app that’s not free ($9.99). And another app that’s worth its weight in gold. For writ­ers, jour­nal­ists, and stu­dents who fre­quently work with writ­ten doc­u­ments, there is noth­ing more con­ve­nient than being able to edit and cre­ate Word and Excel doc­u­ments from your iPhone. And yes, you get used to the tiny keypad.

It’s also pos­si­ble to read a book on an iPhone—just down­load Stanza first. You can change the font, size, page colour, and even ear­mark pages.

ORGANIZATION

Evernote equals ubiq­ui­tous cap­ture. Evernote lets users cre­ate text, audio, or pic­ture notes from either its PC and Mac clients or its iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android apps. It also fea­tures a nifty handwriting-recognition soft­ware that lets users snap a pic of hand­writ­ten note or Powerpoint slide (any­thing, really, includ­ing the wrin­kled paper nap­kin that the cute stranger gave you with their phone num­ber) and upload it to their Evernote account, where you can later search for the text writ­ten in the note by typ­ing the same word in Evernote’s search bar.