iOS Applications Thread Catch All

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Following the new iOS Games Thread Catch All, I've created this one for the non-games department.

To kick this thread off, here a few of my favorite apps that I use (almost) daily:

1Password - not a luxury with the whole heartbleed fiasco going on. On sale now $8.99
Tweetbot - Just love this twitter client $4.99
Clear - Task and To Do List $4.99
Sleep Cycle - Alarm clock, keeps track on your quality of sleep and knows best when to wake you up! $0.99
Alien Blue - Best Reddit app so far $0.00 (yes, for free )
YNAB (You Need A Budget) - Free companion app of YNAB $59.99 (desktop). Sometimes on sale on Steam!
Smart Coin - Currency convertor $0.99 or for free as a free app using the Apple Store app.

Very iPhone centric...I don't own an iPad yet.
I wouldn't mind hearing what apps you all use daily.

Two websites that help me track for sales and what others recommend:
Appshopper - finding most of my deals here
Applr -recommend (or not) apps and follow friends doing the same. A bit more of a social way of finding the better things for your iOS device.

Runtastic Push Ups Trainer PRO is for free right now. Normally $1.99

Trello is one I've recently discovered. It's free, has iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows 8, and web based versions. It's free, though there are paid versions as well.

It's a way to organize lists, feedback, checklists, and other general productivity management tasks in a shared, hierarchical way. Organize a project, or create a shared grocery list with your significant other. I'm still kind of exploring it and figuring out how to work it into my everyday life. While I use Clear, the lack of shared lists is kind of a bummer, and Trello fills this need.

beanman101283 wrote:

Trello is one I've recently discovered. It's free, has iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows 8, and web based versions. It's free, though there are paid versions as well.

It's a way to organize lists, feedback, checklists, and other general productivity management tasks in a shared, hierarchical way. Organize a project, or create a shared grocery list with your significant other. I'm still kind of exploring it and figuring out how to work it into my everyday life. While I use Clear, the lack of shared lists is kind of a bummer, and Trello fills this need.

I use this quite a bit.

1Password is limited to Web sites. LastPass is less expensive and the paid version (which is around $12 a year if I remember) can be "trained" to allow login on most games, services, etc. that you start up as separate jobs on your system. With the paid version, you get the ability to put it on your devices as well, both for use, and as a form of DR. Your data is encrypted and stored in the cloud as well as on your devices.

That said, it's a bit tricky to work with at times, although recent updates have mitigated that somewhat. First, if you forget your master password, you are totally screwed. So don't.

Second, it works fantastically with websites, but can be difficult to "train" with applications. I've gotten some to work, but others, not yet.

Third, it has trouble with thinking that address and phone number entry fields on the same screen with passwords and account names are actually passwords. I get around this by having it generate a password, then immediately copying it into the clipboard, so that if the program grabs the wrong string, I can easily change it in the Vault right afterwards. Usually happens only when changing passwords.

I would say these days you need at least 12 characters for a password, if you're using the full character set, and 15 is safer. In a year or two, it'll be 15 to 18, most likely. So this kind of password generator and storage tool is going to be more and more important. If your passwords are under 12 characters, they will be broken in a tiny amount of time, no matter how well chosen they are. And the biggest rule for today's security is this - if you can remember it, it's a bad password, period.

We're past the time where the old tricks work. You can't use first letters from a phrase anymore, or odd created portmanteaus, or any of the old tricks to memorize passwords, because most password breakers run hundreds of millions of keys per *second* on desktop systems, and billions on GPUs. An 8 character password will take about 16 minutes to crack this year. Each character you add will greatly increase the time needed to break it. Most people, however, have trouble remembering more than 10 digits or so; the length of a phone number.

Well, I'll just use a phrase with 15 words, you say. Problem there is that you're going to limit yourself to letters and maybe a few numbers, greatly reducing the set of possible keys. You need to have a much richer variety of characters in order to get to something like full strength.

So go with *some* password generator, whatever your flavor, but don't do without one. Your account data *will* be stolen, and the amount of time you have to deal with it is dependent partly on the strength of your password.

I had messed around with Last Password on my iOS devices and maybe I am not that bright but found the learning curve to be steep. In my defense I really didn't give it a hard concentrated look.

LastPass had a big update on iOS a few months back -- among other things, they embedded a web browser into the app, which supports auto-password filling (similar to the browser plugins available in Mac/PC browsers). Might be worth checking out again if it's been a while.

That said, I actually don't use the LastPass web browser; I prefer sticking with Safari, and manually copying passwords out of LastPass as needed. The important thing, though, is that everyone NEEDS to use a password management tool these days... and by that I mean, let it generate totally random, complex, un-memorizable passwords for you.

I use it with Mozilla. It runs as an extension, and I can access the vault directly to copy passwords manually as needed, also through Mozilla.

One of the beauties of these tools is that as passwords get weaker, you can lengthen them arbitrarily as needed. Just go to the password change page, tell LastPass how long you want it to be, and what character types it is allowed to use, and bingo! Stronger password. And having a different password for everything becomes possible, not just desirable.

