Jobs has succeeded in transforming the way we consume information in both our personal and work lives. With their intuitive interfaces, sleek lines and quality craftsmanship, it’s easy to see why so many of us now carry an iPhone, iPad, or both with us wherever we go. Raise your hand if you have an iPhone or iPad? If you haven’t got your hand up, chances are the person next to you does.

The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, nor was it the first with a touch interface, but it revolutionized the way that we browse the internet on our cells and consume data. Even if you don’t have an iPhone, your Android, BlackBerry or Windows Phone handset have all been influenced by this device.

And this brings me to our obsession with smartphones.

We’ve all been there, checking our emails on our smartphones at midnight, 1 a.m., 2 a.m., 6 a.m. We now shut the office doors and immediately start working again on the train, the bus and in taxis. We are permanently connected. According to a national survey by Telenav, a third of Americans would rather give up sex than their smartphone. They’d also be willing to wave goodbye to chocolate, caffeine and exercise before they parted with their beloved device.

UK adults and children are just as bad. UK communications industry regulator Ofcom has discovered that 60 per cent of teenagers describe themselves as “highly addicted to their smartphone.” Almost half (47 percent) of teenagers and 22 percent of adults also admit to using their device on the toilet.

Our cell phones have now transformed from a device for contacting and playing Snake to becoming a central part of our personal and working lives. The mobile workforce can now check emails on the move, hold video conferences, proof documents and log in to check their bank balance when sitting on the train or working from a cafe. Our obsession has been fueled by just the right apps to help us accomplish these tasks.

With more than 400,000 iPhone apps and more than 300,000 Android apps now available, what are the apps that today’s web workers should look at using to aid productivity and increase efficiency? Below are just some of the apps that I find indispensable:

• CamCard: This great app takes a picture of a business card and automatically adds the information to your contact list. No more rummaging through pockets trying to locate the contact details of the people you met at various meetings and events.

• Evernote: A popular tool with remote workers, Evernote enables you to quickly capture anything. Whether it’s a photo, a screenshot or a web site, whatever you capture is stored, processed and made searchable.

• Huddle: With Huddle’s iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry apps you can access my company’s cloud-based collaboration platform and manage your projects, files and people from any location, at any time of day.

• Twitter: Yes, it can be dangerously addictive, but having Twitter on your mobile ensures that you are constantly connected to the latest updates from your community and you can track what is being said about your company.

• 1Password:  How many times have you sat on your iPhone/iPad trying to remember one of the numerous passwords you have for a wealth of websites and apps? 1Password securely stores the information required and logs you into websites immediately.

• Skype: If you’re on Verizon Wireless’ network, Skype mobile gives you free Skype-to-Skype calls and IM.

• QuickOffice: Access, create, edit, and share Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations.

• Expensify: This fantastic app allows you to capture your expenses and receipts from any location. You can track everything and build your expenses reports on the move.

• Bloomberg Mobile:  Keep up to date on the latest international business news, stock quotes and company descriptions, etc.

• Instapaper:  Ever found a great article that you just don’t have time to read? Instapaper ensures that you can come back to it later.

What other mobile productivity apps do you use and love? Let me know in the comments below.

Hear VMware’s CTO Stephen Herrod talk about the three key pillars of enterprise mobility — apps, data and people — at Mobilize, September 26 and 27.

Andy McLoughlin, Co-founder and EVP Strategy at Huddle, can be reached on Twitter @Bandrew. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Symic.

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The post notes that anomalies in server traffic led the company to suspect its database has been accessed and take appropriate precautions, although it cannot be sure at this point in time. It also points out that the data accessed alone should not be enough to expose an affected user’s stored passwords. To get those, an attacker would also need the user’s master password, which is only really a risk if that password is easy  to guess using a brute force attack. Users with strong, non-dictionary-based master passwords should be relatively safe, although as some users don’t use particularly strong mater passwords, the company has elected to force all of its users to change their master passwords. In addition, the company will be validating users changing their passwords by either checking that the user is visiting from a previously-used IP block, or by validating against their email address.

As a result of the potential breach, LastPass is also beefing up the encryption it uses:

We’re also taking this as an opportunity to roll out something we’ve been planning for a while: PBKDF2 using SHA-256 on the server with a 256-bit salt utilizing 100,000 rounds. We’ll be rolling out a second implementation of it with the client too.

