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What's on my iPad in 2021? // Top Cross-Platform Apps for Productivity & Creativity
Here are my favorite apps for the iPad in 2021 to boost your PRODUCTIVITY and CREATVITY. This is probably not the list of tops apps you are expecting as they are all cross-platform! I go through every app on my iPad Air 2020 (4th generation). The video is divided in multiple sections: how I sync files between devices, note taking, planning (productivity), email & calendar, communication, security, creativity, photography and video editing. I also have a little bonus if you watch until the end! This is a must watch is you don't live in the Apple ecosystem!
🔗 Buy the iPad: https://geni.us/ipad-air-2020
✨ WATCH NEXT ✨
- iPad Air Review https://youtu.be/ORyYYzuVXAM
- Why I bought a NAS? https://youtu.be/4JAZyyUrHsU
📱Apps I mentioned 📱
Snapdrop https://snapdrop.net
OneDrive https://geni.us/4FYc
Synology Drive https://geni.us/HY8EW
OneNote https://geni.us/xZcJ49I
Nebo https://geni.us/pnIQBR
Microsoft To Do https://geni.us/8OFSx7R
ClickUp https://geni.us/2UdxLFB
Notion https://geni.us/M2cv
Outlook https://geni.us/EZB0XEp
Google Calendar https://geni.us/NkQNuN
Messenger https://geni.us/A5rR7Hs
Google Messages https://messages.google.com
LastPass https://geni.us/MxBRPK
Adobe Photoshop https://geni.us/zKVt
Adobe Spark Post https://geni.us/g3Mdk
Canva https://geni.us/UJG5jJ4
Adobe Lightroom https://geni.us/zWoOE
Darkroom https://geni.us/1ib58
Polarr Photo Editor https://geni.us/7Qjdnu8
Hello Weather https://geni.us/EBZxLB
Countdown Widget Plus https://geni.us/YcCA9
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- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford (http://bit.ly/lba_instagram)
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/loic294
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lbaphotographie
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- My online store: https://store.lbaphotographie.ca
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- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound: https://www.epidemicsound.com/referral/iu5gau/
📸 GEAR I USE ON YOUTUBE 📸
https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo https://geni.us/dji-pocket-2-combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card https://geni.us/sandisk-extreme-128gb
- Canon 6D Mk https://geni.us/canon-6d-mkii
- Google Pixel 4a https://geni.us/google-pixel-4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM https://geni.us/canon-lens-24-105
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens https://geni.us/canon-lens-16-35
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens https://geni.us/canon-lens-70-200
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hello everyone today i'm going to talk about my favorite apps for my ipad that are going to make you more productive and also more creative but there's a twist i'm only going to be talking about apps that are fully cross-platform because this is very important for somebody like me that has an android phone an ipad a macbook and also a windows desktop i'm also going to answer the infamous question of how i sync all my files between all these devices you might be surprised of how i do it for those of you who are new to this channel i'm like ben mahalford a young photographer and filmmaker on the journey to become better at sr if you haven't seen my review of the ipad air i published it last week and there's a link to it in the description down below let's start by talking about how to sync your files between multiple devices if you want to send large files yeah there's actually a way to use something that is very similar to how airdrop works but using any devices so you simply need to go inside of your browser so here i'm inside of safari and then you enter snapdrop.net click enter do the same on your other device so here i have my android phone with the website open and once you have them both connected to your website simply click on the place you want to transfer the files select the file you want to send and then you can add the file and that's all the other device already received the file right here so it's super simple works almost exactly how airdrop works and it works with any device as long as there's a browser so this is super useful when you need to send bigger files between multiple devices for mysql files i'm using onedrive and i actually paid for the storage for uh onedrive but most students can get it for free after school and you can get one terabyte account for free while they're studying so this is a pretty great deal if you're student and you need some cloud storage the reason you want to be using cloud storage for some fast for your school is first that it's easy to access from anywhere which is very important when you're a student and the second is to be sure that everything is always backed up and i always save because i already lost all my files once when my computer broke for my bigger files so let's see all my videos and all my photos i actually use what we call a network attached storage or nas in short i have a whole video that talks about why i decided to buy a nas instead of buying some cloud storage so you can go check that one out if you want to learn more about what is a nas and why it's a great solution but in short for me this is a great solution because i can have everything backed up from my different devices automatically on the nas and then on my ipad i simply have to come inside of the files app here then go inside of my projects here and here i have access to all my files from my different projects from any device so here i can access my files from my ipad from my other devices and it's always very fast because it uses the full speed of the wi-fi connection in your home to transfer files between your different devices and you always have a backup also you can also use it to share files with other people so you can send a link so it's just a great