Homefiniti and Beyond – Apps We Love – S2E1

In the first episode of Homefiniti & Beyond for 2021, I covered one of my favorite topics…apps. I love a shiny new tech toy and am always wowed by bells, whistles and the promise that the product will change my life/ save me time / make my life easier. Below is a list of 18 tools that my coworkers and I swear by for work and personal life. 

1. 1. A Color Story – This is a photo editing app for your phone. I love it because it combines already made filters and effects with manual photo editing tools in a format that I find super easy to use as a non professional. I like it so much I am willing to pay the annual fee to have access to the full suite of tools, filters and effects.
   2. ACDSee Pro. – Peter, also has a photo editing and picture taking app that he loves. He says he never used the regular Apple camera app to take a photo except when he wants to take a panoramic photo. He likes the photo taking and editing features and does pay for the pro version.
   3. Amphetamine – (the app, not the drug) – A simple Mac app that allows you to keep your Mac from going to sleep for an hour, or two, or indefinitely. Believe it or not, a prior version of this app was 
   4. called “Caffeine”
   5. BeLive – This is what we use to broadcast Homefinit & Beyond. Someone recommended it to us and we’ve been using it since day one. It makes it easy to add graphics, guests and photos as well as scheduling, editing and sharing the finished product. 
   6. Calm – What can we say, in the midst of the 13th month of 2020, we could all use a little zen.  
   7. Camtasia – This handy dandy tool is a favorite of our digital producer, Jenna. She uses it to film tutorials for how to use Homefiniti. The app lets you screenshot video of your screen while also recording audio.
   8. Canva – This makes me look almost like a real graphic designer. It’s evolved over the years and offers a whole host of templates, photos, fonts and more to allow you to create graphics, gifs and even video. I use it to make all the graphics for this show and also to create templated photos and video for Facebook ads. It’s a real life saver.
   9. Data Studio – How do I love Data Studio, let me count the ways! Seriously. This app makes analyzing and reporting so so so much easier. And it’s free. We use it to pull in all kinds of metrics from various platforms. Once that data is pulled in we use a feature that lets us make custom metrics and build reports that show super granular data that’s easy to read and comprehend.
   10. Divvy – This one is a Dennis recommendation. It’s a Mac app to help manage screen space allocation for multiple apps. So when you’ve got a thousand apps open, you can better see what you’re working with.
   11. Giphy Capture — At ONeil we take our memes seriously and what better way to win the meme game than to generate your own gifs? No but seriously, this has actual work applications as well. It’s a super easy, super handy Mac app that captures anything on your screen and turns it into an animated gif. We use it to create gifs for our portfolio so we can show off cool features. 
   12. GoFullPage – This app is a chrome extension that is popular with many ONeil team members. It lets you get the whole webpage, not just what’s showing “above the fold” on your screen. An invaluable tool that you can use more often than you might think. 
   13. Google Photos – Google’s got it going on in our app list. For it’s second appearance, I bring you the Google Photos app for your phone. I use it on my iphone to store all my photos so I don’t have to pay for the Apple Cloud or buy a phone with a grotesque amount of storage. I also use it to curate an album for my family each year. The search functionality is pretty awesome as well since it’s got great facial recognition. And of course there’s the added bonus of being able to easily access my photos from anywhere. 
   14. Google Widgets on my iphone – For its third appearance, Google has taken advantage of the new widgets functionality on iOS and since we use the whole Google Suite for work, I now have a screen on my phone dedicated to work with a widget for gmail, drive, and calendar. Highly recommend adopting the use of widgets on your iphone. Android users have had this functionality for some time and it’s worth the hype.
   15. Grammarly – I may have been an English major but I’m still prone to grammatical and spelling errors. Grammarly to the rescue. This app and chrome extension make blog writing, Google doc editing, emailing and more much easier. It catches errors and mistakes far more often than the average spellcheck and I’m forever grateful that it’s elevated my writing game so substantially. 
   16. Image Downloader – This one is a real time saver. It’s a chrome extension that you can use to pull photos from a website. I use it when I’m creating first round drafts of Facebook ads and most of the time the resolution is high enough for those that I don’t ever need to ask for the hi res versions from clients. You can download one image at a time or the whole kit and kaboodle from a specific page.  
   17. Redbooth – This is our project management app. It functions for our web development team and our marketing department and keeps us all in line on projects. It’s easy to use, has a clean interface and offers phone apps as well.
   18. Supermetrics – This works hand in hand with Data Studio and allows you to pull in data from Facebook, Instagram and more. Data Studio wouldn’t be nearly as useful without it. Real time reporting straight from Facebook is a dream. 

So there you have it, 18 apps, extensions and tools that we use regularly. Let me know (molly@oneiulinteractive.com) if any of these are new to you and if you try them out. Tune in on January 22 for our 4th Quarter 2020 Digital Marketing for Home Builders Benchmarks Report.