APPS FOR WORLDSCHOOLERS
There you are out in the great big world, or about to be there, and you realize that the world is, well, very big. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some trusty digital backup? These apps have your back! Need to do some translating? Want to learn another language? Do you need to organize your work? What about a cool way to check out places you want to visit? Here are some apps to get you started. (And a free new word to add to your vocabulary: Freemium: An app that is free and has a paid option that has more features.)
General Work Apps and Tools
A freemium service that takes a really very quite exceedingly long URL and makes it short.
A freemium service that has thousands of templates for flyers, resumes, brochures, posters, logos, and more. (We’ve linked to the pricing page because the homepage, annoyingly, has a sign-up box that won’t go away unless you navigate from the pricing page.)
A membership site that allows you to find workspaces (including internet) using a number of schemes including pay-per-use, 3-day subscription, 10-day subscription, or unlimited subscription.
A free tool that allows you to find and use openly licensed and public domain works.
A subscription support/social group for women who work remotely that seeks to create community and support for women.
A subscription app that works on Macs, Windows, Apple, Android, and Chrome and allows you to selectively block websites, apps, or the entire internet in order to help you stay focused on your work.
A tool that controls the lighting of your screen so that your computer looks like indoor lights in the evening and, in the morning, it looks like sunlight again.
A freemium app that keeps track of all your passwords leaving with just one password to remember to gain access to all your accounts.
This app is available for both Chrome and Firefox and it temporarily replaces your Facebook feed with an inspirational quote so you don’t fall down the Facebook rabbit hole when you are trying to get work done.
This freemium app replaces a new tab page with a personal dashboard featuring to-do, weather, links, and inspiration and has features you can add to further personalize your experience.
A freemium app that produces background noise designed to help you focus on what you’re doing without being intrusive.
A workspace browser that collects all of your most frequently used applications into one in one place without having to have each one open in a separate tab and it offers a fully functional free version as well as a pro one with lots of bells and whistles.
A free app that reminds you to take a short break once an hour and a micro-break every few seconds every 15 minutes.
Thousands of free images, backgrounds, and textures that you can use for social media, webpages, or promotional literature.
Marketing and Social Media Apps
Be.live, Facebook Live, and Zoom
All three of these allow you to live stream and hold meetings directly from your phone, tablet, or computer. Facebook Live is free and meets the basic requirements, while Be.live and Zoom require monthly subscriptions but do offer more features.
An email too with excellent customer support (live chat, phone calls, email, community support, and a vast library of helpful resources), access to easy tracking and reporting, built-in social media sharing tools, free image library, list segmentation, Facebook ads integration, and eCommerce integration.
Hootsuite and SmarterQue
Both of these paid apps allow you to integrate various social streams into one homepage, see all of your account activity in real-time, type and store drafts, easily select where you want to post, and choose to post immediately or later.
Due to its brand recognition and the fact that it’s free, Google Analytics is the biggest name in website and mobile app intelligence while it has a steep learning curve it is still an awesome business intelligence tool.
A free Google app that aggregates mentions of your brand and sends you an email each day containing all the references.
A cloud-based business dashboard application tool that makes critical data accessible, visible, and transparent.
This landing page builder packs a ton of features into an easy to use drop and drag editor which makes it a great tool if you want to collect emails or have people take a specific action.
A free handy way to make a single link that links to all of your social media accounts by inserting your account links than adding the one Linktree Link to your profile..
Snapseed
A free photo editing tool for Android or iPhone that packs a lot of tools into one place, but if you are not doing heavy editing, just stick with the tools already on Instagram.
Termsfeed is a freemium easy to use privacy policy generator for your app or webpage, but only the paid version will include the necessary language only the premium versions include sections for GDPR, CCPA, and CalOPPA international laws. Cookie Notice is a free WordPress Plugin that helps you comply with the EU GDPR cookie law and CCPA regulations.
An easy to use freemium service that allows you to create attractive surveys with a good balance of function and usability.
Workflow Apps
This freemium content creation app doesn’t revolutionize the writing process, but it has a few cool features including drag and drop content cards and one-click WordPress importing.
