20 best iPhone apps to get you started

Here's a selection of some essential and not-so-essential apps that will help you get by in a world increasingly dependent on digital interaction. 

14. Gmail

Staff

Google adapts its popular web and Android phone-based mail application to Apple and, again, outshines the iPhone’s native app, Mail.

Gmail on iPhone is beautiful. The text is less bulky than in Mail, making it easier for the user to differentiate between the recipient and subject text when scrolling through the inbox.

Swiping the inbox from the left side of the screen brings the Gmail menu into view. From here, viewing a specific folder or even switching to an entirely different account (without signing out) is one click away. 

The only feature lacking in Gmail that Mail has is a swipe-to-delete option. Gmail uses the swipe function to archive messages. Users have to check a tiny box next to each message they want to delete and then click the trash can icon. 

14 of 20

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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