Ever since I started using my Android smartphone, I have been experimenting with a number of apps. It’s been more than two years now, and I slowly realise that I am virtually under control of few apps – without them, it’s difficult to make my day. Below are few of them:
Pocket
I travel quite some time to my workplace, and sitting inside the bus with strangers around would keep you bored. So over the years, I have found that this is the time to browse through some news articles that your local newspaper normally don’t cover.
Given the conditions of Indian roads, it’s difficult to read them when you are on the move. So reading them later will be the best option, and that would save your eyes as well. I found Pocket (formerly Read it later) for this requirement, that can save all your web links in your account. It will download the content when you save to Pocket, which you can read in it’s in-built browser later.
You can access these items in every smart device you use, and also directly from your desktop browser. There is a plug-in for Pocket in Google Chrome and you can save items to pocket directly from it.
Other features include sharing the items in the social media, email to friends, tag and archive your favourite items, etc..,
Feedly
For years, I had been using Google Reader to follow the news and blogs that interested me. Just provide the RSS feed URL to the Reader, and it will feed all you want.
Recently Google announced that its going to shut down it’s Reader service. With this, the users were forced to switch to other reader applications. To me, Feedly seemed to be clean and simple. No frills – neat interface. I imported all my feeds from Google to Feedly and that was so smooth. Adding and organising the contents are even easier now.
It also supports saving to Pocket (it also has its own read it later feature though), so I never miss out anything that I want to have a look.
Any.Do
There are lot of apps that try to keep you reminded of your important to-do’s, but I think none of them gives you the comfort that Any.Do gives.
Clean interface, voice input, intelligent predictions, swipe to mark the task completed, shake the phone to clear your done tasks, share a reminder with your friends – the list goes on. When I started using it, there was no option for setting reminders for recurring tasks. They have given that feature now and it works simply great. All the reminders for my bill payments are taken care by Any.Do. For every other reminders as well, it does what exactly I expect it to do.
Any.Do Cal (integrating Calendar to the app) is about to be launched in Android soon, and I am eagerly expecting that.
Toshl Finance
I had few apps to monitor my expenses when I wanted to do that, and there were a handful of apps in the market that helped me track my income and expenses. I particularly liked one app, Expense Manager, that provides easy ways to enter your expenses and categorise them. The one (biggest) issue I faced with them was during the factory reset of the phone – when all of my information were gone. There were options to take backups in excel files, or as CSV – but they were not user friendly.
With the advent of cloud platforms, I thought if there is any app that can offer me to store my details remotely in the cloud, so that I can sync and access whenever I want. And Toshl FInance came to my help. You can start entering expenses by simply adding categories and descriptions (optional). When you populate more and more data, the details of category wise spend and expenses search will become meaningful, and you can see them in nice graphics as well in the browser.
You can set budgets – only one budget in free version, whereas paid version allows you to set multiple budgets. The best feature of this app is that, you and your family members can all use the same login details, and start entering the expenses under respective tags throughout the day. Once they are home, they can sync the details to cloud. So at the end of the day, you have a collated expense chart of all of your family members. We are already trying this out, and it makes the entire process easier.
Pro Version offers dynamic reporting features, but I am satisfied with the free version itself. You can try the demo of Pro version and decide if you want to upgrade.
Note:
Though there are other apps that I use everyday, i.e. facebook, twitter, whatsapp, etc.., I have considered only these, as they are proving to be ‘feel good apps’ in the recent times. Hope you would try out some of these if you have not done so.
Karthikeyan Ramachandran 