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This article is from January 5, 2011, and is no longer current.

Apps for the Mobile Creative: Part 1

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Creative professionals are on the go, working in parks, coffee shops, airplanes, and Mom’s house over “vacation”. Using laptops or even netbooks isn’t always ideal–you may lack the room (airplanes) or time (booting up a laptop just to confirm file receipt). Even the idea generation and quick sketching process, once the sole domain of Moleskins and cocktail napkins, has moved to cell phones and tablets.
Fortunately, there are tools to serve virtually every creative need on the go, regardless of the device. Part 1 of this series covers apps for sketching/designing, business management, and inspiration.
Sketch and Design on the Go
Get your ideas down fast no matter where you are, whether at the lunch table or conference table.
Autodesk SketchBook Mobile
Available for:
• iPhone, $2.99
• iPad, $7.99
•Android, $0.99
Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile (Sketchbook Pro for the iPad) has features you’d expect in painting applications on your desktop computer, including large image canvases; image layers; multiple levels of undo and redo; image transformations for rotate and scale; zooms up to 2,500%; pressure-sensitive brush tips; and paintbrush, pencil, marker, felt pen, and texture brush tools.

Adobe Ideas
Available for:
• iPhone, Free
•iPad, Free
If Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile isn’t your cup of tea, or you’d rather have sketching application that’s (mostly) free in exchange for a little less creative power, look to Adobe Ideas. It includes many useful features, including variable size brushes tips (though only one style), an eraser, opacity control slider, and multiple undo (but no redo).
Adobe Ideas focuses more on productivity than similar apps, enabling you to duplicate designs to create revisions and versions, and it integrates with Kuler for creating and re-using color palettes across projects. Adobe Ideas does do layers–sort of. The basic app lets you have two layers, one for your drawing and one for an optional background photo pulled from your device’s photo gallery. If you want to use multiple layers–up to 10–like Photoshop, you’ll need to purchase that ability within Adobe Ideas itself for $4.99.
Adobe Ideas isn’t available for Android or BlackBerry at press time, but with the company-wide zeal of supporting the mobile world across all devices, it shouldn’t be long before Adobe brings this sketching application to Android and BlackBerry tablets and phones, too. In the meantime, Android owners can check out Woo: Sketch (currently free), while BlackBerry owners might like Draw and Save ($2.99).

iMockups
Available for:
• iPad, $9.99
iMockups is an excellent tool to wireframe websites and app designs for the iPhone and iPad. With its intuitive interface, designing in iMockups is as easy as drag-and-drop. The side panels are loaded with such common components as browser “chrome,” tabbed panel sets, images, video boxes, navigation bars, form elements, headings, and just about everything else you could need to rapidly wireframe a Web design. The iPhone and iPad side panels present similar user interface elements for quickly prototyping a mobile app’s user interface. The ability to manage, export, and share multiple projects and several pages within each project, along with Undo and Redo, complete an extraordinarily useful design application.

Photoshop Express
Available for:
• iPhone, Free
• iPad, Free
• Android, Free
If you have a smartphone, you have a camera. If the phone is fairly new, that camera may even have optics and megapixels to rival point-and-shoots. What phones lack, however, are built-in tools for improving those on-the-fly take-and-share photos. That’s where Photoshop Express for iOS and Android devices comes in handy.
You can crop, rotate, flip, and straighten any image in your device. But that’s only the beginning. Photoshop Express also includes the ability to apply borders, edges, and vignettes to photos, to apply various effects including a vintage style, and color correct the common problems with images using exposure, saturation, tint, and contrast controls. It even helps you share images to Facebook and Photoshop.com.

Manage Your Design Business on the Go
As a designer–particularly if you’re a freelance designer–you are your business. When you aren’t at your computer, your business isn’t being managed. Armed with an e-mail client and Web browser, these apps will help you stay on top of your business no matter where you go.
FileMaker Go
Available for:
• iPhone, $19.99
• iPad, $39.99
FileMaker is the Mac’s best-of-breed database application. Even on Windows, the easy-to-use FileMaker is popular for managing customer and vendor records; inventory management systems; invoicing and estimating systems; and much more. And now with FileMaker Go you can access and manage all your FileMaker databases in iPhones and iPads.