This potential breach is a reminder that storing your passwords with a third party like LastPass or competitor 1Password is risky. Their data is obviously a very attractive target for hackers, despite their encryption and robust security arrangements. But you have to weigh that risk against the convenience they offer: Using a password management tool makes it much easier to have a strong, unique password on every service you use. That’s much more secure than using the same password everywhere, which makes large security breaches, such as the recent PlayStation Network hack  or last year’s Gawker hack, so damaging, as attackers can gain access to wide range of different services with a single password. However, if you’re concerned about storing your passwords in a cloud service, you could always elect use a desktop password management tool like that stores your passwords in a local database like KeePassX instead; the downside is not being able to retrieve passwords everywhere. Whatever password management tool you choose, ensure you pick out a strong master password that’s not going to be easy to crack via a brute force attack.

Photo courtesy Flickr user subcircle

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Speed is always an issue, of course. But for me, and many others who use Firefox, its advantage is that it’s really more than just a browser. With the judicious addition of some well-designed add-ons, it can be a tool for managing multiple email accounts, testing and troubleshooting web pages, managing passwords, synchronizing data, and much more.

Other browsers offer add-ons, too, but as far as I know, no other browser has all of the add-ons that I use. Some I’ve written about before, but others are relatively new additions to my toolbox.

• Gmail Manager. I use this add-on constantly. It allows me to manage multiple Gmail and Google Apps Mail accounts without opening multiple tabs or a separate email program.
• Google Shortcuts. I also use a lot of other Google products (like Reader and Webmaster Tools, for example), but find that their URLs aren’t necessarily memorable. This add-on lets me create simple shortcuts to the Google pages that I often visit.
• Firebug and Web Developer. These add-ons are tools that no web developer should be without. They provide a huge range of functions for testing and troubleshooting HTML, CSS and much more.
• 1Password and LastPass. These add-ons manage password data and sync it with other computers, as well as mobile devices like the iPhone and iPod touch. Yes, I probably don’t need two password managers, but each has its advantages, and I really can’t afford to lose the huge number of passwords I have. So I use both; they co-exist surprisingly well.
• XMarks. In addition to passwords, it’s handy to be able to sync browsing history and bookmarks between computers, which XMarks does well. It can also sync passwords, although I don’t use it for that.
• Screengrab and NoSquint. These add-ons make minor, but very useful, improvements to the built-in features of Firefox. Screengrab allows one to take screenshots within the browser, and NoSquint lets one adjust zoom levels on a site-by-site basis.
• All-in-One Sidebar (AIOS). I do like one feature of Opera — the ability for one’s history, add-ons and downloads to show up in a sidebar rather than popup windows. AIOS is a very configurable Firefox add-on that makes for a much cleaner browser display.
• Finally, Adblock Plus.

Of course, as a web developer, I do need to make sure that the sites my company makes are compatible with many different browsers and operating systems. But frankly, I spend most of the day in a browser, and so far, that browser is still Firefox.

What is your preferred web browser?

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Like a lot of small-business owners, it won’t be possible for me to disconnect entirely; I’ll need to be on call, and to have access to my work. But I want to carry as little as possible, and make the transition from the office to the train as painless as I can.

Luckily, I’ve been taking advantage of cloud services, so preparing for this trip has been easier than those in the past. I recently bought a 13″ MacBook Pro at around the same time Scott did, but since I’ve been using a Mac mini as my primary machine for the past couple of years, transferring my data and settings to the laptop was pretty easy.

For mail, I have several IMAP-based Google Apps and Gmail accounts, and I was able to use the Migration Assistant to transfer my Apple Mail settings. It was actually easier to re-download the messages from Google’s servers than to copy several gigabytes of messages from the old mini.

Similarly, it was easy to back up and restore calendar and Address Book settings; I did make an abbu file backup, then restore it to the new machine, since Apple includes some data that Google Contacts doesn’t.

For IM, it was easy to copy Adium settings. For passwords, I had already set up Dropbox to sync 1Password data; as backup, I also use the cloud-based Lastpass. I use Xmarks to sync Firefox history, and I could have copied other settings too, although I chose not to, in order to do a little spring cleaning.

Once I’m on the road, I’ll stay connected to the mini in my office through Apple’s Screen Sharing and to my company’s Windows servers through Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection. I’ll be using the Sprint Overdrive hotspot for connectivity, and although I’m sure that there will be places with no signal, Sprint has just activated 4G service in a couple of the places I’ll be.

I’ll also be taking the Bookeen Cybook Opus e-book reader, which has grown on me since I wrote about it, and a Belkin surge protector/USB charger; Amtrak has pretty reliable power, but it never hurts to be safe.

Of course, lots of things can go wrong, but I think that I’m pretty well prepared for my trip. So…all aboard! I’ll let you know how it goes.

How do you prepare for travel?

Amtrak image by Flickr user lazytom.

