Yeah, I don’t have an app for that

First of all, in response to the darling daughters (multiple) who told me this link wasn’t obvious enough, I will begin with

EMOTICAMELS  !!!

 

Here is the link to sign up to the appsmitten newsletter. Click on it and sign-up

CLICK Right Here next to the most annoying gif I could find. CLICK HERE !

If you do not sign up, I will add more annoying things until you do.

Actually, I won’t really but my kids insisted that the link was not obvious enough in the previous post that I wrote about appsmitten and since it was sponsored and all and they pay me money if you sign up I should make it more obvious.

Hence, the eyeballs and camels. Also, how many real uses do you get for emoticamels? They were just going to waste.

Now that I have gotten the daughters off  my back, let me tell you

Why I really did sign up for appsmitten ….

This was a conversation I had with Darling Daughter Number 1 today, which if I had learned anything from Linda Tripp, I would have recorded, uploaded on cinch cast and had my blog done. But, alas, I did not.

When I read there were over 1,000,000 apps on the market, I felt as if I was missing out. The only apps on my iPad besides what shipped with it were a Kindle app, Evernote and 17 at the preschool level which I was in the processing of deleting because the genius grandchild number one is far past that point.

The first thing I checked out on appsmitten was apps for entrepreneurs. Their number one recommendation, Dropbox has turned out to be a lifesaver in multiple ways. In short, you can access files from your Mac, Windows or Linux computer and on your iPad. Put them in the dropbox and access from anywhere. You get 2GB of storage free. It is where I now keep whatever documents I am working on at the moment. I would NOT recommend keeping confidential files there, but for everything else, it’s great. I had a scare lately where I thought my desktop had another hardware problem. I realized that all of the documents I’d been working on were on my back-up drive and dropbox so I could just move over to the Windows machine and keep working. Because I work across platforms, iCloud is not sufficient for me for synching my documents.

Evernote was another of their must-have apps, but I already had it. When Google Notebook faded off into the sunset, I tried a few note programs and Evernote was the best, though none of them were exactly what I wanted.

I poked around on the appsmitten site and checked out the apps they recommended. Some did not get very good reviews at iTunes and those I didn’t download, having overlooked bad iTunes reviews in the past and gotten stuck with lemons. Even when I did not download the particular app that their site recommended, the “Customers Also Bought” list on iTunes led me to some really good stuff.

I ended up downloading Photo365 which I really like. I am not very artistic. (This is on a scale from where Picasso is very artistic and your average pile of rice is not very artistic. )

 

On the other hand, I do live a very blessed life in a beautiful community they call Beverly Hills by the Beach (haters call it the latte-drinking, Prius-driving yuppie westside – jealous!) From the community gardens to the beach at sunset to Patty the baby guinea pig – there’s really not much in my life that is ugly and I just take it all for granted. So, with Photo365, you take one photo every day and it fills in on a calendar. Kind of cool.

Another app I some how followed the winding path from appsmitten and ended up at was efax. Now, I already have an efax account so I can get faxes everywhere. I noticed some people complained about the app not being very useful for sending faxes, but I don’t need it for that. It is more useful if I want to see that a fax has been received and review a document.

Honestly, over the last three weeks, I’ve spent about an hour and a half browsing appsmitten and apps its recommendations led me to just because it was interesting. (Seriously, there’s an app for games for your cat? You’ve got to be kidding.) I don’t believe every minute of every day has to be productive and in fact I probably have less play in that whole work-play life balance than I should.

I DID download four apps I haven’t touched (Habit Factor, I Journal, Mint and Moleskin) more because I think I should have a handle on productivity and my budget (but then what would my accountant do?) than because I really want to.

If you’re like me, you’ve got an iPhone and an iPad and have been meaning to getting around to checking out apps forever or have gotten stuck with a number of lemons –  or if you are just curious about what financial apps Suze Orman would recommend, then check out appsmitten, it’s kind of cool.

Having said that, I’m going to go back to writing about yzr errors, macros, arrays and weighted bar charts. That’s kind of cool, too.