Unfortunately, FileMaker Go isn’t available for Android devices. A workaround does exist, however. The Wireless Database Viewer Plus (free) enables your Android-powered phone or tablet to connect to Access, Excel, Oracle, SQL, and other ODBC-enabled databases. FileMaker, running on Windows, is ODBC-enabled, so with a few minutes’ configuration, you can connect to your FileMaker database on Android-based devices with the Wireless Database Viewer Plus app. One caveat: The database management is more basic (and less graphical) than what you’ll enjoy with FileMaker Go.
FreshBooks Management Apps
Available for:
• iPhone (MiniBooks) $14.99
• Android (TimeDroid Pro) $1.99
• Android (ExpenseBooks) $4.99
• BlackBerry (ReportAway) $19.99 Per Year
If you’re a freelancer who isn’t using FreshBooks, you’re almost certainly working too hard when you track your time, send estimates and invoices, and manage your receivables. FreshBooks, which comes in free and paid account levels, improves and streamlines billing and accounting tasks. As a Web-based application, FreshBooks lets you manage your clients, estimates, invoices, time-tracked tasks, and more from any browser on any computer. But, for managing your business on the go, the mobile versions trump a Web browser any day.
Although FreshBooks once had a native iPhone app, the company has let it slide, preferring to let third-party developers create iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry apps with differing levels of FreshBooks integration.
First there’s the iPhone app MiniBooks for Freshbooks, which does everything FreshBooks.com can do, except track expenses, in a native iOS user interface. Right from your iPhone (or iPad using the iPhone app), you can manage clients; create and send invoices; enter payments remitted for your invoices; and start, stop, and send to an invoice several task timers.
ReportAway for FreshBooks is the BlackBerry’s equivalent of MiniBooks, with identical abilities and features.
The offering for Android devices isn’t as feature-rich and isn’t a single app. TimeDroid Pro for FreshBooks is a task timer that lets you record billable activities such as meetings, on-site work, and other events that take you away from your computer. The times may then be submitted to your FreshBooks account and incorporated into invoices. ExpenseBooks for FreshBooks allows you to do something the iPhone counterparts can’t: record your mileage, receipts, and other expenses and send them to FreshBooks for easy billing back to the client.

Bump, Data, Photo, Contact Exchanger
Available for:
• iPhone, Free
• Android, Free
The hugely popular Bump app is exactly what it sounds like: Bump your phone against someone else’s phone to exchange contact information, photos, even apps. Just install and open Bump on your phone and make the other person has done the same. Then select what kind of content you want to send to your colleague. When you two gently bump your phones together, that data will jump from one phone to the other. Once the other person confirms the transfer (to prevent accidental Bump exchange), the transfer is complete. Data can be exchanged Android to iPhone, iPhone to Android, iPhone to iPhone, and Android to Android.

Remember the Milk, To Do List
Available for:
• iPhone, Free
• Android, Free
• BlackBerry, $25 Per Year
Who can get by without lists? We have to-do lists, shopping lists, project task lists, team task lists, even geographically sensitive lists. Remember the Milk, a popular Web service, helps you handle lists simple and complex, and keeps your lists handy and in sync wherever you are. Remember the Milk has apps for any smartphone. (iPad users are encouraged to use the Web interface rather than a dedicated app.) The apps automatically synchronize with RemembertheMilk.com, keeping your individual or shared lists up to date at all times. Remember the Milk is free, though a $25 a year Pro account gives you access to additional tools, including a Pro edition app for iPhone and MilkSync for Outlook, which synchronizes Remember the Milk with Outlook’s Tasks. A Pro account is required to use the BlackBerry app beyond a 15-day trial.

PayPal, Send and Receive Payments
Available for:
• iPhone, Free
• iPad, Free
• Android, Free
• BlackBerry, Free
Get paid. Pay someone else. Split a bill. Check your PayPal account balance. All that and more is possible on your mobile, be it iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry, with the PayPal app.
If you’re new to PayPal or think it’s only a payment processor for eBay, you might be surprised to discover that PayPal can–and very often does–take the place of a credit card merchant account for freelancers and small studios. Through PayPal, clients can pay you using any major credit or debit card, an e-check, a bank account direct debit transfer, or their own PayPal accounts. PayPal is a secure, respected payment gateway on par with any merchant account provider. The per-transaction fees charged by PayPal are often less than those charged by standard credit card merchant accounts, and without the monthly fee of merchant accounts. The PayPal app for iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry devices lets you request funds on the spot from clients–no more waiting until you get back to the office for billing–and even conduct transactions via a bump between devices.
Even if you don’t have money in your PayPal account, you can link your free PayPal account to your regular bank account such that, when PayPal reaches a $0 balance, funds will be withdrawn from that other source. Thus you can use the PayPal app for purchases and bill sharing without actively storing funds in the account.

Go to page 2 for the “Inspiration on the Go” section, which includes an app that lets you paint in words.


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Pariah S. Burke is the author of many books and articles that empower, inform, and connect creative professionals.
  • Anonymous says:

    I’ve recently made an Android app for accessing FileMaker databases. It uses the XML gateway of FileMaker server, giving you basic access to your databases. It’s got the basic search, sort, edit, add, delete, download, scripts, etc right now, and I plan to continue to add new features.

    This doesn’t require a connection to a desktop version of FileMaker like the alternative you recommend, but it does require that your database is hosted on FileMaker Server.

    https://market.android.com/details?id=com.smefworks.android.fmdroid

    https://smefworks.com/fmdroid

  • Anonymous says:

    The cheaper apps is just another reason to choose Android phones or tablets to work on. The apps have the same productivity as for iOS ones. For more info about android app development you can read here.

  • Great article! Through this post we got some useful points. Use of smart phones made it necessary to have mobile friendly website to get good searched over it.

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