Best New Application
Notion
Notion is a remarkable newcomer with a highly pliant interface that like Coda and Quip allows you to blend text and tables to create sophisticated, collaborative documents, such as business or marketing plans. Notion goes one step further by offering a Chrome web clipper that, much like Evernote, quickly captures web pages and lets you save clippings to specific folders. We really like its elegant folder interface that can be customized with emoji, a very cool feature. More importantly, if a table includes dates, you can change views to show Kanban boards or calendars.
Notion comes bundled with pre-made templates, including Movie List, Recipes, Yearly Goals, Travel Plans and “Lightweight To-do’s.” Best of all, Notion offers both an iPhone app and a Mac desktop application, making this a surefire hit in the making. Well worth your time exploring.
Website: Notion.so
Price: Free; Basic (1 user, unlimited uploads): $4.00/member/mo.; Team (unlimited users, unlimited uploads): $8.00/member/mo.
Best Digital Banking Application
T-Mobile MONEY
Traditional banks love to charge fees, while offering miniscule interest rates and terrible customer service. T-Mobile MONEY is a clever way to attract 81 million T-Mobile customers with a 4% interest rate on balances up to $3,000, compared to a 0.06% industry average. More importantly, signing up takes less than 10 minutes, if you’re a T-Mobile customer and your debit card shows up in days, both records for the slow-as-molasses banking industry. Both the website and mobile app experience are unparalleled too. Glad someone is giving the banks a run for their money.
Website: Notion
Features: 4% interest; no account fees; 55,000 no-fee ATMs.
Best File Transfer Application
WeTransfer
WeTransfer is an online file-transfer utility that is gorgeously designed and simple to use. It’s a great application designed in Amsterdam.
Website: WeTransfer
Price: Up to 2GB: Free; We Transfer Plus (featuring your own branding and up to 20GB files): $12/mo. or $120/yr.
Best iOS App
Scanbot
Best mobile scanning app. Just snap a pic of your receipt and Scanbot will automatically recognize the edges of the receipt and puts a nice, shadowed rectangle around it while eliminating any distracting background. Conveniently save your scans to iCloud for superior convenience. It’s an app you won’t be able to live without.
Website: Scanbot
Price: Free; Paid Subscription: $4.49 1st year, $22.49 years after 1st.
Best MacOS Application
Scrivener
Can’t live without Scrivener. Organize your life. Scrivener is perhaps the most amazing writing organizer and thought outliner. Designed for book authors, Scrivener lets you organize your writing and thoughts by folder or sub-folder. It can even attach a document to a document. We have started moving all of our writing — whether for book, site, collateral or anything else — into Scrivener. Highly recommended for anyone who does any writing, from business plans or brochures to novels.
Website: Scrivener
Price: $45.00
Best Database Application
Airtable
This company has raised $170 million and is worth more than a $1 billion. We can’t all be wrong, now can we? Airtable works like a spreadsheet but gives you the power of a database to organize anything. Features rich fields that can hold checkboxes, dropdown menus. Has traditional grid, calendar or “kanban” (like Trello) views. Realtime collaboration with commenting and change audit trails is a huge plus. But its most powerful feature may well be its ability to add look-up fields that link to other sheets for data consistency, making Airtable a true relational database.
Website: Airtable
Price: Free (Unlimited bases, 1,200 records/base/2GB attachments/base); Plus (5,000 records per base, supports Blocks and 5GB of data): $10/mo.; Pro (50,000 records per base and 20GB of data): $20/mo.
Best Design Applications
Figma
Figma is a relative newcomer that has taken the world of the design by storm. Its ability to keep up with a global development team is detailed in this case study: “Design At Scale: One Year With Figma.”
Website: Figma
Price: Starter: Free (2 members); Pro (1 editor, unlimited members): $15.00/editor/mo.; Organization (unlimited teams, private projects): $45.00/editor/mo.
Canva
This Aussie company has a better idea about how design should work. Investors have signed on, giving the company a $2.5 billion valuation. Wow! Canva lets you easily create beautiful brochures, social media posts and other design documents. Use Canva’s drag-and-drop feature and professional layouts to design consistently stunning graphics.
Website: Canva
Price: Free; Pro: $12.95/mo.
Best WordPress Applications
Elementor
Elementor is our favorite newWordPress page builder, replacing our previous recommendation, Pro Theme, which is growing long in the tooth. Elementor is unquestionably the best-designed and most powerful WordPress site builder platform available today. It features a superbly designed editor, that is consistent even when used with such Elementor add-ons as Ultimate Addons for Elementor. Elementor effortlessly creates site-wide headers, footers, single-post blog templates, etc.; it also features an extensive elements library, all responsive and pre-templated for fast site design. There are simply too many features to list here. A must-buy for any WordPress blogger or designer.
Website: Elementor
Price: Personal: $49.00/yr.; Plus (3 sites): $99.00/yr.; Expert (1,000 sites): $199.00/yr.
Pirate Ship
Any e-commerce store operator knows that finding a viable shipping solution that is easy to use and fairly flexible is a major challenge. Pirate Ship is a cloud-based platform that seamlessly interfaces with the WooCommerce WordPress plugin and provides cost-effective USPS shipping on labels you can print yourself. It even lets you paste in an address in the browser and it will automatically place the information in the right fields. A much-needed solution that is humorously supported by Bjorn the Pirate.
Website: Pirate Ship
Price: Based on package weight and distance.