June 4th, 2012

Two new apps I’m loving: Pulse and Dragon Go!

I have a pretty fast turnover rate with apps on my iPhone. I test a ton of new apps but quickly delete them if they don’t immediately prove extremely useful. Two quick ones that I’m loving.

Pulse News: A very slick news reader app that can also pull in your google reader RSS feeds. I love the clean and simple UI and actually prefer that it doesn’t have read-it-later features like Instapaper (I don’t like have a backlog of news I have to read). In an effort to focus on signal rather than noise, I have almost completely cut off any unfiltered news source in my routine. I never watch news on TV, read a newspaper, neither in app nor dead tree format, and I cancelled my long-standing subscription to The Economist this year. My only in-bound sources of news are my pretty carefully pruned Twitter feed, which is basically just a list of #MustReads curated by a cast of all-stars, and the few blogs I read regularly. For me that’s: GigaOm, Techcrunch, Lifehacker, Tim Ferris, Paul Krugman, Nerd Fitness, Art of Non-Conformity,  A VC, and The Art of Manliness. (sorry no links, just google them). As I’m writing this I realized a great feature to add would be the ability to publish/subscribe to a given Pulse page… how meta would that be.

Anybody have any good additions to my list?

(for those of you looking to fill out your Pulse page, feel free to drop my RSS in there: http://www.tylertringas.com/feed/atom/)

Dragon Go!: I love my iPhone but I prefer to spend as little time using as necessary and absolutely as little time typing with two thumbs as I can. Dragon Go mashes up the voice recognition technology of Dragon dictation with the straight-to-the-point search results of Duck Duck Go! as well as adding some voice command to apps like Spotify, Pandora, Yelp, Amazon, Maps, and Twitter/Facebook. Ask it for tickets to a movie and you jump straight to Fandango results for cinemas near you. Call nearest whatever anything and your phone starts dialing. This is a fantastic example of apps that Just Work. I have no idea how or why this app is free but you should definitely get it before they realize how awesome it is and start charging.

What apps make your life more painless?

  • http://twitter.com/SolarConstant Nathaniel Bullard

    Tripit makes my life Just Work.  Freemium business model; I pay $49/year to coordinate all of my travel information, in particular upcoming trips and points.  API connects to reservations systems upon receiving push notifications so that I can check in to flights at the moment that such opens.  Also, it features push notifications customized for relevance (text, email can be specified) for vital things like departure gate changes and delays.  Very useful yesterday, for instance:  a push that came four hours before departure of a delay allowed me to drink an extra beer in Ocean Beach rather than sit and fume in San Diego Int’l

    • ttringas

      Nice one. I have TripIt but haven’t really dug into its uses to use it fully. Definitely worth it for premium? I’m getting to a point where my organizational SaaS is becoming a noticeable cost overhead. Starting to keep an eye on it.

  • http://twitter.com/sustainablejohn sustainable john

    question: does anyone use google 2-step verification for sign in? because while it may make your gmail more secure, it certainly makes adding things like a google reader into your pulse impossible (unless I’m doing something wrong).