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. 

9. Instagram

Instagram is not a hipster app anymore. It’s too mainstream. But the reasons it became so tragically popular to the hip make it a great app for the majority of us.
 
 Instagram lets its users snap a photo with their smart phone, add a filter to change how the image looks, and share it with Instagram’s online community – a great way to let your friends see (literally) what you’re up to.

The filters can make the image look retro if you’re into that, but they can also make the image sharper, give it greater detail, and improve the composition overall.

If you want to keep the photo as you took it, no sweat. You can upload unedited shots, too.

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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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