The 10 Best Apps Of May From The Daily App

App Reviews: The Best Of May

From gadget apps to productivity apps, from iOS to BlackBerry Tablet OS, we continue to see more apps every day that pique our interest and could play a big role in pushing IT into the next generation. Here is a look at the 10 best apps we examined over the past month in our Daily App blog.

Ridgid For BlackBerry PlayBook

It’s simple, it’s straightforward, but, somehow, the Ridgid level app for the BlackBerry PlayBook just strikes us as very cool. It’s an app that turns the PlayBook into a carpenter’s level. Ridgid measures the degree of horizontal angle, vertical angle and diagonal angle, and also offers a camera that provides an image with a cross-hair that allows you to snap a perfectly level photo.

If you’re in IT, this could be helpful when installing servers or appliances into a rack, for example, or installing signage.

Inventory Droid For Android

One key way for an SMB to find value in technology is to discover ways it can reduce cost and complexity. With the $4.99 Inventory Droid, SMBs can find a quick-and-dirty inventory solution that combines a simple database with nifty features like barcode scanning in an easy-to-deploy app.

It’s a fast, inexpensive and easy to use inventory app.

Atomic Web Browser For iPhone

Apple provides one Web browser natively for the iPhone: Safari. And while Safari is OK for most Web-browsing functions, Atomic Web Browser is just a bit better.

It’s a 99-cent download from the Apple iTunes App store, and immediately it provides much greater functionality and control over the browsing experience than the Safari browser on the iPhone.

Withe the app, you can manage downloads, gain greater control over the deletion of cookies and saved forms, as well as limit the amount of history that gets saved.

Adobe Connect For BlackBerry PlayBook

There are still only little more than 3,000 apps available for the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet platform, but one of the best so far is Adobe Connect.

Created by Adobe to provide, in its architecture, a Web-based live meeting and videoconferencing application, Adobe has successfully ported it over to RIM’s new tablet platform in a manner that is effective and sleek.

On a 7-inch screen that this tablet provides, it's more than enough real estate to conduct a quick group or team conference.

Hello Note For BlackBerry PlayBook

BlackBerry PlayBooks come pre-loaded with Documents to Go software for authoring and editing longer-form documents, but Hello Note is a free app available via Research In Motion’s Blackberry App World service that is nice, light and straightforward for less intensive note-taking.

This app has a clean interface and provides a clear, white note box for creating notes with the PlayBook touch keyboard. It opens up quickly and allows you to start typing almost immediately -- which is perfect for those occasions when the spontaneous need for fast note-taking pops up.

CamScanner Lite For Android

Every now and again, a piece of technology makes you just stop and say, ’Wow.’

CamScanner Lite for Android is a free, downloadable app from Android Market, and installed in less than a minute on a Droid X smart phone. This app is that piece of technology that evokes a ’Wow’ response.

With very simple navigation in CamScanner Lite, it uses the Droid X native 8 MP camera to allow snapshots of documents to be converted into high-res, clear and easy-to-read PDFs. It crops and auto-enhances each photo, and does such a good job that, in the right light, it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between a PDF that was produced by CamScanner Lite and one that was scanned by a flatbed PC peripheral scanner.

iOpenSource For iPhone

No, Apple didn’t suddenly throw open its iOS to the open-source community. But it did approve an app for its iTunes App store that makes it easier to open source code and download it right to an iPhone if you’re in a pinch.

Now, we know many open-source developers won’t cop to owning an iPhone, what with all of its proprietary software. That’s cool. But for those of you who do (whether you admit it or not), an app called iOpenSource might be a utility worth checking out.

iOpenSource essentially provides several shortcuts to those seeking to pull open-source code down from the Internet into a handy zip file. First, it aggregates several search engines for finding code -- Google Code, Github, SourceForge and BitBucket -- onto one screen. Once one of the search engines returns a link to the open source code you want, it allows you to download it as a zip file and extract it right to the device.

History Cleaner For Android

This is a neat app to have on board, and serves as a sort of smartphone equivalent of a paper shredder: History Cleaner for Android.

This is a free app from the Android Market. It downloaded and installed in about a minute. History Cleaner will wipe the cache of all apps on a Android device, delete browser history and phone lists like ’frequently called,’ ’missed calls,’ and SMS messages that are sent and received (A certain pro golfer may have wished he had History Cleaner on his phone last year).

This app gives you the option of checking boxes for each category of data that you’d like removed from the phone, and then it’s as simple as hitting a button that says, ’Clean Selected.’ Then poof! All the data you want gone is gone.

TouchStudio For Windows Phone 7

Microsoft has released a new app into beta -- TouchStudio -- that aims to let anyone write simple apps for their Windows Phone 7 devices. A free download from the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, TouchStudio provides a series of script templates for everything from classing algorithms to automating URL bookmarks to creating simple games.

Navigate to individual templates by simply pressing brightly colored buttons for a variety of functions. One pretty big caveat: You'll need at least a moderate understanding of coding or scripting to even edit one of the templates. In the hands of someone who doesn't know what he or she is doing, it could turn into a little bit of a mess. While it's simplified, it's not that simplified.

Office2 Plus For iPhone

A company called Byte Squared has produced a free app for iOS that for many could, arguably, be the most important button on your iPhone.

Office2 Plus (that's "Office Squared Plus") is an app that aggregates any number of cloud file and storage services into one single service. This allows for much faster access to online files when you're on the go than if you'd have to navigate through several different services one at a time; for those who subscribe to Google Docs, MobileMe, Box.net, DropBox and more services all at the same time, Office2 Plus becomes a single gateway to all of those services.