An online-based proposal software tool that integrates well with other online tools and helps you to create solid proposals quickly and efficiently and comes with great customer support which is worth the monthly fee if you write a significant number of proposals each month.
A subscription app that allows you to schedule meetings, sync meetings to your calendar, and show others your open time blocks; it also integrates with Zapier.
Dropbox and Google Drive
These are cloud-based storage apps. Dropbox is a subscription service that offers 2 to 5 TB of storage is a subscription and has a free trial if you try out the teams (instead of the personal) version and it has phone support, while Google Drive is a freemium service that comes with 15 GB of storage and the option to purchase more.
An awesome freemium app that works on all platforms that checks grammar, punctuation, and spelling and has additional tools for a fee.
Cloud-based shareable documents and spreadsheets which, unlike MS Word, are completely free.
Google Keep and Evernote
Google Keep and Evernote is a freemium app. Both programs have powerful features and extensions that work in Google Chrome and Firefox, however, Google Keep is more strictly a note-taking app best used by students or more casual notetakers, while Evernote can be used for team collaboration and is more at home in a professional context.
A freemium online tool with limited functionality in its free version, but it offers a good breakdown of your writing in terms of readability, verb and adjective choices, and use of passive voice as well as limited formatting capabilities. (Be sure to write someplace else and then cut and paste your document as there is no save in the free version.)
A freemium cross-platform app that lets you send a short video instead of typing out an email.
A nice tool if you need to get a handle on exactly where your time is going. It has a 14-day free trial which is long enough for the tool to automatically track the time you spend on apps, websites, and even specific documents without timers or any manual entry.
A subscription app that can identify important messages, hide distractions, provide do not disturb, banish annoying senders, remind you to follow up, and more.
Global World Clock App and Synchronize App
These are two Time zone apps. The Global World Clock is a free app for Android phones that gives you everything you want in a clock app including time zones, reminders, timers, a calendar, offline functionality, an alarm, and more. After a lot of searching, we couldn’t find a time zone app for Apple that matches (or even comes close to) the functionality of the Android one, but the Synchronize app is a good basic forward time-shifting app that allows you to easily check and project time across multiple time zones.
A tool for desktops, androids, iPhones, or tablets that helps you manage and keep track of the time you spend on each project either in real-time or as a scheduling assistance.
Two freemium apps, Trello and Asana are both built to help you visualize and tackle tasks with a view to completing projects. Trello is visually appealing and ideal for smaller teams, and Asana is comparatively daunting, but also more powerful particularly when it comes to delegating tasks and managing multiple projects.
This is another freemium app that connects to the apps you are already using to automate repetitive tasks, so you can focus on other work.
Website Tools
A tool that helps you to develop color palettes for your site (or any promotional work).
A plugin that works with WordPress and blocks spam comments on your webpage and is free for personal use.
Allows you to exclude yourself from webpage metrics so you can go to your page as often as you like without worrying about skewing your numbers.
Tons of free fonts to make your page stand out.
An inexpensive place to check if a domain is available, buy it, and, if you want, set up a one-page website.
Instead of linking to a specific keyword tool, we have linked to this blog page. Check out the first section about Free Keyword Research Tools.
This freemium tool lets you manage multiple WordPress websites in one place.
This is a paid WordPress plugin that helps you to manage your members by granting and revoking their access to posts, pages, videos, categories, tags, feeds, communities, digital files, and more based on the memberships they have.
A freemium WordPress plugin designed to allow you to track analytics across sites. It lets you choose which sites to track and which program you use to track them.
Portent’s Content Idea Generator
A free fun tool that takes your keywords and creates article titles using them (just don’t take it too seriously).
A great tool for compressing jpegs so that your website loads more quickly.
A site with a lot of useful information about website building, plugin use, and digital marketing.
A must-have plugin to help protect your site from hackers that is free with WordPress, but has some pay levels if you need increased or specialized security.
The place to create your web presence. It has tons of themes, lots of pricing options, including a free one, and it works with a huge number of plugins to make your website work exactly the way you want it to work.
