25 APPS FOR GEEKS
With thanks to everyone who contributed thoughts on our Facebook page: Martin Bailey, Jonathan Bowman, Conrad Braam, Geoff Campbell, Hazel Collins, Sean Dodd, Craig Greenall, John Gwatkin-Williams, Nick Houghton, John Johnson, Andy B J Low, Si Mellor, Geoff Miles, Robert Neuschul, Mark Newton, Michael Oglesby, Nick Ross, Mark Scott and Ryan Thomas.
The app stores are full of apps that look pretty and do little. This list is the exact opposite.
The apps here might not be plastered on the walls of the Design Museum (some are so ugly we can’t even bring ourselves to screenshot them), but they are either unbelievably useful or tug at our geeky heartstrings in some way.
We’d like to extend a huge thanks to all the PC Pro readers who sent in suggestions for the list via our Facebook page. If your suggestion didn’t make the final cut, take consolation from the fact there’s bound to be some brilliant apps here that you haven’t previously installed. Here’s our cross-platform compilation of nerdy delights.
AUTHY
PRICE Free from authy.com
Two-factor authentication is a must-have on any password-protected account, and SMS-based 2FA is not to be relied on. Authy provides a brilliant free alternative, generating time-limited 2FA codes that are compatible with a huge range of online services (including password managers such as Bitwarden). Authy provides several measures to prevent it becoming a single point of failure or from locking you out of accounts should you, for example, lose the phone that provides the 2FA codes. It’s cross platform and can be installed on multiple devices, so the absence of one device isn’t critical. This is also very useful if you need to change the mobile phone number your account is tied to. In fact, everything with Authy is pretty simple – it does its job effectively, without fuss and without charge.
