My Favorite iPod Touch Applications
I’ve owned my 16GB iPod Touch for almost 4 months now. During the time I’ve owned it I’ve tested out a plethora of Web applications on it, and made extensive use of the built-in apps. I’m finding that out of all the applications I’ve tried, I utilize a small core of them every single day. Here’s a list of that core set of applications:
Built-in Applications
Notes: I find this to be a wonderful little database for information that’s accessible whether or not I’m connected to the Web. Currently I keep the following permanent Notes on my Touch, as well as creating additional ad-hoc notes as needed:
- Shopping List
- List of key IDs and Passwords for logging onto Web sites from my Touch
- Packing Checklist for Business Travel
Calendar: The calendar application keeps track of all my appointments and time-based events. It syncs quite well with Outlook 2007.
Contacts: Another application that simply works well and syncs great with Outlook 2007.
Mail: This application retrieves POP email from three different accounts, including Gmail, without a problem.
Weather: Hey, I’m always interested in what the weather conditions are going to be.
Maps: The wonderful Google Maps application works great, including the location function. It can even correctly locate me when I’m in my house in the wilds of WV!
Web Applications
Remember The Milk: This application is my to-do manager. It can not only be accessed from Touch, but from my Treo and UMPC as well. It’s simply a great little task manager and works well with GTD.
Hahlo: I use this wonderful app for reading and posting to Twitter. It’s one of the best Twitter clients I’ve ever used on any type of computer!
Google: All of the standard Google functions: iGoogle, News, Google Reader, etc., work great on the Touch. In particular, I make extensive use of Reader for accessing my RSS feeds.
Glide OS Mobile: I use this to compose and edit postings for Twitter and my blog. It’s very fast on the Touch, although it’s very slow on my UMPC. Regardless I use the Document functions of this Web-based OS for creating postings on my Touch and for that it works great. I use the iCopy bookmarklet to paste the postings from Glide into Twitter or WordPress. In fact, without iCopy I really couldn’t use my Touch for blog and Twitter postings. When is Apple going to add native copy/paste functions to the iPhone/Touch?!?!
EditGrid: EditGrid provides full-functioned spreadsheet operations for the Touch and is compatible with Excel. It’s a little slow on the Touch, but it really works amazingly well!
Instapaper: This application, along with it’s associated Read Later bookmarklet, is incredibly handy for saving Web pages for later reading. It also works quite well on my Treo.
Evernote: This application is so amazing, it’s actually hard to describe. It’s like having additional RAM added to your brain! It works great on the Touch, Treo, and UMPC. All I can say is that if you haven’t looked into it yet, drop everything and do so immediately!
So those are the applications I use every single day. There are a bunch more that I use often, usually a couple of times a week, but the ones above are the most valuable applications that I’ve got on my Touch.
