This episode is part 1 of a 2 part series about the apps Richie and I love most on our phones. We cover a wide range of solutions from todo lists to photography and videography to relaxation and games. Stay tuned for this episode of Etsy Jam and find out about some killer apps you may not know about yet.
Weather Apps
Gordon: I like Weather Underground. It’s hyper-local which is what I like about it because I don’t end up with some inaccurate forecasts.
Richie: What I like about Weather Underground too are those webcams that they have in there. I can really see the weather because there’s an option to view nearby webcams. You can see if it’s a blue sky, or there’s snow on the ground, how much snow is there, or if it’s raining and those kind of stuff.
Chat Apps
Richie: I have Facebook Messenger. Family uses it and a good amount of random people I meet.
I have Snapchat too. There are couple of people that I talk to on there. Otherwise, I usually watch other people’s stories on Snapchat. My cousin is on there and she’s a flight attendant so I get to see the photos she took from different places in the world and that’s cool. I follow people like Gary Vaynerchuk, JLD from Entrepreneur on Fire, Alexis Ohanian from Reddit, and Justin Kan from Justin.tv and Twitch because they have some good stuff on there.
I also have WhatsApp. I have a handful of people I talk to on there. I have the default Messages on iPhone too for texting because a handful of people still use that. And then I have Signal. Signal is there for being the most obscure no-one-knows-about-it that you could possibly use for messaging.
Gordon: The other chat app that I have that Richie hasn’t mentioned yet, is Slack. Richie, Kevz, and I use Slack to talk as a team and it’s really convenient. It keeps everything organized for you – you can have different channels and things like that. It’s been a good solution.
Bonus app for Etsy sellers:
For you Etsy shops out there that maybe don’t want to put your mobile phone number, you can go ahead and get a Google Voice number and have people call that or make it ring you on your phone. Or maybe put it in Do Not Disturb if you don’t want to have people calling you on specific times of the day. It’s also a really easy way for you to put that extra touch point out there so if people really need it, they can give you a call. It has voice mail and all the regular features your phone already have; it’s just another number that you can throw around.
Music Apps
Gordon: I used to listen to a lot of podcast when I had my commute. I kinda have fallen off the podcast train since and I know I need to find a good point in my day where I can do that. I use Overcast for a really long time which I really like. Other music apps that I got is Serato Pyro. Serato Pyro is a fun one for anyone who is a music enthusiast and really likes the concept of the Genius feature in iTunes. Serato Pyro does that but it does it based on tempo. It’s almost like a DJ where you give it a list of songs and it will figure out the tempo of all those songs and feed them in order next to one another so that it smoothly transitions from one song to the next.
I’ve also got Amazon Music, Google Play Music, and Shazam.
Richie: I have Spotify which is in my home screen because I found it by far the best. I love their curated playlist and stuff. I think they really do a nice job of putting stuff together. They also have a bunch of playlists by mood and while I know a bunch of other services have those things too, I feel like Spotify nails it pretty well.
Movie and Entertainment Apps
Gordon: I have iMovie which I like. It’s good for manually editing videos but one of the really cool things that I like about iMovie is that they have some trailer presets that you can use. Just simply drop in your own footage and it will make a movie trailer sort of thing. I’ve done this a few times and it’s really fun.
I also have a cool one called Magisto. This is a cool app and I recommend you guys play with it at least or purchase their plan that they have with it. But it basically allows you to throw a bunch of videos or photos into a movie. It uploads your photos and footage to their servers and they go through it with their algorithm that figures out which are the most interesting parts of that footage is. Then it automatically edits all those pieces together for you and puts in a music that you choose. You also choose how long you want the clip to be and then it dumps out a movie for you at the end.
Richie: I have the Kindle app. I like to read on my phone because that’s what I have with me most of the time. I also use Pocket. Pocket is what you use when you find an article on the internet – whether it’s a blog post or a magazine or something. What you do is you save it to Pocket and this app strips out all of the distracting stuff like ads and just shows you the content. More importantly, this is the place where I put all these stuff for when I want to read something later.
Document and File Management Apps
Richie: I use two things. An app called Tiny Scanner so I can digitize paper documents. The other app is called Shoebox. Shoebox is a great little app for receipt retention. So pretty much anything I’m gonna need for tax related stuff; I scan them with Shoebox. Any business expenses are gonna get scanned in as well. They also have this optical character recognition that will extract the numbers off of it and identifies what it was, and where it’s for etc. I pay for that service just because it saves me a lot of time from not having to look at all the receipts and sort them out myself.
Photography Apps
Richie: Google Photos. I really like Google Photos. It does a really nice job of grouping things. It makes it really easy to make albums for me. They have a decent photo editing capabilities in there too. I like it and it’s good enough for me.
Gordon: I have a handful here. Simple DOF Calculator is one of them. If you take photos with a DSLR this could be handy for you. It basically helps you figure out what to set your aperture to on your camera if you’re doing manual shooting. It will help you calculate based on the kind of camera body you have, the lens type you have, what the focal length of the lens is, how far away your subject is – it will tell you where to set your aperture to get that nice blurry background which is called bokeh.
I also have Snapseed for editing photos which I used to love. Then there’s Prisma and it allows you to apply fun and artistic filters to things if you want to mess around. And then the last one I have under Photography is Lightroom. I’ve been a long time Lightroom user on my computer but on my phone, I recently snagged it because they just enabled RAW shooting on the iPhone 7 Plus so you can shoot in RAW mode. Most photographers will tell you to shoot RAW because it allows you to change photos with a lot more flexibility than you have when you’re shooting on Auto mode.
Security Apps
Gordon: Big ones for me under my security category would be LastPass and Google Authenticator. We’ve talked about LastPass in our Tools to Keep You Safe Online episode so if you guys haven’t seen or watched that yet, you should definitely check that one out. LastPass is a password manager basically and it’s super handy.
Google Authenticator allows you to do 2-Factor Authentication for your accounts. It’s another step when you log in to an account to help you lock down that account that if someone does get your password to your account, they won’t necessarily be able to log in as you because they are missing this piece of the puzzle. It’s pretty easy to use and pretty easy to set up.
Richie: I have LastPass but I don’t have Google Authenticator. I use something called Authy instead. The extra benefit of Authy is back ups. So if you switch phones or stuff like that, it’s much easier to transition to another device.
That wraps it up, but watch out for Part 2 of our Favorite Phone Apps!