solution everywhere and you always have everything synced together with almost no effort my favorite note-taking app is onenote and i know it's not the one that has the best pen support or the one with the most features but the fact that you can easily write on documents here and also right on the side of the document makes it really a great option for a student and also the fact that it syncs everywhere really outweighs the fact that it cannot have all the features so i usually take some note on the ipad then i might look at them on my laptop i might look at them also on my phone so it's really important for me to have my notes always synced everywhere if you're interested in your student you want to know how i organize my things inside of onenote i actually have a notebook for every semester then inside that notebook i have sections for every class and sometimes i might have even more than one section for the same class so like let's say for my classes and also for my labs and then i have all my pdfs inside of pages here and i might add some pages if i'm taking some notes or things like that so it's still a pretty great option for you to have to take notes and the one thing that some people might not know is they can actually add some lines here to get a little bit more of the feeling of some paper when you're taking some notes inside of onenote another note-taking application that you probably didn't even know existed is called nebo and i used to use nemo a lot more when i was taking math classes inside of cj and they say they have the best handwriting recognition and i can say that it's actually true they have the best underwriting recognition so if we come inside of here we can actually write some more complex math problems so if i write an equation here i can actually just write it here double tap on the equation and it's going to transfer it automatically inside of a normal nicer view and if we come here we can actually draw also some diagrams here so you can simply draw a diagram pretty quickly like that and double tap and it's going to convert it so it was just a small error here but if we fix it here with an arrow we have it done and then if you have some text you can actually select your text here and even resize your text and they recognize it and keep your text all aligned and your words together so this is really cool and you didn't see any other software that are as good at recognizing your text this works on the ipad but also on android and on windows this might seem like a boring part of the video but planning your stuff is really important to be less stressed and stay on track with your projects so i use a mix of microsoft to do of click up and also notion depending on what i do so i like starting my day and go inside of microsoft to do and add some tasks there for everything i have to do during my day for school and more complex projects i use click up and if you've never heard of click cup click up is trying to replace other productivity apps with one app and i must say it's one of the best ones i ever use and i tried a lot of them in the past so instead of click up here i have all of my classes here so if we go on here you can open one of my classes and you can see i have all my tasks listed here so i have my classes my exams my quiz my projects and now i have due dates on them the reason i like click up so much is that you can organize all your information in different views and also customize pretty much everything however you want the only thing is that they launched a new version for their iphone and ipad app and it's still missing a lot of features but if we go on the web version here we can actually see that i have a dashboard here where i have a nice calendar with everything i need to do inside of march right here and if you go here i also have a cush slim dashboard where i can see all my tasks that are upcoming that are in progress and also that are overdue and all these features are coming really soon in the ipad app and they're also gonna have an optimized ipad app really soon so you can get all these features inside the ipad app so this is a really great way of staying up to date on everything you have to do inside of a more complex project i recently started using notion to plan my youtube videos i used to do it inside of click up but the reason i switched to notion is actually because of how good it is for writing so just like click up you can have different views for your content but at the base of notion it's really the principle of having a page so if you open the youtube video i have right now here we can actually see it's a lot of text and it's just a really great experience when writing your text and when you want to add a little bit more advanced things inside of your text like to-do list or things like that what i also really like on setup notion is that it supports scribble mode so you can simply touch anywhere on your document and then just start writing using your pen and it's simply going to transfer whatever you wrote inside of your text so this works really great when you just want to write quickly some things inside of your document and you don't want to be using the keyboard to do it and just want to use your pen this is a really cool thing that they support notion might seem intimidating when you see complex setups but at the base like i said it's just pages and then you can use what they call a database and a database is just a list of page that you can show in different formats so here i have a calendar view then i have a list view here you can have different views and to show the same type of content and you can see that if i come inside of here i can have all different kinds of views for the same content which is pretty cool uh depending on how you want to organize your content another very important thing to understand is that there isn't one app that is perfect for everyone so i realized i actually like using free apps so using microsoft to do for my daily list