Social Business strategist, podcaster, blogger, founder of Social Connections and conference speaker
Ghost Browser allows you to have multiple authenticated sessions open to the same site simultaneously, with each session having its own cookie jar, isolated from other sessions. This allows users such as web developers, testers, social media managers to easily work with multiple identities or use case perspectives without the need for multiple browsers, bookmarks, saved passwords etc.
One of the most enjoyable educational apps I’ve yet experienced :
Join broadcast legend Sir David Attenborough to explore more than 1000 of the greatest wildlife moments ever filmed.
Explore the most comprehensive collection of Sir David’s work ever released online.
- Includes six decades of highlights from more than 40 landmark BBC programmes, including Planet Earth, Blue Planet, The Life of Mammals, Africa and others.
- Watch unique collections of films curated by Sir David and others.
- Create and save your own collections and share them with friends and family.
- Hunt for hidden films featuring Sir David, recorded exclusively for the app.
- Explore extraordinary sequences of animals and plants, from iconic large species to rarely seen enigmatic creatures. See them hunt, mate, eat, travel and communicate in their natural habitats; ranging from the high mountains to the deepest oceans, across deserts, forests and the polar ice caps.
- Watch lions, polar bears, whales, sharks, eagles and giant lizards and many more.
Available at no charge as a universal app for iOS, and on Android, this has barely been off the family iPad since we downloaded it.
Tip of the hat to Vowe.
This week’s Awesome Apps features a pro-level task management app and what I believe to be the best podcast app available today. One business app, one for leisure, both recommended for your iOS devices!
Each Monday I’ll be selecting a couple of tried and tested apps that I use on a regular basis – one that is business or productivity-related and another that adds value during leisure or down time. Given my professional focus is on collaboration and community, and my work involves documenting and delivering strategic recommendations, facilitating workshops and training large groups of executives and community members, I’d expect that a good number of apps will be useful in those and similar scenarios.
Planning a conference session or work presentation anytime soon? This app might come in handy…
Ummo is your personal speech coach. Whether you are practicing for a presentation or looking to improve your day-to-day communication, use Ummo to track your filler words (“Umms” and “Uhhs”, “like”, “you know”), pace, word power, clarity, and more.
This iPhone app is definitely a version 1.x, and has its flaws, but looks extremely promising in terms of providing machine analysis of presentation and speaking styles.
Install the app, allow access to the microphone, click the mic button, wait for the countdown to complete and then start talking. The app will capture each work as it is said, looking for pre-defined filler words, any lack of clarity of tone, and any overly-long pauses. Once the recording is complete, it provides quite detailed reports and analysis of the effectiveness of the recorded session:
As I mentioned, there are some (um, err) issues – this needs a fast iPhone (it works considerably better on my iPhone 6s+ than it did on the iPhone 5 I tested, and even then, it does sometimes mis-capture the words. However, speech is by its nature imperfect, and I can forgive the app some teething pains.
For my use at least, it gave some good data, and helped me to spot some weaknesses in my speaking style that I hadn’t isolated previously. The reviews on the UK store are not great at present (1.5 stars! They are much better on the US store…), but this review from MacStories is, I believe, fairer to the developer. Anyway, it costs just $1.99 (£1.49), so it could be worth your time and hard-earned cash to give it a punt!
Every single episode of This Week in Lotus (my goodness, I miss that show) that we recorded over Skype was captured using Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack Pro.
This Mac OS X app has always been phenomenally good at managing the audio inputs and outputs available to a Mac system, applying filters and effects, and then writing high-quality recordings out to just about any format you can name.
However, Audio Hijack Pro has become a little long in the tooth over the past few years, with the last significant update almost a decade ago. The UI certainly looked out of place on the recent versions of OS X – Mavericks and Yosemite.
The great news is that Rogue Amoeba has just release a brand spanking new version of the product – Audio Hijack 3:
Featuring a beautiful new UI, and significant new features, this looks a huge update for loyal users of the app.
