One great thing about being a web designer is that you can often work outside a traditional office setting. And with subnotebooks and powerful tablets in abundance, it also means you don’t need to be at your desk to actually get meaningful work done.
If you have an iPad, you can probably take care of some emergency web design or development tasks from poolside, as long as you have the proper app for the job. Now I wouldn’t recommend attempting to design and build a complete web site from your iPad, but with some of these clever tools, you can at least put out small fires … or just laze around the pool taking your brain for a walk and stretching those creative muscles. Here are our picks for 10 very useful apps for the busy web designer.
- Diet Coda
- Link: Diet Coda
- Price: $19.95
- What It Does: This is the iPad version of Panic’s popular code editor, Coda. Features remote editing, FTP, syntax highlighting, Prompt terminal and more.
- Silk Screen
- Link: SilkScreen
- Price: Free
- What It Does: Instantly preview your Adobe Photoshop designs right on your iPad.
- Dropbox
- Link: Dropbox
- Price: Free (Additional Storage Extra)
- What It Does: Access and share your files from anywhere.
- Simple Note
- Link: Simple Note
- Price: Free
- What It Does: Keeps notes, lists, ideas and syncs them to all your devices. Also supports tags, pins and sharing.
- Evernote
- Link: Evernote
- Price: Free
- What It Does: When SimpleNote isn’t enough; Evernote to the rescue. Share, sync, keep everything important in one place.
- Adobe Photoshop Touch
- Link: Adobe Photoshop Touch
- Price: $9.99
- What It Does: iPad version of Photoshop. But note that it’s not for the first generation iPad; sorry, kiddies.
- Paper by Fifty Three
- Link: Paper by 53
- Price: Free
- What It Does: Captures your thoughts and ideas on the iPad the way the iPad was meant to be used. 2048×1536 drawing canvas; share across Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and email. Comes with default effects palette; additional effects cost extra.
- Skitch
- Link: Skitch
- Price: Free
- What It Does: From the folks who brought you Evernote, you can share, annotate, clip, sync, with ease.
- Morpholio Trace
- Link: Morpholio Trace
- Price: Free
- What It Does: Allows you to trace on top of imported graphics. Great for all creatives, architects, marketing and advertising creatives.
- TREAT Patterns For Products
- Link: TREAT Patterns For Products
- Price: Free
- What It Does: Great little app for creating moodboards or just exploring and exercising your creative energy.
Joni Mueller has been designing web sites for hire since 2003, when she first blew up her web host’s server by insisting on running Greymatter. Since then, Joni has designed for Blogger and Movable Type, TextPattern, WordPress and CMS Made Simple. She lives with her cat and shoe collection in a bucolic old section of Houston called Idylwood. For some strange reason, Joni likes to refer to herself in the third person. When she’s not working on web design, she’s ordering lawyers around. And blogging about it. Or both.
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