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This is a quick round-up of the apps I’ve discovered to be the most useful for my lifestyle over the past year. I’ve tried many, but these are the ones to which I keep returning.

Daily News: There is a wide variety of news reader applications available. Some of the ones that have caught my attention recently include Flipboard, USA Today, ABC News, CNN, and AP News. Of these, I like the layout of USA Today the best, followed by AP News. The Flipboard layout is very nice but involves too many steps/swipes to read through the news feeds quickly. On the contrary, USA Today lets me quickly swipe right to left to flip through each article.

Twitter: I use Twitter quite often for both professional and personal interactions, and have found it to be invaluable. Flipboard, Pulse, Twitter for iPad, and Echofon are all great apps for reading Twitter feeds. Twitter for iPad, hands-down, has become my favorite for multiple reasons. The interface makes it easy to drill down through links, read feeds from other users, consistently monitor direct message threads, and back-track to the original timeline simply and conveniently. Lately, I’ve warmed up to the Hootsuite app, for one purpose only: to schedule tweets to be sent at specific times of the day. Other Twitter tools unfortunately don’t provide that capability.

Task Management: Keeping a busy life organized via task or to-do lists has always been a challenge. My relatively recent discovery of Appigo To Do, which integrates and synchronizes seamlessly with the popular http://www.ToodleDo.com web site, has become my top choice. I have it installed on my iPad and iPhone and access the ToodleDo site from any web browser (although currently access is blocked from my work PC). I can enter new or update existing tasks, notes, and completion status from any location. I employ the “Getting Things Done” model to categorize my tasks and it has been working very well for me.

Note-Taking: The ability to remain organized, and especially with respect to random notes collected throughout the day, is greatly enhanced by having an iPad readily available. I enjoy using Evernote (www.Evernote.com), a web-based storage solution that allows me to save handwritten notes, audio recordings, photos, screenshots, scanned documents, and other types of information to be made available via web or a dedicated app. I use two apps to synchronize to the Evernote service: Awesome Note and Evernote’s self-titled app. Awesome Note‘s interface is greatly improved over that used by the Evernote app, so I tend to use it much more frequently. Most recently, with my interest in reading periodicals in electronic format, I’ve begun filing clips of text and screen shots of articles of interest into Awesome Note, analogous to cutting out an article from a printed magazine with scissors and storing it in a filing cabinet. (In case you didn’t know, you can take a screen shot simply by simultaneously pressing the power and home buttons. The shot is stored in your photo library.) The Evernote service is free for moderate use, up to 40 MB uploaded per month. A premium version is available for heavy users. So far the free version has met my needs well.

Reference library: The ability to store, search, and annotate work-related reference documents on the iPad is absolutely golden. My line of work involves numerous professional literature articles, regulations, manuals, and other reference material and having quick and searchable access is exceptionally useful. GoodReader is my choice given its ability to store and display Adobe PDF documents and other formats, without altering their formatting, in a folder structure that I define. I will frequently email documents to myself and store them locally on the iPad, or drag them into a folder via iTunes. GoodReader allows downloads from the Internet, directly from an email server, DropBox cloud storage, and other sources.

Reading books and magazines:

The rapid pace of technological development has left me leery of investing in a large library of electronic books which could eventually become inaccessible due to changes in format, copyright protection (a.k.a. digital rights management), and the ever-possible business model casualties. Consequently I’ve decided to invest only in what I believe is the current and likely future leader: Amazon’s Kindle format. Our family owns a couple of stand-alone Kindle devices and we’ve installed the Kindle Reader app on the iPad and on the iPhone, preferring to use that over Apple’s own iBooks. An advantage of the Kindle Reader app is its automatic synchronization between open books assigned to the same account. I can read partway through a book on the iPad, and if I happen to be standing in line or waiting somewhere with my iPhone, I can resume where I left off.

So far I’ve been disappointed with the availability of digital magazines on the iPad. Ideally, there would be one app that can access most of the popular magazines available on the market in digital format. Unfortunately, that is not the case yet. I really like using Zinio to browse through Reader’s Digest and Outdoor Photography, but as of this writing other magazines of interest such as Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact and Bicycling Magazine are not yet available via Zinio. Hopefully this market will expand in the near future.

Content Development: The nearly universal distribution of the Microsoft Office products Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in the business environment makes it crucial to have the ability to review and edit those formats on the iPad. I have not found the ideal solution yet. Quickoffice and Documents to Go are the most popular; of the two I use Quickoffice. There are drawbacks, however, and those mostly center around inaccurate rendering/formatting of pages, fonts, spacing, etc. and the limited subset of functions that are made available. I would love to see Microsoft begin developing for the iPad platform as they have for Mac OS, but until or unless that happens, we’ll have to depend on the current vendors to enhance their offerings.

