16 BEST cloud apps you should be using right now
Why install software when you can do it all in the cloud? We show you the best cloud apps you need to start using right now
If you’re having trouble keeping up with all of your social media accounts, roll them into a single app with Hootsuite, which lets you keep track of five at a time on its free plan, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and up to two RSS feeds. If you need more than that you’ll need to pay for a Pro account, which starts at £7.19 a month and is aimed more at those who use social media as part of their daily work.
Since Twitter bought Tweetdeck and removed the Facebook integration, this is one of the best tools going for keeping a handle on your social world without scooting from app to app and site to site.
Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader
You can thank Apple for this one. Its insistence that any third-parties that sell products through the iPhone, iPad or iPod touch pay it 30% commission has been cited as the inspiration for Amazon creating a browser based reading app, rather than relying entirely on App Store approval for the iOS edition. The result benefits everyone, not only Apple users, as it lets you access your Kindle library through any browser on any device.
Past purchases are immediately ready for reading and, if you’ve left Wi-Fi active on your hardware Kindle or a Kindle app running on your iOS or Android device, you’ll see your current bookmarks, annotations and progress, so books will open up on your current page. If you need to read anything offline – perhaps on your daily commute or a flight – you can download books to your browser cache by right-clicking a cover and selecting Download and Pin Book.
The presentation is tidy and businesslike, with a small selection of text sizes, background colours and margin widths to choose from, as well as options for single or dual column layouts. There are keyboard shortcuts for turning the pages, so you don’t need to keep your mouse in your hand the whole time you’re reading.
The only downside is that you can’t read books that you didn’t originally buy from Amazon through the cloud reader, so if you side-loaded anything onto your physical Kindle by dragging it on over USB it won’t be represented here. For mainstream fiction and non-fiction, though, it’s a great way to keep on top of your reading pile when you find yourself with a few spare moments and no Kindle to hand.
Pocket lets you save web pages you need to read but don’t have time to look at right away. They’re stored in your online Pocket account from which you can read them through a regular browser or synchronise them to various client applications for Windows, OS X, Chrome, iOS and Android. Rather neatly it’s also been integrated with the latest raft of e-readers from Kobo, which you can pick up in WHSmith. That means you can read your stored content on an e-ink screen.
It doesn’t just save down the HTML and CSS underpinning your articles and reproduce them wholesale, though: it goes further than this, and reformats them for distraction-free reading, retaining any embedded images but stripping out the surrounding adverts and other page furniture.
Once you’ve completed an article you can either delete it or store it in your archive, at which point it’s removed from your Pocket queue, but retained for future reference. A built in search engine and tag system makes it easy to find both new and old stored content, and the service is free, allowing you to clip an unlimited range of content.
To this end, very prolific hoarders of online content will likely welcome the new highlights feature in the latest update – Pocket 5.0 – which picks out trending, ‘impactful’, long or short reads, so you should never have trouble finding the best content from your library to fill a gap on a long commute.