I have no experience with LastPass, but it sounds good. 1Password is pretty good though for most things. Maybe not for games and such.
But I don't really need it for that. 1Password is also on the Mac, win, iOS and Android. I think both are great options. Just using a utility like this is already
a win

Also... I thought we already had a non-game iOS thread over in Tech & Help? This non-game thread probably doesn't belong in the Games section, at least.

merphle wrote:

Also... I thought we already had a non-game iOS thread over in Tech & Help? This non-game thread probably doesn't belong in the Games section, at least. :)

It says 'iPhone' and there was no activity. So I combined it to iOS. I agree it shouldn't be with games. But it's also for Platforms. I am fine putting it in Tech & Help

Sure, of course. Sorry for being a pedant.

merphle wrote:

That said, I actually don't use the LastPass web browser; I prefer sticking with Safari, and manually copying passwords out of LastPass as needed.

You can also create a bookmarklet for Safari (the app has a guide on how to do that) which you can activate while browsing to AutoFill logins. You do have to log in to LastPass in the browser for that to work, and repeat that every now and again since you are automatically logged out after while. Still, a useful addition to a great tool.

Vert is a nice unit converter. The only one I use that directly converts kg into pounds and ounces - handy if you didn't grow up with the Imperial System.

PlainText2 is a nice, light, word processor.

Pocket for reading PDFs and saved articles

Knots 3D for references; NightSky2 for casual astronomy

SimpleNote

Clean, light, and (yes) simple note taking app.

Two awesome features is that notes can be shared with other users, and there is a web app so you can add/edit notes from any browser - which is a must for any app for me.

It is my go to app for quick, one offs and transient notes that I don't need to store long term in Evernote. It's where all of my shopping lists are and they are shared with my wife so we can both edit and view them.

Has anyone tried GoodReader 4 yet?

The new features being advertised mostly relate to editing and annotating PDF's, which I just about never do. But it should run on iPhone as well as iPad, which means that I'm all but certain to buy it unless it's broken in some way. So is it?

Haven't tried it yet, but curious as well about it.

I went ahead and grabbed it. And hit a minor snag right away: migrating files from the old version to the new one requires making a temporary duplicate copies of everything. Which my iPad does not have enough free space for.

That aside, and going by just a few minutes messing with files I manually transferred into it, the new version seems a little zippier. Which is nice.

Tagging, because apps.

misplacedbravado wrote:

I went ahead and grabbed it. And hit a minor snag right away: migrating files from the old version to the new one requires making a temporary duplicate copies of everything. Which my iPad does not have enough free space for.

That aside, and going by just a few minutes messing with files I manually transferred into it, the new version seems a little zippier. Which is nice.

I got tired of the overly-complicated interface of GoodReader a while back. All I was looking for was something that could access all of the online services and my home network.

I stumbled across Files United which is quite nice. Very similar to GoodReader, but a lot simpler. It also has local and iCloud storage which syncs across devices.

Can anyone recommend a good app for learning to read? My daughter turns 5 soon, and is feeling motivated to learn to read now that she's enjoyed a little Pokémon X/Y. She knows the alphabet and can write her name and some of the letters, but that's about it.

I have heard good things about the Reading Rainbow app.

Does anyone know of an IOS app that can import your library from book sites like Audible and Kindle, just by providing login information for those services?

I read lots of books, and want to better organize and keep track of favorite books, authors, and series. I especially want to track good authors and series, so I know when new books come out.

I'm a sucker for writing apps on the iPad so when MG Siegler posted about Hanx Writer, a writing app that mimics old school typewriters, I didn't need a second opinion. Interestingly, it was developed in collaboration with atom Hanks due to his love of typewriters. $0 but additional printers and features cost $3 a piece or $5 as a bundle.

Actor Tom Hanks and Hitcents have partnered on a new app, Hanx Writer, that recreates the experience of a manual typewriter, but with the ease and speed of an iPad. Developed in close collaboration with Tom Hanks, Hanx Writer reflects the look, feel, and sound of old-fashioned word-processing while embracing a few new-fashioned luxuries (like the DELETE key!).
UCRC from the Idle F***in' Thumbs Podcast thread wrote:

No, no, I still like it, but my podcast time-budget was radically curtailed.

Similar reasons have me digging Overcast on iOS since it can both play at a faster speed, adjusting the audio back down so there's no chipmunk effect, and also shorten gaps and pauses. Net effect is that I can usually shave 6-10% of the time before making any speed changes, and the lack of gaps makes everything sound better.

This is the first time I've willingly stopped using iTunes for this purpose (at least for audio podcasts) since they added it nearly a decade ago, and Overcast's approach to "playlists" actually makes sense to me.

There's some sweet deals going on over at App Santa.

Microsoft(!) just put out (another!) nice app.

Office Lens. It's a simple scanner app that will scan directly into OneDrive, OneNote, Word, and PowerPoint. Pretty nice if you live in that ecosystem. It supposedly converts documents to Word to make the editable, but I've only used the Image to OneNote and PDF to OneDrive capability so far.

I hope Peace works better than Adblock Browser has. Adblock may be free, but pages take forever to load and it has crashed frequently.

Peace is a plugin for Safari on iOS 9, not a separate browser. There are going to be several now that Safari supports ad blockers.

I'm using Crystal right now which is free for now. It's great, but ultra basic. I immediately switched back to Safari from Chrome.

I might check out Peace because of the whitelist feature.

I installed Crystal and enabled it but I have no idea if its actually working. It doesn't appear that there are any settings. Also, since other IOS browsers have to pretty much be re-skinned Safari, does the blocking carry over to them too?

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