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For your app-roval: My horrifying digital dependencies
My phone now has earned the twitch status of my wallet, my hand reflexively tapping whatever pocket it should be in, creating a giant flux of anxiety if it's not there. Worse still, inside sits tiny voids of dependency that exist to control the tire fire that is my brain. My iPhone 6 plus is at times (along with my Chief of Staff) all that stands between me and catastrophic failure. Here are the little buttons I press to stop my world ending.
I require medicine to exist, as many people in the world do. In my case it's for anxiety and ADHD, which are conditions that you'll find compounded if you miss even one dose. Most pill trackers on most devices suck like working in a vacuum factory. Medisafe, which I found by accident, is the only one that's got the simple things you need from these apps:
You can easily enter in your medicines.
It has a database of medications so that it doesn't say "BUHHH?" when you enter something obvious, and put in the number of pills you have.
It's really easy to tell it when you took it, and it reminds you to do so.
You can handle both as-needed and time-specific medications.
You'd think that making a medication-tracking app would be easy, but it turns out most companies making these apps are bad at it. Medisafe's great. It even pings my Chief of Staff if I don't take them, so that if I forget and also ignore my reminders (which I would never do, except all of the times I do it). I found the app by accident, and it's become the one I use all the time.
Full disclosure: At one point, Doorman was my client. I didn't do a very good job for them. Partly because I didn't live in San Francisco (I was in North Carolina), we all day and I also didn't trust people to not steal packages from my doorstep. Thus I went back to the service that I'd not truly understood I needed.
It's simple: Doorman gives you an address that you can have packages sent to. Doorman has people at that address and they accept your packages. You pay a fee (either per-package or monthly) and on the app tell them to deliver it at a certain time window, after 6pm (through midnight), which you can choose depending on your plan.
I use them at least 4 times a week, and if I didn't I'd probably lose the 49 different things I order daily from Amazon. Thank you, people who deliver to me, and I'm so sorry about the very large objects I order.
I remember seeing the launch of Workflow and thinking "man, what kind of lazy idiot would use this!" only to adopt it the moment I got my new Apple Watch. The commands you can enter into Workflow use the combinations of different app access to save me a bunch of time but also do things faster (and more accurately) than I can often do with my huge, horrifying fingertips. For example, connected to my watch, I can poke at Workflow in two taps to say "from my location, get an Uber to take me home." This hails an Uber, tells the Uber where I am, then tells the Uber where I'm going. Alternatively, I can when I take a bunch of photos, I can get them uploaded to Dropbox (away from my easily-breakable phone) in one tap. That's magic. That is what magic is. Workflow makes me feel like a Steampunk Prince From The 23rd Dimension.
It's very cool to dislike Microsoft, especially if you're using an Apple machine to type on and an Apple phone and an Apple Watch and everything technological you use regularly is Apple. I am fortune's fool - I use Outlook, as it's the best email client and life-organizer I have. It's the best email client on the iPhone, with the ability to search your actual emails (unlike the Apple mail client, which rarely works properly for me), and lets you connect all of your various cloud storage services and attach things from them. It's also remarkably intelligent, noticing the attachments you've been sent and allowing you to send them elsewhere, either via email or the cloud. It's also - and I'm surprised how few people know this - a great calendar app that syncs with Google's very neatly. Finally, it's got support for the 4 different email aliases I have. These are all important things to me in my professional and personal life, and I'm utterly surprised that Microsoft is the only company to competently handle them.
In Conclusion:
I'm a terrible human being that is reliant on technology and technology-related accessories.
