9 Essential iPhone Apps for Freelancers
There are tonnes of apps on Apple's App Store. As a one-man organisation in the web and graphics industry, I thought I would share my rundown of what I feel are the most useful apps on my iPhone to date for business. (Sorry, Blowfish).
1. Dropbox
The Dropbox; (referral link) service is a fantastic way to store and share files on the cloud. I use it daily for collab work and for sharing files with people. This iPhone incarnation of the Dropbox app brings file management to the iPhone in a better way than any other app I've found. It's almost like having Finder; on your iPhone.
Highly recommended for anyone who wants to share and view files on their iPhone.
Price: Free
2. Evernote
Evernote is a service that you need to use for a while before you realise its value. It's essentially Notes;, which is already on the iPhone, except Evernotes are stored on the Internet as well as your handset. Be it text, snapshots, photographs, voice recordings, screenshots or rich text, you can store it all on Evernote. I find myself using it more and more as the years go by. Evernote is a web app, iPhone app, Mac app, Windows app, and much more.
Notes on the cloud, accessible from just about any computer around. Try it, you won't regret it.
Price: Free
3. Tweetie 2
We all have SMS and Calls on our iPhones, but Twitter is my universal conversational medium of choice. Tweetie is my favourite iPhone app to date, after having tried just about every one in the store (and there are lots!)
With support for multiple accounts, drafting tweets, an inline web browser, support for other third-party iPhone apps and a gorgeous user interface, this app is the winner in iPhone Twitter apps for me.
Price: £1.79
4. Skype
Instant messaging on the go is not something for everyone, and I seldom do it (Tweetie 2 and I have that covered with Direct Messages) but having a free phone line open whenever you have a wifi connection will soon prove invaluable if you make international calls, or if you just like to talk a lot. Whats more, if you make use of Skype's call forwarding, answer machines etc, you'll find all of that functionality in this app.
Skype have announced that Skype calls will be available over a 3G connection too soon, so it's well worth getting on board!
Price: Free
5. Pastebot
iPhones now have Cut/Copy/Paste functionality. Hurrah! Pastebot extends this functionality, allowing you to keep a clipboard of multiple cuts, from plain text to rich text, images to … well … just about anything really.
Pastebot comes with a Mac app, too, for syncing clips from your Mac over to your iPhone. I'd love to see this become two-way, with a clipboard manager over on the Mac side too, but even as it stands its a beautiful little set up.
Price: £1.79
6. Minibooks
As a Freshbooks user, I manage my estimates and invoices in the cloud. What Minibooks does is bring all of this data down to your iPhone, for reviewing, creating and timing. Fantastic for those times when you're on the go and need to keep your project workflow moving quickly.
When you use this app alongside Pastebot, you can keep stock notes for your invoices saved on the clipboard to paste in and edit each time you create a new one. Really, really handy, and as easy as using the desktop web app.
Oh, and there's a Lite version for free if you want to try it out.
Price: £8.99
7. Wallet
With Wallet what you get is a complete sinkable compilation of your credit cards, web passwords, serial numbers, and other valuable snippets of data. Whenever I enter my details into something I turn to Wallet (or its counterpart Mac app of the same name) instead of endlessly fishing through my physical wallet for the right card.
Wallet syncs with it's big brother Mac version to offer a consistent set of data across iPhone and Mac. If you save the database file on Dropbox; (referral link), that gets you synced up on multiple Macs, too. This alone made me switch to Wallet from the free Keychain Access app that comes free on every Mac.
Once you get by the master password screen on each load, you can open up any piece of data and touch it to copy it to your clipboard. Go back over to where the details are required, and paste. Done. This app will regain enough moments of your life fumbling in your pockets and wallets to make it worth the £2.99 App Store price tag.
Price: £2.99
8. Reeder
Reeder has a curiously easy interface, and is currently my iPhone RSS reader of choice. Once you learn what all the undocumented little shapes in the interface mean, Reeder is a brilliant little app that syncs with any Google Reader account. Again, this means that your feeds are living happily on the cloud, accessible from any computer, and also natively available on the iPhone for offline reading.
Price: £1.79
9. PayPal
Finally, we have PayPal. Keeping my personal reservations of a one-world currency aside for a moment, the PayPal iPhone app is a great way to make payments on the go. And if not only to make payments on the go, it's also a great way to look incredibly clever if you make payments right in front of clients before you even leave the room. Since it's free, it's worth the download even for the off-chance that you'll use it.
If you know of any other apps that you'd like to share as a freelancer, stick 'em in the comments!