Craig Mod

Craig Mod is a writer, designer, publisher and developer concerned with the future of publishing & storytelling. He is co-author of Art Space Tokyo, an intimate guide to the Tokyo art world. He is also co-founding editor and engineer behind TPUTH.com, co-founder and developer of the storytelling project Hitotoki, and frequent collaborator with Information Architects, Japan. He’s lived in Tokyo for almost a decade. Which is why his iPhone screen says ‘Softbank.’

I don’t use iPhone’s Mail.app at all. I’m too addicted to Gmail’s threading and Softbank’s delivery of mail to Mail.app I find unreliable. Here in Japan we can map an email address to our SMS address. It works great and you get reliable, instant push notifications. It also lets me keep phone correspondence and Gmail correspondence happily separate.

Tabelog (2nd row from top, 2nd from right) is another app I use daily. It’s basically Yelp for Japan with a very efficient interface. You can do a quick scan of your surrounding for any hidden cafe or bar gems tucked away down easily overlooked alleys.

Japanese is the worlds best, worst named Japanese dictionary application. I’m a word lover so I’m constantly looking for proper Japanese analogs to my favorite English phrases, and this app never fails to deliver. Also, it’s a goldmine of bizarre Japanese nuggets like, 脱がせ屋 (“nugaseya”) ― ‘persons who convince female celebrities to pose nude for photoshoots.’

Birdbrain I use to spy on my followers ― who’s recently followed or unfollowed me.

TiltShiftGen is a great photo app that I use for brightness / contrast / saturation adjustments to photos. It also lets you, as the name implies, produce those tilt-shifty style thin-line-of-focus images.

Weathernews is a probably the best Japanese weather app (that I’ve been able to find anyway).

Instapaper is always loaded with a dozen new articles for the rare train ride I find myself on.

And Google Reader is just that. I’ve tried a couple native RSS readers but, again, I’m a Google UX whore ― I just like Google’s usability flow better than any native app. And I don’t have to worry about syncing.