Apps for the Mobile Creative: Part 2
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Mobile Essentials
I understand that one person’s “essential” is another’s “take it or leave it,” but the following apps are, for me at least, genuine essentials for mobile professionals. They can either save you time, or save your mobile device itself.
Find Your Lost or Stolen Device
Available for:
• iPhone (Find My Phone), Free
• iPad (Find My Phone), Free
• Android (Lookout Mobile Security), Free/$2.99
• BlackBerry (Lookout Mobile Security), Free/$2.99
Cell phones fall out of pockets and get left on counters. Tablets are targets of determined thieves. If you somehow lost your phone or tablet, how would it affect your life? You’d have to buy a new device, of course, which could be anywhere from $99 to $899 out of your pocket. And there are provider expenses at issue, too—disconnect and reconnect fees, for instance. There’s the cost of the time you aren’t reachable, that you have to spend getting a replacement device back up to work-ready. But what about the data on your device? Is your credit card and banking information on there? How about your clients’ financial data? The cost of losing a mobile device, whether through accident or theft, can be astronomical.
Spend a few minutes installing one of these free device locator apps and rest easy that, should you misplace your device, all you need is a computer to find it again—or direct the police to it. Some apps, including LookOut (with the $2.99 a month premium service), can protect the data stored on your phone by locking down, wiping out, or even bricking a stolen device.
Reusable Text Snippets
Available for:
• iPhone & iPad (Clips), Free
• Android (CopiPe), Free
• BlackBerry (Clipboard), $1.99
Whether it’s your e-mail addresses, usernames, and passwords, or common texting and e-mail phrases or signatures, any road warrior finds herself typing the same things over and over again.
Snippet-managing apps can save you that time and trouble. Enter your reusuable text into the app once, and thereafter it’s just a press-to-copy and press-to-paste operation to pick up the text from the app and paste it into any other app, e-mail, or Web form. You can even set CopiPe, the Android app with the weird name, to live in your apps bar; access to your categorized text snippets couldn’t be easier.
Dropbox
Available for:
• iPhone, Free
• iPad, Free
• Android, Free
• BlackBerry, Free
Dropbox, the popular file sharing and synchronization service, is available on your mobile devices as well. Why would you use it on a phone or tablet? To share Word, Excel, PDF, text, image, and other documents; to keep the WEP-key for your secured WiFi network in easy copy-and-paste reach on every device you might want to connect with it; to have your favorite music available to all your devices; to keep boilerplate or standard forms and documents such as model release forms, W-9s, price lists, client questionnaires, and more within easy reach to attach to e-mails sent from any device… I could go and on.
Dropbox on mobile devices works the same as Dropbox on the Web or a desktop or laptop computer. Your files are there, organized into folders, and you can use, edit, or delete them.
If you don’t already have a Dropbox account, sign up at this link.
LastPass
Available for:
• iPhone, $12/year
• iPad, $12/year
• Android, $12/year
• BlackBerry, $12/year
As the name implies, LastPass might be the last password you ever need. This free service takes over desktop and mobile browser password management, freeing you from having to remember individual website usernames and passwords. Moreover, it synchronizes automatically between your desktop and laptop computers and all your mobile devices: Use your iPad to create a new account on SomeSite.org, and LastPass can automatically log you into that site at any point in the future from your PC, Mac, DROID Incredible, Palm Pixi, or any mobile device running a LastPass client. You can also access your “password vault” online through the secure LastPass Website.
Getting LastPass on your computer is simple and free. Just download and install the LastPass client software for Windows, Mac, or UNIX. You can then have it automatically integrate with all the major Web browsers. You can even get portable versions of LastPass, with software and encrypted databases you can carry around on a USB thumb drive.
LastPass installation varies with each mobile device but is always easy. What doesn’t vary is the cost: Desktop and Web LastPass clients, as well as the LastPass service itself, are free. To use it on a mobile device, however, you’ll need to pay for LastPass Premium, which is a whopping $1 per month (paid annually, so $12 a year). Once you’re a Premium member, you’ll have access to all the extra features; you don’t have to pay separate memberships for iPhone and Android apps.
If you want LastPass on an iOS device, you must realize that Mobile Safari wasn’t built to be as extendable as the desktop version of Safari. Thus, LastPass isn’t able to plug into Mobile Safari on iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. Instead, if you want the significant time- and brain-saving features of LastPass, you’ll need to make the slight tradeoff of using Safari for LastPass’s own Tab Browser. I gladly made that tradeoff myself, and (almost) never looked back. Once in a while, Tab Browser freezes and I have to reboot my device to clear it out, but that’s rare.
LastPass on BlackBerry and Android also require replacing the default browser. On BlackBerry, the browser is automatically installed with the LastPass app. On Android devices, you’ll need to use the excellent Dolphin HD tabbed browser, into which LastPass has been integrated. The link above leads to the Dolphin HD Browser (with LastPass) download page.
You can also install LastPass for Mobile Firefox and other mobile devices and software from the official site.
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