Best new apps of the week: Microsoft Outlook and Pushbullet
Every week, our staff will handpick an app from the past two weeks that we believe is a must-have download for your iPhone or iPad. These apps will always be from various categories, but they are chosen because our own staff members love it and have been using them daily. So here are this week’s picks! Enjoy!
Microsoft Outlook
Access your email, calendar, contacts, and attachments in one place with our App of the Week.
Are you ready to get more productive this week with your email and schedule? Then you should check out our official App of the Week, Microsoft Outlook from Microsoft. This is the first major release after Microsoft acquired Acompli last year.
For the most part, the new Microsoft Outlook will look and feel familiar to the old Acompli, but with good reason — this is merely the beginning of a new Outlook for mobile, but the app is already polished and a pleasure to use. The new Microsoft Outlook app will provide users with access to email, calendar, contacts, and even attachments in a central hub. It’s the ultimate tool for productivity on-the-go.
Users can add as many email accounts as necessary, and the app works with Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, Outlook.com, iCloud, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail. Regardless of the account you’re using, Outlook puts emphasis on email that you need to focus on in the appropriately named “Focus” section of your Inbox, so you won’t get distracted with the stuff that isn’t important. The app also makes use of natural swiping gestures for triaging messages quickly and efficiently. There’s even a Mailbox-like feature so you can snooze a message to a later time, when it will resurface back to the top of the inbox.
The calendar view makes you stay on top of your calendar so you can schedule new appointments with contacts. The attachment view is handy too, as it gives you a list of the most recent attachments in your email.
We deal with email frequently throughout the day here at AppAdvice, so we’ve been enjoying what the new Outlook has to offer. The app is a pleasure to use overall, and it’s been making taking care of our inboxes even better. If you’ve been wanting an all-in-one solution for email, contacts, calendars, and attachments, then look no further than Microsoft Outlook. You can get it for free as a universal download on the App Store.
For more information on Microsoft Outlook, don’t miss out on our original post here.
Honorable Mention Pushbullet
Quickly push text, links, and files to multiple iOS and Mac devices with Pushbullet.
Need a faster way to send links, files, and text to yourself between devices? Then our Honorable Mention, Pushbullet, is worth a look this week.
Pushbullet may not be completely new, but it has received a notable update last week, bringing support for the larger screens of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, as well as the iPad, iPad Air, and iPad mini. There is also now a version on the Mac. The latest update also brings a handy share extension that allows users to push photos, links, and much more from your iOS apps to other devices. You’ll no longer need to email yourself for simple tasks.
When you have the Mac version in your arsenal, you can get plenty of use from it. The Mac version lets you push files to all of your other devices, and there are several ways of doing this. The standard method involves tapping the plus icon in the app to initiate a push to a device, but you can even drag-and-drop files onto the app or the dock icon to start them.
Another fantastic feature of Pushbullet for Mac is iOS notification mirroring. This is done through Bluetooth Low Energy, and you’ll be able to see, act on, and dismiss iOS notifications from your Mac. There’s also a desktop Safari extension so you can share directly from Safari on your Mac. And finally, the best feature is the universal copy and paste between devices, so it’s easier and faster than ever to get something copied on to the clipboard of another device.
We always enjoy little utilities like this, and Pushbullet is one of the better ones we’ve come across. If you’re in the market for an app to give you seamless continuity between your iOS and Mac devices, then you have to give this one a try. Pushbullet can be found on the App Store as a universal download for free, along with the free Mac version in the Mac App Store.
For more on Pushbullet, check out our original article.