Author: Brian Beam

As someone who runs a freelance consulting business, it’s important to track my time accurately so that I can bill my clients properly, and there just so happens to be a plethora of standalone timekeeping apps available for iOS.

How do you wade through this crowded category in order to find an app that’s right for you? Fortunately, I’ve done some leg work for you, but time tracking can be rather detailed and everyone has different needs and preferences. My criteria may not exactly match yours. Luckily, many of these apps provide limited free versions so that you can try them out before making a commitment of time and money.

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I spend lots of time listening to music on my iPhone. I don’t consider myself an audiophile but I’m always on the lookout for ways to tweak the quality of the audio coming out of my device. The built-in iOS Music app provides quite a few stock equalizer settings to choose from, and I’ve looked at a few other audio-enhancing music apps, but I can’t help thinking that there’s something better out there. So I thought I’d give GoodHertz‘s $3 CanOpener—for Headphones a spin.

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How often are you at an event and you thought about documenting the moment, but you either didn’t have time, or it wasn’t appropriate to be fiddling with your iPhone? Then, later, recording your thoughts simply wasn’t a priority, the memory had faded or you had simply forgotten. For me, that includes most parties, birthdays and weddings I’ve ever attended or hosted, and countless trips and interesting daily events.

If that also describes you, then you might find Heyday by Hey as useful as I have. Heyday is a free photo/video journaling tool for your iPhone or iPod touch that continuously and automatically chronicles your photos, videos and locations, then lets you add your witty commentary whenever you have the time or inspiration.

When you first open the app, it walks you through a quick tutorial and asks that you grant it access to your photos and location data. (Make sure that you grant it the access it wants otherwise you’ll severely limit the app’s usefulness.) After that, you’re prompted to create an account; you can either log in via Facebook or create an account with an email address and password. After you’ve finished those tasks, then Heyday builds a timeline for you, organizing your existing photos and videos by day, time and location. You can then scroll through each moment, adding notes, deleting unwanted location points and working with your photos.

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[Disclosure: Q Branch developers John Gruber, Brent Simmons, and Dave Wiskus have written articles for Macworld in the past. Gruber is currently a Macworld senior contributor.]

The App Store is chock full of note taking apps and all of them try to distinguish themselves in various ways. Vesper: Elegant Notes by Q Branch is a $5 (it’s available for $3 during the holidays) iOS note taking app that singles itself out from the pack in terms of its simplicity and flexibility. Vesper is about as simple an app as you can imagine (note taking or otherwise), and that’s a compliment, not a criticism. As a software developer, I constantly strive for simplicity, both of purpose and design. This is not an easy goal to achieve; it’s natural for developers to want to say “yes” to adding lots of cool features, but it requires focus and discipline to say “no” to many of those in order to avoid cluttering the app and confusing your users. It’s obvious that the developers at Q Branch share these same values.

Because the app’s so simple, getting up to speed with Vesper is very easy. When you open the app, you’re greeted with a few pre-existing notes tagged as Tutorial, which are just that. After reading those four notes, you should have a good handle on everything the app can do.

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