This is a freemium WordPress plugin whose free version is fully functional. It performs full manual or scheduled backups of all your WordPress files, databases, plugins, and themes, and restores them directly from your WordPress control panel.
A freemium plugin for WordPress that solves a lot of technical SEO issues that might otherwise plague your page (and you).
Travel Apps
This site has some of the best hotel prices around for well-located places to stay particularly in Asia.
Find medium and short terms rentals all over the world including private houses, apartments, and rooms for rent.
You put in the starting point and the destination and this site will give the cheapest fare it can find and the dates you can use that fare.
This service provides proof of onward travel by air when you can’t enter a country without proof of onward travel. Best of all, it is really cheap and they promise to email your ticket within 5-30 minutes of your booking, are open 24/7 and the tickets can be extended for 20 days for free.
A membership to a network of over 500 coworking spaces around the world whose self-stated mission is to create a collaborative global coworking scene without the hassle.
A free app that helps you to learn a language and has almost 100 languages available.
A monthly subscription language learning app that focuses on pronunciation and learning through association instead of memorization.
This is a site that covers all things air travel including the latest news about airlines and air travel and a forum where you can talk to other frequent flyers.
Translates between over 100 languages, but it is not always completely accurate.
These are two mediation apps that are both good, but different. Headspace is more structured, gives you the experience of taking an in-person class, and offers some short meditations. Calm offers more open-ended sessions as well as adult and child meditations and ambient music and sleep guidance.
A tool to help you find which cities around the world appeal to you. The cities are ranked by their friendliness to travelers and digital nomads, and the site has lots of other useful information about the cities and is constantly updated.
A desktop or mobile app that compares allows you to sort and manage passports (if you have more than one) and includes useful info such as how long your passport allows you to stay in a country/region and whether or not you need a visa to visit.
This site tracks the cheapest flights and error fares and lists them on one page.
A great tool for finding cheap flights and if you type everywhere in the destination box it gives you the cheapest flights to everywhere you can fly to on the date you entered.
You can make internet calls for free with Skype and you can call to any phone on a pay per call or monthly subscription basis.
This freemium app allows you to keep track of borrowing and lending over time, and until the balance is settled up, each person’s outstanding balance may go up and down.
Vetted long term rentals that show you a video walkthrough and a layout map. They charge a fee to the renter and are available in a only in a few western European cities.
This free app has daily UV forecasts, lets you know how long you can stay outside before getting a sunburn, lets you know how much sunscreen to apply based on your size and clothing choice, and can highlight key features of your specific sunscreen via barcode scanning.
This tool helps you explore places to live or visit based on criteria that you select including infrastructure, quality of life, and cost of living.
This site shows you flight deals, airline reviews, and credit card advice so you can maximize your points. It also has a ticker that shows you exactly what your rewards points are worth in cash.
This tool offers time conversion, meeting planners, a custom world clock, and all the time zones in the world all in an easy to use fun to explore package.
A very inexpensive way to send money abroad either online or from a mobile device that can be used with a credit/debit card, Apple Pay, or a bank account with no markup and low fees.
A free app for iOS or Android that allows you to track your travel expenses without the need to use wifi and supports over 200 currencies and allows you to convert directly within the app.
A freemium app that allows you to organize all your trips and trip info in one place, and with the reasonably priced pro version, you get a seat tracking, alternative flight monitor, and a cheaper flight monitor.
TrustedHousesitters is the largest platform that connects people looking for house/pet sitters with people looking to house/pet sit all over the world.
A monthly subscription internet privacy tool that lets you browse the web without restrictions, download files anonymously, send private emails, and protect your data.
This app helps you find a ride or get food delivered.
A freemium app whose free version lets you keep track of accounting, invoicing, and receipts with pay-per-use payment transactions and monthly rates for payroll services.
This app uses your phone or computer’s WiFi connection to securely facilitate messaging and voice with end-to-end encryption calling in over 180 countries but only to people who have the app. (Note: You can’t call emergency services using Whatsapp.)
This monthly subscription app lets you track your spending in real-time, uses color-coding to alert you to your current spending, and allows for multiple currencies.
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