Top 10 Favourite Apps: Gary Boon, MD of Shout Digital
The Drum explores the best apps on the market at the moment by asking some of the industry's top digital development professionals. This week Gary Boon, MD of Newscastle based Shout offers his choices.
As an avid reader of blogs, tech articles, financial and sports news this app allows me to pull together all of those sources of content and cleverly lay out the articles as if they were editorial content in today’s newspaper.
I use the ‘Cloud’ to cut, copy, bookmark and generally store all manner of things that I find interesting, may come back to one day or just need for future reference.
Evernote lets me capture web pages, online articles, images, and podcasts amongst everything else like no other app and allows me to remember everything.
I thought I bought a lot of books before the iPad. Now, I have 35 unfinished eBooks ranging from the autobiographies of George W. Bush and Alan Sugar to Dan Pink’s Drive and Stephen Hawking’s The Grand Design.
I’ve changed one problem of space on the bookshelf to the amount of storage I need on my iPad.
IMDB Movies & TV
I love movies and the latest blockbuster TV series and I’ve used IMDB for years on the web. I use this app to watch all the latest trailers, news on the stars and what I’ve missed. If there were Oscars for apps, this would surely be a front-runner.
If you love football, this game will keep to returning for more and more. It’s supremely delivered both visually and technically, as you’d expect from EA, and the one game I play for hours with my son. Albeit we have a big difference of opinion on who is the best team!
I can use Video Stream from Collect3, to stream the latest episode of a TV Series or Movie from my media centre directly to my iPad. I can then quietly go into my home office and get a quick catch-up on my latest favourite show when the family hog the TV.
I’m always keen to stay up to date with current affairs – Sky News is the main channel watched in the house, so why not catch-up on the iPad? Sky really knows how to develop a great application and user experience.
FT News / The Times / Sunday Times
Technically 3 apps, but I have them all on my iPad for the same reason; I enjoy nothing better than to read a well written piece of journalism or editorial.
GoodReader
I use GoodReader and when synced with my Dropbox account - I use the Cloud to store my documents, download them as I need and read them on the go. It’s the perfect app for reading a wide range of documents and connecting to a multitude of cloud services.
iThoughtsHD
I have a lot of ideas and thoughts and trying to consolidate them all into something useful can be challenging. Mind maps are one way I use to do just that and collate those ideas and permutations together in some sort of order. iThoughtsHD from CMS is the app I use almost daily to detail what I’m thinking and then able to easily save, store and share those ideas with friends and colleagues.