then click up for my school projects and more complex projects and notion for my youtube videos so i use all three of them and i'll use them in different ways and they all work pretty well together in the end now let's quickly talk about email and calendar i use the outlook app because i still have a hotmail account as my main account so i just really like it it's a really simple app that gets the job done really well uh for both calendar and also emails but this is a point where i need to disclose that i worked for the outlook wayback team last summer as my internship but that doesn't change i still just really like this app if you're using gmail and you want to have a better app for your calendar you can actually use the google calendar app that i personally think is just a little bit better a little bit cleaner to use and a little bit easier uh but yeah they're both great options i don't really need to have anything any more complex because i don't really have complex needs when it comes to email or calendar just the default apps work pretty well for me the most common reason people are going to mention of why they don't want to leave the apple ecosystem is because of imessage i use messenger with all my family and friends and it works great and has pretty much all the features that imessage offers if you go inside of messenger here i have the conversation can call anybody like audio or video and it works pretty great another really great thing about messenger is that i bought a facebook portal from my grandmother recently so i can call her and she can answer using the portal even if she don't know anything about technology and never had a computer or something like that so that's a really great thing uh when you use messenger is that you can use this easier device for some people another pretty cool thing for people that have android phone is you can actually go to the website it's called messages.google.com and then you're gonna have some setup uh steps to set this up once it's linked to your phone you can actually access all your text messages on your ipad here if you want it to look a little bit more like an app you can actually go in the share menu here then go down to add to home screen click on add and then you're gonna have an icon here that you can open it's gonna open in a full screen view so you can actually see your messages in full screen on the ipad which is pretty great if you're still not using a password manager i highly suggest you go and download one i personally use lastpass because i really like it but we can see here that once i have a website and it's configured i can simply click here to enter a password select the option to use my password from lastpass use my finger to authenticate and that's all it took to log into the website so this is such a great option because it's so annoying when you have to type some long passwords on the ipad to access any website or any app or anything and lastpass just works really great on my ipad but also on my other devices is a pretty cheap option if you want to pay for the paid plan let's get a little bit more creative and talk about photoshop you might not know but i create all my thumbnails for my youtube videos inside of photoshop and for the last few thumbnails i've been using my ipad and the photoshop version on the ipad and the performances are really great they're really really good my biggest problem with the app is actually that if you have to edit some text and if i click on the text here the text just disappears from the screen then you come here you can scroll it back inside of the screen make an edit click on it again and it disappears again this is so annoying because i always have text on my screen so it's really annoying to have the text disappear all the time another thing that is not as great is when you want to move things around you cannot like just click them and move them um you actually have to go inside select the layer here and then move them it's not a big thing but if you want to be using the pen to draw on your pictures this is where photoshop becomes really great it uses the full tilt of the pen so you can start drawing on the side here move to the top and it's going to change the pen and you get really realistic results using your pen inside of your drawings inside of photoshop so this is really great and it's a thing that i use instead of my thumbnails more and more because it's just so fun to be using the pen to draw on pictures inside of photoshop talking about adobe there's another app they made that i like quite a lot which is called spark post so you can use spark post to create some social media posts or anything that is graphic design in a pretty easy manner you can either use some of the templates so they have some free ones and they also have some paid ones and then if you want to go you can also create your own from sketch which i did for most of my uh instagram stories and then i can just come here and then you can even animate some things inside of here so here the text is going to be animated and i can create this with all just a few clicks and it's super easy to customize and change some stuff inside of here so this is a really cool app if you want to create some nice little designs a honorable mention i'm going to give is also for canva so i used to use canva on the web a lot but just discovered the ipad app it seems to be working pretty well so i'm definitely going to try this one a little bit more but if you already use the canva app on the web it's a good thing to know that it also exists on the ipad let's talk about my favorite creative activity which is photographing you won't be surprised to hear me say that my favorite app on the ipad is lightroom and the reason i like lightroom so much is that i have all my files synced between all my devices automatically it's also super easy here to come and classify my different files and flag the ones i like and you can also have access to really advanced photo editing