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But when I upgraded from Firefox 3.5.7 to 3.6 the other day, I discovered that a few of the add-ons that weren’t yet compatible were important to me. In fact, they had become such an integral part of my daily workflow that I was significantly slowed down without them. Luckily, almost all of the add-ons were updated within a couple of days so I’m back up to speed now, but I realized how much I missed them when they weren’t available. In this post I’m going to share the add-ons that I find it hard to be without.

Some of us at WWD have ditched Firefox in favor of the faster Chrome, but until these add-ons are also available in Chrome for Mac, I won’t switch. In the meantime, I’m sticking with Firefox, and hoping that 3.6, the newest version, lives up to its claims of increased speed.

Mozilla Prism. This add-on allows me to create a site-specific browser for locations I visit frequently. I’ve used it to create a “Google Reader” application that appears in my dock, can be placed in a separate Space, and operates separately from Firefox. I’m not sure why Mozilla hasn’t updated this yet; I’m using Chrome to view Google Reader for now.

LastPass. This password manager not only keeps track of my passwords, it syncs them between browsers and computers. I imagine most web workers have as many passwords as I do — they’d be impossible to keep track of without a program like LastPass. I also use 1Password for the Mac, and sync its data using Dropbox, figuring that it doesn’t hurt to keep such important data in multiple places.

Xmarks. This handy extension syncs my bookmarks between browsers and computers.

Adblock Plus. I appreciate all of the content that is available on the web, including WebWorkerDaily, thanks to the support of advertisers. But some sites have such obtrusive advertising that they are unusable. Google (which makes most of its money from advertising) is allowing ad blockers in its Chrome browser in the hope that advertisers will make “useful” ads that no one will want to block. Until then, Adblock Plus is a necessity for me.

Gmail Manager. This is the Firefox add-on that I use the most. It’s the best way I know to manage multiple Gmail and Google Apps mail accounts.

I’ll also add two tools that are incredibly helpful to web developers: Firebug and Web Developer. Both help me and my colleagues to test and debug web sites.

…and finally, Cards. Well, OK, I guess I can live without this one, but I’ll have find something else to do while I’m on the phone.

What browser add-ons do you rely on?

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Some Monsanto executives learned the value of safeguarding their data the hard way when they couldn’t access key information they needed during the chaos after 9/11. So in 2003 they founded Morgan Street Document Services to help individuals and businesses protect their important documents from disasters. Orggit was launched recently to bring this service to a wider consumer audience through a user-friendly interface.

Unlike storage and sync services such as Dropbox and Sugarsync that are just storage space for files, Orggit has a user interface that allows for organizing various types of information records.

After logging in, users are greeted by four tabs across the top of their Orggit home page:

Wallet: This section stores information about all the cards you might carry in your wallet. It is organized using tabs down the left size for various types of cards, and each tab’s contents appear in the main area of the screen when selected. Each card type’s fields are customized to hold standard data types for those cards, including customer service numbers. Images of the cards can even be added. A “wallet report” can be printed containing details of all of the stored cards to use as an offline back-up or for reference in filing a police report or canceling stolen cards. This section of Orggit is similar to a Palm app that I used to have that is now available for a variety of mobile phones called SplashID. However, SplashID syncs only between a desktop and mobile device with no cloud backup of data; that redundancy is a key feature of Orggit.

Medical: This section contains a service I’ve never seen offered by any other back-up or storage service: 24/7/365 ICE (in case of emergency) medical record forwarding. It allows a user to create and store a complete medical history for themselves, including scanned documents. This history can then be downloaded in a nicely formatted PDF form for sharing with healthcare providers. Orggit will also fax or email it 24/7 to healthcare providers that request it in an emergency if they provide Orggit the member ID number found on the ICE wallet card that is mailed to every Orggit member. The card provides instructions on how to call and retrieve the records, or report a lost wallet.

As someone with a complicated medical history involving several chronic conditions, I love the idea of healthcare providers being able to access a comprehensive healthcare record for me if I have a problem away from home. My one complaint about this section is that the date fields for items require complete MM/DD/YY date entries and it can be hard to be that specific about things that were a long time ago. It would be helpful to be able to enter an incomplete date, such as just the year, or just month/year. What I’d like to see added would be more fields for recording routine doctors’ visits, and events such as routine illnesses or symptoms. Perhaps a calendar or journal function in this section could serve for those purposes.

Accounts & Codes: Designed to store logins, this is the least robust of all the service’s sections. It keeps a single alphabetized list of your logins. Clicking on the item will take you to an entered URL but won’t log you in. For day-to-day password retrieval, this can’t compete with applications like 1Password for Mac or even Firefox’s built-in password manager. But it has some advantages those sorts of programs don’t, such as the cloud storage of the data and being able to make it visible to other family members in case of emergency.

