Alli's most-used iPhone and iPad apps of 2011

If you look at my iPhone and iPad home screens, you see almost nothing in common. You might think they were owned by two different people. I use them very differently, so have different top apps for each. For the purpose of this year's most-used apps list, I'm limiting myself to the overall top 5 in no particular order. (It's enough I was able to limit to five!)

  • Alli Flowers

Holiday Alarm

Holiday Alarm is dependable enough to wake me every morning for school. It wakes me with the iPod tune of my choice - without my having to remember to make it the active app before going to bed at night. It's programmable, so you don't have to worry about being woken up on national holidays, and you can add in (or remove) additional holidays as fits your personal schedule. I love how I can set it once so that it will wake me early the 2nd weekend of every month for drill. Can't ask for more.

Bejeweled Blitz

Bejewled has been my favorite game since the Palm days. It just gets better, and the latest update is just the Blitz version that pits you against your Facebook friends. A universal app, I play it more now on my iPad than iPhone, but haven't removed it from my iPhone!

DataVault

Ever get to the bank to deposit a check, only to discover that not only do you not have a savings deposit slip, but don't remember what your account number is? I hate to admit the number of times this has happened to me. Or the number of times I show up in someone's classroom to fix their computer, to discover that the latest master password has slipped my remembery. I don't worry about it with DataVault. It remembers everything for me, and syncs to both my Mac and Windows desktop. Did I mention that the next update will have iCloud support so that my iPad and iPhone will sync to each other automagically?

Flipboard

Flipboard was made for the iPad, and while I'm not crazy about it on the small screen of the iPhone, I now get 90% of my news from my Flipboard sources. It's beautiful, it's timely, and it's always with me.

PhotoSync

I like having total control over my photos, whether they originated on my iPhone, or I loaded them to a computer from a digital SLR camera. PhotoSync gives me that control, and more. I can transfer photos and video from/to my iPhone, iPad, desktop easily and quickly. So much more than my Photo Stream!