My Top-10 Apps for iOS

There are several iPad apps I use almost every day. These are my go-to apps that let me do the work, send the invoices and pay the bills. The list below are my top-10 apps that I use specifically to do my job as a web developer who specializes in Drupal-based sites. I am not listing Dropbox here, as anyone who uses an iPad for anything at all should already be very familiar with (and in love with) Dropbox. If you don't have Dropbox, go to the App Store right now and get it!

Development and Testing 

iSSH: This is the keystone. No way could I be a serious (well... to me anyway) developer without SSH (using a public and private key) access to my development and production servers. With Drush and SSH I can handle all my update tasks, build new sites, move and copy files... almost anything I need to do. I will confess, however, complex file management on a command-line sucks really bad on any platform, which is why I use iSSH to start a VNC service and run it just long enough to do my file management work on my servers. Yeah, I know, the Linux server purists will be aghast at the idea of running Gnome, but it's only for a few minutes at a time and I kill the VNC process when I am done.

Textastic: Best text-editor in the app store. Textastic allows me to connect to my servers using SSH (using a public and private key), as well as edit files on Dropbox. The syntax highlighting is great and the stability is fantastic. It's a deep program and I still have not mastered every part of it. Buy for slinging code around servers, it's the best. 

Jump: Jump allows me to connect to VirtualBox systems using RDP. The interface is very good, and its intuitive handling of the mouse is second only to VNC Viewer. I use this because I need to test CSS and javascripts on various platforms and browsers. By running my VM in VirtualBox headless on my wife's iMac, I can hit them with this app and never bug her for time at the iMac. I was a tweet-whore for this one. They were giving away a free copy if you tweeted some shit about them, so I did, and I got it, and I am really glad I did.

VNC Viewer: I tried all the VNC clients in the app store (well. not the really expensive ones). Since I have used RealVNC on Windows for a long time, I decided to give the "official" iPad VNC client a try. Wow, this is a great app! The way you move the pointer around is so cool, even though you don't have a mouse on the ipad. That design is simply the best and most intuitive way to control a remote mouse-centric interface I have ever seen. While I wish it would maintain a connection while you switch to another app, I understand the memory constraints, and when I have a lot of apps open, my otherwise-stable Jump app does occasionally crash. VNC Viewer is extremely reliable, even after using it for hours.

Social and Communications

The next four apps are "social" apps, whatever that means. I suppose they involve interacting with other people, but so does Fuze Meeting. Anyway, these are the apps I use to communicate with clients. I don't list the Mail app here because anyone with an iPad should already know and love that awesome app. 

BeejiveIM: Dumb name, superb app. While very few updates to an app often mean an inattentive developer, this one gets few updates because it's rock-solid and totally reliable. I used IM+ for a while, but looked bad to some customers because they went through a period of terrible reliability. I never went back to IM+ and have grown to rely on BeejiveIM. In fact, on my new iPad, I don't even have the various backup apps I had for when IM+ would fail. 

Flipboard: For consuming tweets and Facebook updates, nothing else comes close. I feel that I need to read my customer's and peer's tweets even though I really don't want to. Flipboard turns the twitter feed and Facebook updates into a great experience. You can flip through nicely laid-out pages and before you know it, you're done. In addition, you can post and retweet, which means I can do everything I need right there.

Fuze Meeting: You have to show clients stuff. I generally run the Fuze meeting from my iPad and walk them through the site on their own system using screen-sharing. Sometimes I run Fuze on a VM and show it that way. After using WebEx for many years, a one-meeting test of Fuze has show just of really bad WebEx is. WebEx basically works, but so many little parts are totally screwed up, and those are areas experienced WebEx users simply accept as broken. Just try Fuze Meeting for the 30-day trial and you will never go back.

Colloquy: I use a lot of open source products (Drupal, PHP, Apache etc.) and for me, the best support for them is found in IRC. Colloquy is what I used on the Mac, and it's what I use on the iPad. Fantastic app, very stable. My only quibble is if you have the app running in the background, the time limit before it logs you out is too short. To other people it must look like I keep rebooting my computer or lose connection. However, getting support there has saved by bacon many times. One last note is my cloud server host (Linode) has a great channel there too, and extremely knowledgeable Linux-heads hang out there. That, in particular, has really been helpful. 

iPhone Apps 

Finally there are two iPhone apps I use on my iPhone that are closely related to these iPad apps listed here. I keep them on my iPhone because I always have my iPhone, and these are for when I get the terrible text/email/IM/call that something is very wrong with a customer site I manage. 

Drupad: This should really be on my iPad too, but I dislike running apps on my iPad that are not designed for it. Anyway, you can do a ton of management activity for a Drupal site using Drupad. It allows you to manage users, run cron and other tasks without having to go though the process of logging into Drupal and burrowing through the pathetic admin system (I love Drupal, don't love the admin interface, although some modules make it much better). 

Linode: I use Linode for my server hosting. They are the best! They have a great iphone app that allows me to mange my servers from my phone. I can manage my DNS records, drop and attach a drive, reboot, and a lot of other things that are needed in an emergency situation to get a site back up and running after an unforeseen circumstance. As far as the iPad goes, the Linode dashboard site looks and runs fantastic on the iPad, so I am very satisfied with managing my servers that way if my iPad is nearby. This app is only for the iPhone and I understand why.

One of my favorite stories about the last two app is when I was sitting on the toilet at my local Costco. While doing my business I got a text from a client that their site was not coming up properly. It was coming up enough to where my site monitoring service did not get an obvious error to send me an alert, but it was certainly not running. Before I wiped, I had removed some corrupted content from a Drupal site, rebooted the server, and verified the system was back up and running. 

TMI? Maybe. Great software? Absolutely.