Filing Cabinet: The filing cabinet is designed to store scanned copies of important documents, similar to Dropbox and other storage services. However, unlike Dropbox, it doesn’t sync files with edits in another location. This lack of file syncing to an offline source in Orggit’s filing cabinet is not as big a deal as it might seem. Most of the files that Orggit is intended to store are scans or PDF’s of static files such as legal documents that would require creation of a whole new file if they were changed. They also aren’t documents that are typically updated that often.

Using the filing cabinet is simple. There are buttons for its drawers across the top of the page. Six drawers are already named and come configured with pre-named folders to suggest contents for them. Users can add a seventh drawer or tailor the existing ones to meet their needs. Basically, the drawers and folders are just a user-friendly way of representing a file storage structure to users.

The iPhone app is a nice addition to the service but not a key component of it. It has the ability to trigger the faxing or mailing of medical reports from its emergency section. The iPhone app also gives you the ability to use your phone’s camera to take pictures of your ID cards rather than having to scan them or use your camera. The camera can also be used to update family members’ profile pictures. You can also create a custom home screen for your phone using one of your pictures that includes a banner with instructions for accessing the Orggit ICE service.

The app is very limited in function beyond those nice features, however. Information cannot be added or edited (besides adding the photos), only read. And there is no access at all to the filing cabinet.

Orggit has the capability of holding virtually the entire identity of a user if they use the service to its full potential. The site obviously requires a high level of security. So before I commit a large volume of my data to the site, I wanted to know what security measures are in place to protect my data — and me.

The Orggit’s representatives that I contacted say that the site uses the same standards of security as the National Security Agency to secure customers’ data. They have servers in multiple locations, and those servers are behind a firewall and use the highest-grade Extended Validation SSL Certificates from VeriSign. Orggit also says it encrypts all member passwords, security questions and phishing images with AES 256 bit encryption, “rendering brute force attacks unfeasible.” They also use the VeriSign Extended Validation green address bar to signify to users that they are connected to a legal web site.

Although at first glance Orggit may seem oriented towards personal use, it can have several important business applications. The wallet tab and the ICE service can provide extra security for road warriors. One of the filing cabinet drawers can be configured to hold work documents (an especially critical mission if you are self-employed and have documents like tax returns and articles of incorporation to protect).

Orggit costs $49.99 for an annual subscription. The subscription includes the company’s free iPhone app ; the addition of up to nine family members on the account; auto-reminder service for expiration dates of credit cards, drivers license and passport; 24/7/365 ICE medical records forwarding service; and 5GB of storage space. Added family members must have an email address and get their own “wallet,” medical and accounts/codes section; the filing cabinet is shared between all users. The primary member controls whether family members can see each other’s data or not, and whether they can see the shared file cabinet.

It does take time to enter all of your critical data into an application like Orggit. But in an emergency, having access to that data via Orggit will make the investment of that time seem like a tiny price to have paid.

Do you keep important documents safe with off-site backups?

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But why not buy an iPhone, or a Palm Pre, which I’d had my eye on for several months? The Pre seems to be a good phone, but it doesn’t yet have the apps that the iPhone does. And the monthly fees for Pre service are considerably higher than what I’m paying now. The iPhone’s monthly fees are even higher, and many folks I’ve talked to don’t find it to be a very good phone.

So, keeping my current phone and buying an iPod touch seemed like a good compromise. I can get good Wi-Fi coverage in most areas where I live, so I’ll be able to go online, even without the phone function.

Many of my WWD colleagues already have iPhones. Aliza has recently written about good apps for web workers. Dawn’s shared her favorites, too. But with the holidays coming up, here are some of my ideas for apps to put on that brand-new iPhone or iPod touch:

Communication

• eBuddy. A multi-service instant message client for MSN/Windows Live, AIM, Yahoo, Gtalk, ICQ, Facebook Chat and MySpace Chat. Supports multiple accounts on the same service. Versions for web, Android and other platforms also available. Free.
• Facebook. A well-designed way for Facebook users to keep up with their friends while on the road. The app has had its issues, but they are apparently fixed now. Free.
• Gist. Scott and I have both found Gist useful, and the Gist iPhone app does a pretty good job of presenting a lot of information in a small space. Free.
• LinkedIn. This app keeps LinkedIn users, er, “linked in” from their iPhones and iPod touches. The latest upgrade adds some nice features, including an inbox for LinkedIn messages. Free.
• Nimbuzz. You can use this app to make inexpensive international calls over Wi-Fi. The app also includes a chat function, but it’s pretty rudimentary compared to eBuddy. Free app; rates for calls vary.
• RingCentral. If you’re a RingCentral user, you can use this app to manage your phone messages and more. Free for RingCentral users.
• Tweetie. There are lots of Twitter apps, but so far, I like Tweetie the best. It has a clean interface, and supports multiple Twitter accounts. Thanks for the tip, Darrell! $2.99.
• Waveboard. Mobile access to Google Wave. Will hopes for better access soon; I imagine that this app will become more sophisticated as Wave does. $0.99.

