[App]cessorise

For those of us old enough to remember, there was actually a time before the Internet and its supporting browsers were the key applications we used.

Way back then, in the early nineties, the first applications we touched were all pretty serious. Perhaps ‘serious’ is not the right term; instead let’s call them ‘work-related’: word processors, spreadsheets and even the dreaded-by-some PowerPoint style presentations.

These days, apps have their own hierarchy. Games sit at one end of the spectrum with social, entertainment, data storage and even so-called ‘lifestyle’ apps now all fitting into their neatly defined place in the software application universe. This evolution meant that work apps for the office then needed a formal name or classification; and so it was that the term ‘productivity applications’ was born.

Productivity apps started out under a sort of de facto taxonomy that was mainly determined by the constituent components of Microsoft’s Office suite: word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, are in this group. Microsoft itself extends its definition of productivity apps to email, project management tools, document sharing and collaboration software and even diagram and flowcharting apps for the serious admin junkie.

Today though productivity apps fill an even broader space where calculators have morphed to become snazzy expense tracker tools, and alarm clocks have become world time zone apps with rich graphical representations of the world. There are even language translation offerings with speech recognition and voice playback.

If you are prepared to truly forget the inefficient and old-fashioned notion of a paper and pen or pencil, then you can move to an online diary app to boost your productivity. As basic as this sounds, diaries and to-do list apps remain hugely popular with new versions being constantly developed all the time.

Let’s face the facts; there will come a time in the not too distant future when Post-It Notes cease to exist in paper form because we just won’t use them anymore. How far can some of the better productivity apps take us today?

Apple Pages

If you really need to write and edit documents on your iPad, then Pages is arguably better than almost any other app in this space. The ubiquity of Apple iPad devices has ensured widespread popularity for the firm’s own paid-for word processing app. But inconsistencies and document format incompatibilities do exist, plus the internationalisation factor definitely requires attention. Localised support for the Gulf region and its many dialects appears to be lacking at this stage; there is even a Facebook group called “Apple!! We want Arabic (RTL) Support in iWork (Pages) for Mac & iOS” with the RTL of course denoting user demand for Right-To-Left text support.

Passwords Managers

Password managers occupy a thorny space on the global productivity applications map. Love them or hate them, many people find them a useful means of collating and thus managing our ever-burgeoning list of PINs, keywords and entry phrases. New users to Windows 8 will find a free app on the Microsoft store imaginatively entitled ‘Password Supervisor’,similar to offerings on Android and other platforms.

BlackBerry users will find the descriptively named ePassword Free among the higher rated no-cost options in this space just now. It has to be said that support for Arabic and almost any other non-Roman script is non-existent in this space, but given the impetus to move towards ‘gesture-based’ password swipes, this imbalance may now feel some weight of correction.

Speech Recognition

Rather more international in its outlook is the Boston-based firm Nuance with its Dragon Naturally Speaking, Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search apps. Since last year these have been made available in parts of the Gulf including the UAE and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Applications for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad are now available for free on country-specific app stores supporting the standard Arabic language, plus English versions too of course. According to a 2012 Arab Advisors survey of mobile phone users in Saudi Arabia, 47 percent of respondents who use applications prefer to use them in the Arabic language.

You can use these apps to dictate SMS text messages, emails, social media updates, mobile web searches and more. Nuance claims that its software can work “up to five times faster” than typing, so give it a go.

Office for free

At the end of the day, if you really want to be productive, you’re going to need an Office-style suite of applications in the traditional Microsoft style. If you work in a company with Microsoft-only policy, or under corporate guidelines that mean you can’t change software vendors - then no problem and great for you, the tools are powerful and very functional. If you have freedom of choice, then try LibreOffice instead. This full-featured Office-style productivity suite is a “near drop-in replacement” for Microsoft’s software and it is completely free across a range of platforms. It even comes with Arabic language support through what it calls its “Complex Text Layout” (CTL) function. You could consider the also free of charge OpenOffice now owned by Oracle, but take it from your reporter who has followed the open source newswires for some years - Oracle is busy selling databases, stick to LibreOffice for now.