Other tools that I use...

Most of the blog posts here are made for a selfish reason, to remind me of things I would quickly forget otherwise, it's really a personal diary more than anything else...

Over the years I've made a few posts which help me every time, like in the past month, I start a new job or have to setup a new computer, and I even silently update them time to time. Certainly these fit in said category:

http://c0de517e.blogspot.ca/2011/04/2011-tools-that-i-use.html

http://c0de517e.blogspot.ca/2012/01/prototyping-frameworks.html

http://c0de517e.blogspot.ca/2010/01/how-do-you-do-your-work.html

Now I'd like, and probably it's going to be the last piece of this puzzle, to write down some of the remaining software stuff I found important to do my job. This is mostly about the tools I use on my iPad, on my Samsung Galaxy (Android) and on the cloud...

• Dropbox. Easy and really really important to me. I use it both for photography and coding, it's available on Mac, Pc, Android, iOS and Web, so it covers everything. I particularly love the Android integration which allows me to snap photos of notes and things I want to remember and then upload them directly into my dropbox account. Essential!
• Wunderlist. Another cross-everything tool, it replaced the non-cloud tools I had on iOS and I prefer it to Remember The Milk because even if the latter is probably more powerful, it's free account it too restricted for me, and the paid one a bit too expensive considering that I'm even happy with just a text document on dropbox...
• ...speaking of which PlainText on iOS is a neat text-editor that syncs into a folder in your dropbox account. Not the best text editor for the iPad for sure, but I hate typing on the iPad anyways, the touch screen keyboard makes me uncomfortable very quickly
• Reeder for iOS. Best RSS reader ever. Offline caching is fundamental to me as all my tablets are wifi-only, and even if I can tether my cheap and unlimited Wind mobile over wifi with the Android phone, the speed and coverage are often not great so in practice I always sync Reeder over the home wifi before going to work...
• iAnnotate PDF. Best PDF reader for iOS that I've found
• Bamboo Paper. Best natural writing app I've found, I think it feels better than penultimate which is very good too...
• VLC (videolan) player for iOS. Has been pulled from the store over a petty argument about its licensing, but I still have it on my iPad :)
• ReadItLater, both the iOS client and I have bookmarklets on my various browsers. I use it also as an offline reading tool, especially when I travel I upload all the travel guides I want (i.e. wikitravel) and then cache them on the iOS client...
• ZooTool for bookmarks (which for me is bookmark sharing, I don't really care about the bookmark library myself, I just figured that I do a lot of work to read feeds and other stuff on the web so I can create and share such a list for others to benefit...), it's a bit of a pain to get the bookmarklet on the iPad as they don't provide an easy wa
• Just started trying Spreed, which is a cool web based speed reader with a nice bookmarklet...
• iTunesU...
• http://www.rainymood.com/ rarely, as I don't mind the noise and I often find background chatter to be quite nice, I listen to a lot of Italian news and politics at work :)
• http://sleepyti.me/

Other stuff that I use but it's not really work related

• iOS: Zinio (magazine newsstand), Fancy (cool stuff), SpyderGallery (as I have a Spyder color calibrator), Air Video (great to share videos from my iMac to the iPad), Photosmith (at a given point I wanted to write something exactly like that, to allow selection and rating which is a tedious process, of Lightroom photo collections), Daytum (personal logging)
• Android: WhatsApp (messaging), Glympse (rarely used) and Poynt (rarely used...), HDR Camera (half-decent, the HDR merging is good but the alignment is really cheap and looses sharpness)
• Cloud: Yelp, to decide where/what to eat, PreyProject.com to protect my macbook and my Android stuff, LogMeIn for remoting
• Physical world: I write on paper. Yes, I've tried iPad and styluses and gloves and palm rejection and everything. It's terrible, and thinking otherwise is just a delusion caused by the fact we love our gadgets. It's many orders of magnitudes worse. And if you need a digital copy, just take a picture of the page with a cellphone. Now, that said, which pen and which paper, that's an interesting thing.
• An A5-A6 spiral bound notebook. It's important to be spiral bound with an hardcover, if you're writing while commuting and so on you need a hard surface, the spiral bound books allow only the page you're writing on to be facing you and with the cover on the back they are the best in terms of stability. Field notes, Whitelines or the classic Rhodia.
• Pencil, I use a KuruToga because it's cool with Uniball NanoDia leads (fairly soft).
• Pens. Too many, I collect fountain ones and buy too many other writing instruments in general, from brush pens to very fine ballpoints to graphite and brushes... For an everyday fountain surely the best choice is a Lamy Safari. You want to couple it with a very smooth flowing ink like the Aurora black.

What iOS/Android/Cloud tools do you love? Suggestions?