14 DAY TRIAL // To be productive on your computer means to move fast and do a lot of stuff with the tools you have. But you can be just as productive on the go. The AppStore makes it easy to find the right tools to make your actions faster and this new category created by the AppStore editors is taking everything to the next level.
It's Productivity Monday in the AppStore and the editors have chosen the premiere apps in that category: IFTTT, Launch Center Pro and TextExpander. There are a few steps that will increase your productivity so we're going to take them one by one.
First of all, you need to make sure you know what you want to achieve. Get a piece of paper or a ToDo app and write down the issues you need to solve.
There's no shame in getting fiddly with this. You have to understand that in order to be productive you need to spend some time getting your tools in order. The setup part will probably take anywhere from 5 minutes for the IFTTT app to about 10 minutes for Launch Center Pro and more than an hour for TextExpander. But every one of those minutes is worth spending because you are going to earn hundreds of minutes in the next year just because you are using these three apps.
There's no good recipe for using each of them. You need to adapt them to your needs. IFTTT is the iPhone app for one of the best websites created in the recent history. This will connect your different accounts and gadgets together in such a way that will have everything on the web work for you.
Imagine this scenario: if someone posts a photo of you on Facebook, you want to receive an SMS notification and then download that photo in Dropbox and put it in a certain folder. Or how about, when you create a new contact on your iPhone, having that saved to a Google Spreadsheet and put in a text file in Dropbox? You can do all of that and much more with IFTTT. And since the iPhone app was released, you can enable it for apps on your phone and add Push Notifications in the mix.
Launch Center Pro is an app that offers another great reason. It has been recently discounted by 40 percent so it's just $2.99 (€2.26). Launch Center Pro (LCP) will enable you to use actions within iOS 7 apps, not the apps themselves. To put it in layman's terms, in order to call your loved one, you don't need to open the Phone.app, look for the desired contact in a list, tap on it and call. You just tap one icon in LCP. Searching for a word on Wikipedia is another action. There's no need to open a browser, go on the website and look up that word. Just type it in and go.
And we left the best for last. TextExpander Touch is going to save you hours of your life if you use it regularly. You first need to create short abbreviations that expand into long snippets of text and use them in every app that supports this. Imagine you could be typing something like "ttel" and that will expand into your phone number or type "ssig" and it will add your full signature, complete with your name, phone number, email address company, department and position.
