iOS apps

As increasingly we're carrying tablets and smartphones with us, we expect them to double as work tools so we can at least see our data, if not work on it, too. However, there are significant compatibility and access issues to deal with anytime you step away from your desk. Here we explore these issues with Excel spreadsheets and offer one possible solution.

A piece about buckyballs catches your eye on the ABC web site. As you read it, you find a link to a Wikipedia article about carbon nanotubes. Opening that page, you find yourself clicking on references to buckypaper, nanoflowers, tensegrity spheres and a biography of Buckminster Fuller. Soon, you have half a dozen tabs open in your browser, filled with fascinating information and no time to read any of it. The old solution would have been to bookmark each of those pages in the hope that you’d eventually find time to sit down at your computer and read them.

Your iPhone lets you choose the ringtone that sounds when someone calls you. You can switch between the standard ringtones by tapping Settings —> Sounds —> Ringtone. If you want to have a different ringtone play when someone special calls, select a separate ringtone by locating that person in your Contacts and then tapping Edit —> Ringtone. The phone comes with 25 ringtones and you can purchase more through iTunes. However, Apple’s approach to selling ringtones is, to put it sweetly, ungenerous.

We've stress the importance of keeping your passwords secure in our comparison of PC passwords. But it's just as important to secure the passwords that you use on your iPhone or iPad. iOS password managers work in much the same way, allowing you to use, but not have to remember, highly secure and different passwords for every account you log into. However, their interface and features vary significantly, and here we review three affordable or free iOS password managers to help you make your choice.

Based on the Password Safe open-source application, App77 pwSafe is very plain. It allows in-app syncing to Dropbox, but that’s US$2.49 extra. There’s no built-in browsing facility, unlike competing iOS clients. Each field (URL, Username and Password) can be tapped upon to automatically copy to the clipboard, but this is a one-at-a-time approach, so you’ve got to switch between the browser and pwSafe for each entry.

Callpod's Keeper Password & Data Vault includes a browser to give you quick access to password-protected sites, although we hit a few more problems with it than 1Password. One feature we liked was that by default, Keeper will auto-destruct the data vault on your phone after a few incorrect guesses; this way if your phone is lost, your data should be secure, even if you can’t remotely wipe it.

AgileBits 1Password Pro doesn’t lose much in the translation to iOS, although it’s confusing that there are two versions: a slightly cheaper one for iPhone and iPad, and a universal application. This elegant offering is a better option for Mac users who already use 1Password, as you can sync your password files with the Mac desktop client, something the PC version doesn’t support.

It works well as a standalone app, with an integrated yet slow inbuilt browser for single-tap access to your password-protected sites.

The iPhone has a fairly decent camera and the iPad 2 has, well, a camera. What neither possesses is a really easy way to transfer your latest snaps from your device to your computer. Instead, there are several methods that are pretty clumsy and which usually involve connecting your device and computer via a cable, sidestepping iTunes and then copying the photos manually.

If you like to tweet on the move, there’s certainly no dearth of iPhone Twitter apps to choose from. From simple yet luscious apps such as TwitBird, to complex, multi-account tools like TweetDeck, there are plenty of options. But most of us will need to look no further than Twitter’s own app to accommodate our mobile tweeting needs. Just as Facebook was tardy in developing its own app for the iPhone, so too was Twitter. In fact, the company didn’t even bother developing one.