Here are Spider Graham’s favorite smartphone and tablet apps. Rob “Spider” Graham is founder and CEO of Trainingcraft, a provider of digital advertising, marketing and sales consulting, and training solutions. He also teaches at Harvard University and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, covering digital media development, web store creation, business strategies, and interactive marketing best practices. He is also a contributing writer for The Business Journals.
My tablet: iPad
My smartphone: Android
My five favorite apps
1. Flipboard
While I have tried a number of news apps over the years, I often find that what they report and what I want to know are often very different. Flipboard is a news aggregation program that allows me to customize my news to include topics that are of greatest interest to me.
The app displays the collected articles in a magazine-like format, which is super intuitive and attractive. Setting up a personalized Flipboard is as simple as scrolling through information categories such as business, tech and science, arts and culture, food and dining, travel and style, among many others, then selecting from different sourced news feeds for each category.
SEE ALSO: Patrick Stroh’s favorite apps
2. Evernote
I’m a constant note taker. While out for a walk, driving in my car, or sitting in the office, ideas for new training courses, business ideas, and chores occur to me. As a result I need to have a way to make sure all these different note have a single place to call home, and that’s what Evernote does for me.
Apart from thoughts and ideas I don’t want to lose, Evernote allows me to also take pictures and archive them. This means that whether I’m using my iPad, my Droid phone, or my laptop computer, I can add to and have access to all my (near) brilliance anytime I need it.
3. Band of the Day
I’m a huge music fan but find that discovering new bands that match my tastes isn’t always that easy. BoD offers a calendar driven opportunity to explore a new band by reading about the band’s history, watching live video performance, following the band’s Twitter feed, and listening to tracks from a recent album.
The bands profiled represent an international collection of diverse genres. While not everything is going to make you want to purchase an album, you will definitely get a change to broaden your musical horizons.
4. Paper
While I’m far from being an accomplished visual artist, I do like to pretend to make art from time to time. Paper is an incredibly well made and intuitive app which allows users to grab a colored pencil, marker, stylus and other tools to create drawings and paintings using just their fingers. What particularly nice is a “rewind” feature that allows users to back away from recent changes to a drawing they thought better of.
The paid version of the app offers users a greater range of art tools, paper types and even colors.
5. SimpleMind+
SimpleMind+ is a mind mapping tool and absolutely one of my favorite pieces of software ever. I use it to develop curriculum, put together business and marketing strategies, and make to-do lists. It allows me to start anywhere in the planning process and add new elements as they occur to me. In short, it allows me to think the way I do and pull together all the loose pieces into a cohesive pile very easily.
I opted for the paid version of the app, which gave me access to better formatting and layout options and access to more robust tool. Some of the best money I’ve ever spent in my career.
My favorite app for fun
Guilty Pleasure App: Perhaps the one app I use almost daily is the Wimp.com app. Wimp.com is a web site that posts five really interesting, amazing, positive and very safe-for-work videos every day. This app makes it very easy to access and watch the full collection of videos on the site.