options right inside of lightroom the only problem with lightroom is that it's super expensive so if you want a cheaper alternative you can use dark room which is a pretty great app when you have all your files locally but then if you wanted something else i also talked about polar photo editor inside of one of my other videos and it works pretty great on the ipad 2. my only problem is that it only works in a vertical mode here so you have to use the ipad in vertical mode for it to work because it was never optimized for the ipad but it's still a pretty great app and it's a lot cheaper than having to pay for lightroom now let's move on to my last category which is about video editing and for this it's no surprise that the best app out there on the ipad is lumafusion lumafusion is super powerful it reads 4k no problem at all and also has the most powerful options when you're video editing and it's still pretty easy to use if you don't really know how to do any video editing if you don't want to be using a lumafusion and you want something a little bit more cross-platform there's adobe rush but my problem with adobe rush is that it's not as powerful and also a lot more expensive than having to use lumafusion so i would just stick with my fusion even if it's not a cross-platform option if you want to be doing video editing on your ipad now if you stick until this point inside of the video i wanted to give you a little bonus point and this is the widgets i have on my home screen here so at the right top here i have some widgets from hello weather and these are very beautiful widgets about weather and i have them inside of a stack to have a little bit more information or i can just swipe through them and get a little bit more uh information about the weber and the next days and things like that then if you go down here i have my calendar so i have my upcoming event right here then i have on the left here an app that is called countdown so it just counts down to the number of d and you can customize the background image that text and everything on it and here i have my number of us have days left before the end of school so i'm pretty excited only 72 days left at school then down here i have my to-do list so i always see my upcoming tasks so this is really great to always know what is upcoming inside of my day then the other widgets are a little bit more normal so i'm not going to talk about them inside of this video i would really like to know what are your favorite apps on the ipad so please let me know in the comments below if you enjoyed this video please leave a like below to let me know you enjoyed the video and also consider subscribing to the channel i post new videos every week see you in the next one bye
Video Links
- 🔗 Buy the iPad
- iPad Air Review
- Why I bought a NAS?
- Snapdrop
- OneDrive
- Synology Drive
- OneNote
- Nebo
- Microsoft To Do
- ClickUp
- Notion
- Outlook
- Google Calendar
- Messenger
- Google Messages
- LastPass
- Adobe Photoshop
- Adobe Spark Post
- Canva
- Adobe Lightroom
- Darkroom
- Polarr Photo Editor
- Hello Weather
- Countdown Widget Plus
- Instagram: @loic.bellemare.alford ()
- My online store
- Affiliate link for Epidemic Sound
- https://kit.co/loic.bellemare.alford/youtube-gear
- DJI Pocket 2 Creator Combo
- 128 gb MicroSD card
- Canon 6D Mk
- Google Pixel 4a
- Canon ZOOM LENS EF24-105mm F4L IS II USM
- Canon EF 16-35mm f/2.8 Lens
- Canon EF 70-200mm f/4.0L-IS II USM Lens
- VANGUARD VEO 2 265CB CARBON FIBER TRIPOD
- DJI MAVIC AIR
- http://bit.ly/loicba
What is this video about?
I've been asked about my iPad setup a lot, so I decided to put together a comprehensive breakdown of my favorite apps. But here's the thing—I'm not recommending apps just because they're popular on iOS. I'm focused on cross-platform apps because I live across multiple ecosystems: Android phone, iPad, MacBook, and Windows desktop. If you're stuck in the Apple world, you might find this video especially useful because it shows you don't need to be.
Let me start with the foundation: how I sync files between all these devices. Snapdrop is my go-to for quick file transfers—it's basically AirDrop for everyone, working through any browser. For regular files, I use OneDrive, which is straightforward and reliable. For larger projects and video files, I invested in a NAS (network attached storage) because it gives me automatic backups and lightning-fast syncing over my home WiFi.
For notes, OneNote is my default because it syncs everywhere and the cross-platform reliability outweighs missing features. I also use Nebo for handwriting recognition—it's genuinely impressive at converting equations and diagrams. For planning, I use a mix of three apps: Microsoft To Do for daily tasks, ClickUp for school projects, and Notion for long-form planning like my YouTube content. I know it sounds fragmented, but each one serves a specific purpose.
For email and calendar, I use Outlook and Google Calendar. For messaging, Messenger and Google Messages handle everything—and yes, they work great without iMessage. Security-wise, a password manager like LastPass is non-negotiable.
On the creative side, Adobe Photoshop on iPad is surprisingly powerful for making thumbnails, especially with pen support for drawing. Spark Post handles social media graphics quickly, and Canva is worth exploring too. For photography, Lightroom is my favorite despite the cost, though Darkroom and Polarr are solid cheaper alternatives. For video editing, LumaFusion is the clear winner—it's powerful, handles 4K without breaking a sweat, and is more affordable than Adobe Rush.
I also walk through my home screen widgets—Hello Weather, calendar, countdown timers, and my to-do list—because sometimes what you see daily matters more than what you dive into occasionally. The truth is there's no single perfect app for everyone. I use what works best for each specific task, and the fact that they're all cross-platform means I can move between my devices without friction.