You’ve heard “there’s an app for that,” and with each day, that statement becomes even truer. Here, we’ve collected five of our current favorites. Each of them has definite business benefits and also lets you have a little fun while getting things done.
All tools are free unless indicated otherwise.
1.) Awesome Screenshot 
Awesome Screenshot is a screen capture and image annotation tool that allows you to not only capture your screen, but edit, annotate, blur the background, add comments and more. It also provides a place to host and share your images as well.
The Awesome Screenshot Chrome plug-in has more than 2 million users, and it is available for other browsers, as well as an app for iOS or Android devices through their respective app stores.
2.) Sidekick
Sidekick by HubSpot takes your email to a whole new level with tools for email profiles, tracking and scheduling within your own email client, including Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail.
Email profiles by Sidekick show you a variety of useful information about your contacts – including things like work history, location, mutual contacts, email history and more – turning your email into a powerful CRM tool.
Tracking is a great addition to those of us who use Gmail, Outlook or Apple Mail for our business communication. With Sidekick you can see, in real time, when someone opens or clicks one of your emails. Sidekick tracks when, where, how many times and on what device your message was opened. Now it’s easy to tell if someone hasn’t responded to you intentionally or just hasn’t had a chance to open your mail yet.
A feature that hasn’t been rolled out yet, but is promised soon, is email scheduling. Now you can prepare your message and choose when in the future you’d like your contact to receive it. For the forgetful among us (including me!), this feature can be used to email a reminder to yourself … from the future!
3.) Mightytext
One of the most popular features in the last Apple OS X operating system update was the ability to send and receive your SMS and MMS messages on your laptop or iPad using your phone number. Mightytext makes those features available to Android users. Using your Android phone number, Mightytext lets you text from your computer or tablet, with all SMS and MMS messages staying synchronized in your phone’s SMS inbox.
Additional tools include notifications on your computer from your phone’s apps (like SnapChat, WhatsApp and Instagram), instant video and photo syncing, filters, templates, texting directly from Gmail and more. Mighty, indeed!
4.) Jumpcut
If you work regularly in Apple’s OSX operating system, you’ve undoubtedly been frustrated by the limited function of the clipboard, which only allows you to copy and paste one item at a time. Jumpcut remedies this shortcoming by allowing you to access all of the text you’ve cut or copy for an entire day, easily accessible through a button on your menu bar. Jumpcut is a simple fix for an annoying limitation of the OSX operating system.
5.) HootSuite
Last but in no way least, is a favorite of business professionals who spend a lot of time managing multiple social media accounts. Hootsuite provides, well, a suite, of tools – desktop, mobile app, web clipper, campaigns – to make your social media more effective and easier to manage. Hootsuite interfaces with 25 different social media networks, including the biggies like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, providing a central place for your social media where you can monitor, engage, respond, schedule and upload messages in bulk.
Additional tools like listening, collaboration and analytics help make sense out of what can sometimes be an overwhelming social media landscape. For those who wish to dive deeper, Hootsuite can provide the data and visualization of that information to help you recognize trends, measure sentiment, create reports and more.
Hootsuite offers a free plan, with various levels of paid service. Hootsuite currently services more than 10 million users, including companies like Oakley, Siemens, Levi’s and ebay.
We hope you’ve found something on this list that can help make your day a little bit easier and maybe a little bit more fun. What are some of your favorite go to apps? Let us know in the comments.