I enjoy showing off the different ways I use my iPhone. Here’s a quick rundown of my favorite discoveries, ones that I use on a frequent basis:

Task Manager: As a former Palm OS user, I searched for nearly six months (since first getting the iPhone) for a strong to-do manager, an indespensible tool for managing my busy life. I wanted one that would sync with the “cloud” in case I somehow lost my phone or experienced a loss of data. Also important to me was the ability to maintain an historical record. I played with another app that sync’d to an online task manager service, but was disappointed to find that there was a fee to maintain a record of completed tasks, and no way to export them outside of the service’s proprietary format. TouchTodo is the perfect answer! It syncs with Google Calendar, backs up my tasks to the cloud via Google Docs, and has a host of other great features. I especially like being able to create a checklist within a task, such as a grocery list. My wife emails a list in plain text format and I simply paste it into a task, press a button, and voilà–I now have a list of grocery items to check off as I get them!

GPS Apps (GaiaGPS and RK Free): I enjoy many outdoor activities such as hiking, hunting, running, and cycling. Having a built-in GPS with the right applications can be very beneficial to me in each of those sports. If hiking or hunting on unfamiliar terrain, I can use Google Earth on a PC to define the perimeter of the property, export a .gpx file, and import it into GaiaGPS. The perimeter will be defined on a topo map for me to ensure I remain within the eatablished property boundaries. RK Free is another very helpful app to use when running or cycling to monitor my elapsed time and distance, esentially a GPS- based pedometer with great accuracy.

Lose-it: It’s painful to admit, but occasionally I struggle to maintain a comfortable weight, despite a daily work-out routine.  Counting calories and monitoring fat and fiber intake are hard-and-fast requirements for me. I use Lose-It every day to track my eating habits and am proud to report that it works very well to help me in this effort! It’s amazing how motivating it can be to monitor food intake and calories expensed during exercise. Lose-It contains an extensive nutrition database of foods and let’s me enter my own as needed.

Streaming Music: It’s nice to listen to music stored in my phone’s memory, but eventually I yearn to hear something new. Streaming music fits that objective quite well over either Wifi or 3G. My favorite streaming apps are Pandora and WunderRadio. The former let’s me search for a song or artist, then it streams high-quality music from different artists that it believes have a similar style or genre. WunderRadio, produced by http://wunderground.com, rebroadcasts tens of thousands of terrestrial (regular AM and FM) radio stations from all over the world. With this, I essentially have a built-in radio receiver that can receive much more than just my local stations, all provided for free over the ‘net.

Note-taking: Evernote is an excellent utility for capturing and organizing searchable text, clips from the web, storing reference photos, etc. I consider it my glorified notepad and use it extensively since the app synchronizes with the corresponding service on the company’s web site (http://www.Evernote.com). I can enter notes from the PC or iPhone and always have them available at my fingertips.

Electronic Books: Stanza is my favorite book reader, largely due to its links yo a vast collection of free books available for immediate download online direct to the iPhone. Most of the freebies are classics (older books whose copyrights have expired). Both Stanza and the Kindle app, which parallels the hardware device that bears the same name, are now owned by Amazon.com. If you have the hardware- based Kindle reader, the Kindle app will connect to your online repository and allow you to read your collection on either device. Although a dedicated reader still captures my interest, the iPhone does a great job for now and has the advantage that it is always with me.

Bible: There are several apps for reading and searching The Holy Bible, but my favorite is BibleReader by Olive Tree. I first started using it on the Palm Tungsten T back in 2003, and even purchased the New International Version (NIV) for the Palm. To my pleasant surprise, Olive Tree allowed me to obtain the iPhone version for free simply by logging into my account. The reader is great and has solid searching, bookmarking, and footnote capabilities.

Voice Recognition: i believe the wave of the future (or quite possibly, the wave of now!) is voice recognition as a means to interact with a smartphone, desktop PC, or other computing device. Two apps, Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search, both work exceptionally well. I can dictate an email an make minimal changes to it with the former and save a lot of on-screen typing time. The latter, as well as the voice search capability included in the excellent Google App, sure makes it nice to enter a web search query quickly and accurately. Voice transcription, believe it or not, doesn’t actually happen on the iPhone itself; recordings are uploaded to the servers for conversion and are returned to the app as text in just a couple of seconds.

Password Storage: I suspect most people, like me, have many usernames and passwords for web sites, networks, email, etc. that need to be documented somewhere. Yes, I realize that one cardinal rule of computer security states that one should never write down their password, but with dozens of different ones that are mixed-character passwords of 10 digits or longer, few are able to memorize them all. mSecure is a password-protected vault that really comes in handy for me to keep the passwords accessible while still protecting them.

Replacement for text messaging: I refuse to pay extra for text messaging in addition to the already expensive cost for an unlimited data plan. Instead, I use a free Google Voice number (will post an article on that separately) that forwards SMS sent to it to my gmail account. The GPush app notifies me via user-selectable ringtone and pip-up measage of an incoming message on that email account (used only for that purpose). I can then read and repond to the message via email, and it is sent back to the originator as a text message.

Social Networking: Facebook is, of course, an immensely popular social networking site with over 350 million users worldwide at the time of this writing. I almost never visit Facebook on a desktop PC anymore and enjoy reading and posting updates from the phone. The Facebook app makes this very easy, and encourages snapping and posting photos whenever the moment hits me.