File and Idea Management

• Dropbox. This app is another reason to love Dropbox, which many of us at WWD do. As one would expect from Dropbox, it just works. Free.
• Evernote. My colleagues at WWD like Evernote, too, and I’ve finally seen the light. It’s a great replacement for PhatNotes, which I used to use with various Palm products. (The Palm versions are apparently no longer available.) Free.

News

• Reeder. A very nice and elegant RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader. $0.99.

Just about every news source also has its own iPhone/iPod touch app these days. So far, I’ve been impressed with the ones from NPR and from some news outlets that have used the PodCurry platform.

Password Management

• 1Password. Manage and sync passwords. I’ve been playing with the brand-new version 3, and it’s good enough that I’ve moved from SplashID after many years. Use Dropbox with 1Password to make your password data available on multiple machines. $7.99.
• LastPass. Manage and sync passwords across multiple machines. The Firefox add-on for this service was included in WWD’s Add-Ons Collection. Apps for iPhones and other mobile devices available with premium membership, $12/year.

I’ve barely begun finding fun stuff, but I think I’m off to a good start with the Google Earth app, and TriPeaks Lite. I’m sure that I’ll find more, but I really need to get back to work now. Happy holidays!

What iPhone or iPod touch apps would you recommend for new users?

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So why is email such a hassle?

• It’s more than 30 years old. Email has come a long way, but its underlying protocols haven’t changed much since the 1970s.
• It’s really three different systems. Sending (SMTP) and receiving (POP or IMAP) are totally separate functions, and are often handled on different servers. That’s why I often hear comments like “I can receive, but I can’t send” from clients.
• It’s being used for a lot of things it was never designed to do, like send images and attachments, highly formatted messages, signatures and calendar entries.
• It’s been overrun by spam, and even well-designed spam filters aren’t perfect, and cause unwanted side effects, like messages that get misidentified as spam, or just go away.
• Email software is too complex. These programs that were originally built for offline use; that is, they were set up so that users could read and write messages without being connected to the internet. Sending and receiving would happen in batches. That made sense when internet connections were slow, expensive and charged by the minute. Now that most people have always-on connections like cable or DSL, that process is less necessary. Desktop email client software is a pain to set up and use; as someone who helps many people with email, Outlook is the bane of my existence.
• Many of us connect to the Internet in more than one place — at work, at home, and on cell phones. It can be very frustrating to realize that we’ve left the message we needed to reply to at the office.
• Many of us have more than one email address. I try to keep my work and personal email separate, plus I have a series of email addresses that I use when registering on websites that might try to send spam. And I have several email addresses that were given to me, such as the ones that are automatically created when signing up for instant-messaging services like Yahoo, AIM and Windows Live/MSN.

What can be done to overcome these problems? Here are some tips that might help you and your clients and friends be more productive.

• Get your email on the web. Dump your desktop email software, and switch to Gmail/Google Apps or another online provider like Yahoo. If your Internet connection is unreliable, Google Gears lets you work offline.
• Create a master inbox. If you have multiple email accounts, you can set up forwarding to receive and send email from one place.
• Use IMAP. If you need mobile access to your email, set up your phone software to use IMAP, not POP. By using IMAP, your messages will sync automatically in all of the places you check your mail.
• Use social networks. It seems like all of my friends under 30 don’t do email anymore, but they’re on Facebook a lot.
• Use instant messaging. For short, simple conversations, IM can be very efficient. In a few seconds, you can schedule a meeting or a lunch date. It’s much faster than email or phone conversations.
• Use file-sharing services for sending large documents. There are lots of such services, and new ones are popping up all the time, including Fluxiom and FileShareHQ. And Dropbox and the new Opera Unite service allow you to share files directly from your computer.
• Organize your electronic communications. Celine wrote about this recently, and I’ve talked about it, too.

Oh, and one more:

• Remember your passwords. This is obvious to you and me, but I’ve heard “I didn’t know I had a password” way too often. Online services like LastPass, or programs like 1Password, SplashID, or the free KeePass (Windows and phones; also available for Mac and Linux) can be lifesavers.

How do you keep email simple?

Image by stock.xchng user chris27.

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