Click on the headings of each app to download.
$41.99
OmniFocus is more akin to a life manager than a project manager, with no task too small to be logged, but its greatest skill is to integrate them into your working life – and all the projects that fill your time. Take the huge work assignment consuming your thoughts right now.
OmniFocus helps break it down into individual timelined actions, all assigned to “contexts”. Let’s say you need to ask Tony lots of little questions. You make the context of these actions “Tony”, and next time you’re having a meeting with him they all appear by his name. You can view actions by due dates, project, or any other context you choose. OmniFocus has its faults: primarily that it can’t sync directly with PCs (it can to Macs). But don’t be put off, it could transform you into the most organised person in your business.
$10.49
We haven’t yet found a Windows server admin app we’d recommend, but if you need to support Mac OS X servers – or want to see the potential of these devices in the server room – then look no further than Server Admin Remote. A friendly interface, complete with fancy graphs to show metrics such as CPU usage, is married to all the features most people are likely to need at their fingertips.
The fact it works over 3G adds yet more appeal; handy when you need to reboot the server while sitting on the train.
$14.99 (Android); $19.99 (iPad)
While Apple offers Keynote (see below), Pages and its rival apps for around $11 each, Quickoffice and Documents To Go are pitched in battle to offer better value “suite” alternatives. They’re both compatible with Office 2010, integrate beautifully with online services such as Google Docs, and both work on iPad and Android.
For us, Quickoffice wins out for now thanks to drag-and-drop support, but it’s worth comparing their features before you commit.
$7.49
The big advantage 2Do holds over OmniFocus is that it can synchronise to-do lists with Outlook on your PC, as long as they’re both on the same wireless network. While it doesn’t offer the advanced skills of its life-organising rival, it’s more than a simple to-do list: you can create projects with timelines, for instance, or simple checklists.
Other nice features include the ability to add locations via Maps and voice notes. It also looks pretty and, compared to OmniFocus, it’s cheap.
$10.49
If you’re going to batter clients into submission with a presentation, you may as well do it in style. Keynote – the iPad accompaniment to Apple’s PowerPoint rival – ships with a dozen high-quality templates, onto which you can drag, drop and easily resize text, tables and charts. There are also 20 transitions on offer to impress your audience, including the highly polished Magic Move, which allows you to make items elegantly shift and disappear from one slide to the next.
Best suited to users of Keynote on Mac OS X.
$10.49
Mind-mapping isn’t quite the trendy buzzword it used to be, but thousands of people around the world swear by its ability to create, link and visualise concepts. What keeps iThoughtsHD at the top of an ever-increasing pile of mind-mapping apps for the iPad –18 when we last checked – is its slick interface, seamless integration with Dropbox and wide support for mind-map program formats.
With regular updates, it keeps getting better too.
Free
Great as Excel 2007 and 2010 are, they can’t rival a dedicated tool to tease out meaning from a massive list of numbers. And that’s precisely what Roambi does, in tandem with your free Roambi Lite account at www.roambi. com. The biggest challenge is to organise your source data (such as Excel spreadsheets) into a form Roambi can decipher; once you do, you’ll find a treasure trove of interactive charts, and even a Cardex-style presentation to let you flip through sets of results.