The new app costs $49 for first-time buyers, or $25 as an upgrade.
You can download a free trial from Rogue Ameoba’s site (it overlays noise on recordings of more than 10 minutes), and it’s worth checking out Jason Snell’s review for more detail.
I can’t wait to get recording with it…
We’ve partnered with Microsoft Office to help you do more on your phone or tablet. Now you can edit Office files from the Dropbox app and access your Dropbox directly from the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps for iPhone and iPad.
When you’re inside the Office apps, sign in to your Dropbox account to:
Edit Office files from the Dropbox mobile app and sync changes across devices.
Access Dropbox files from the new Office apps and save new files to Dropbox.
Share Dropbox links from Office when you’ve finished making changes.
This is significant and I think shows the way ahead for a lot of the Social Business mobile apps out there. Being able to access all our documents whilst on the mobile is important, but being able to edit them using native full-fidelity apps and to return the new version for colleagues to see immediately is a real step forward.
I’m seeing an increasing number of users using iPads as their primary device whilst at work and especially whilst travelling – it’s not such edge-cases like Federico Viticci that have switched to tablets full-time. It is functionality such as Microsoft and Dropbox are delivering that will help close the productivity gap between tablets and desktops once and for all.
Our goal is to build on the lessons learned from traditional social networks to make a new kind of community: positive, local and useful, wherever you are.
Each month, more than a million people are joining Circle for real-time information and conversation about nearby crime, traffic, natural disasters – as well as places to go and things to do.
Lost dogs. Best fishing spots. Free kids events. Closed roads. Flash mobs. Amazing, scary, exciting and crazy are happening everywhere. The Circle community is there to help you navigate your world.
And we have some help. Circle is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, Ashton Kutcher, Ron Conway, David Sacks and other top investors. Headquartered in Palo Alto, the company was founded by CEO Evan Reas with the goal of truly connecting the mobile web to the real world.
Circle has truly beautiful design, a clever focus on local news and events, apps for Android and iOS, and excellent integration with existing networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
As ever, the key question is whether your friends and peers are on the network – that’s what makes it sticky. Right now, that’s not the case, and there’s precious little being added within 50km of my location – I’m sure it would be different in San Francisco, NYC or even London.
However, I’m hopeful that this will change – I like Circle and would like it to succeed.
One of the many advantages for those living in the USA is that so many innovative online services get offered there first. Some, despite many broken promises, never make it to the UK – a classic example being Google Voice. However, I’m also well aware that folks that live in less populous or non-English speaking places do even worse than we do.
Anyway, another example of a fantastic service that is US-only right now is the New York City-based startup, Oyster, which has been termed the ‘Netflix for Books’:
We created Oyster to evolve the way people read and to create more of the special moments that only books can offer. From anywhere a mobile device can go—a bustling subway car, a quiet coffee shop, or lost at sea with a Bengal tiger—our mission is to build the best reading experience, one that is both communal and personal, anytime, anywhere.
With apps for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, subscribers get access to a huge library of books available for download to their devices. Whilst the access is truly unlimited, the last 10 books are kept on your device for offline reading.
Having tried the service for a short period of time on a friend’s device, I was impressed by the range of titles available and particularly the beautiful typography used.
Whilst the range of books available is nowhere near that available on Kindle or iBooks right now, I personally found the reading experience to be more pleasurable – not least because there wasn’t the sense that I might be buying a book at significant cost that I didn’t enjoy and couldn’t pass onto others.
Lastly, the social features are pretty cool – with the ability to add networks of fellow readers and to share and comment on friends’ activity and libraries.
Having fully embraced subscription-based music (Spotify), movies and TV (LoveFilm and Netflix), I’m definitely ready to pay a fixed monthly fee for unlimited access to books.
If Oyster was available in the UK I’d be there in an instant. Right now, you have to reside in the US and can either download the iOS app, or else join via oysterbooks.com – there is a 30 day free trial available. You can also buy memberships for others as gifts – that could be a great idea this holiday season!
