Top Twenty-Four Apps.

In the spirit of giving at Christmas, we are giving you the gift of the top twenty-four apps all in one little list.  We know... you're welcome.  You should know, though, that there was no way we were going to spend Christmas day typing a blog post (even for you), so we actually typed this last week (twice, if you need to know- we deleted the first one... nice.  Ya, we were pretty happy about that.).  So, you ask, how did we type it last week and have it post on Christmas?  Did we get up at the crack of dawn Christmas morning, rush to the computer, and hit the "publish" button?  Did we hire elves?  Did we actually type it on Christmas after all (you know, third time's a charm)?  No.  No.  And, no.  If you want to know how we did it, click here.

Anyway, on to the list.  So, in no particular ranking, but in the order in which they were published, these are the twenty-four apps we reviewed:

1.    Evernote
2.    SoundHound
3.    Better Christmas List
4.    Postagram/Sincerely Ink
5.    Lose It
6.    ePrint
7.    Pandora
8.    Words With Friends
9.    Alarm Clock
10.  Fantasy Monster Football
11.  Capture
12.  Glo Bible 
13.  Silent Film Director
14.  Grocery IQ
15.  SnapTell
16.  All Recipes/Epicurious
17.  Nike Training Club
18.  Pages
19.  App Advice
20.  Card Shark Deluxe
21.  TripIt
22.  Greeting/Holiday cards by Cardmon
23.  HootSuite
24.  BlogPress

Day Seven. App Seven. Pandora.

Pandora.  If you don't know about Pandora Radio, where have you been?  It's simple, it's sweet, it's music you love.  All you do is type in the name of the song or artist that you feel like hearing and Pandora will create your own little radio station of music like that.  It's a great way to discover new music you like, and Pandora gets better and better at knowing what kind of music that is.  With every song that plays, you have the option of a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" rating to tell Pandora whether you want more that's similar or not.  We don't know exactly how it does it, but we have to assume it involves elves running around frantically pulling cd's off shelves trying to match the perfect song to you (or, maybe it is just tagging and algorithms, but we like the image of the elves better).  You also can just skip a song, but our thought is, why not rate it and keep those elves busy.  Anyway, Pandora saves your stations so you can listen to them anywhere you access Pandora.  Pretty cool.

Day Two. App Two. SoundHound.

Let's go for a fun one today.  Day Two app is SoundHound.  As far as we can tell, SoundHound has no real value other than it's just amazing.  It doesn't make our life more productive, it doesn't make us money, it doesn't make us better people, but we love it. SoundHound is one of our very favorite apps simply because it's so cool.  Sometimes, that's the best reason.  In short, SoundHound is a music recognition app. What that means is that you can hear a song (on the radio, from your neighbor humming, on the tv, etc.), tap the "listen" button on SoundHound and have it not only tell you the name of the song and who sings it, but also scroll the lyrics right along with the music!  In addition, it provides information about the band and the album, as well as links to purchasing the song and concert tickets, opening a Pandora station (another cool app, BTW), and more.  However, this is supposed to be a quick, get in get out review and we're getting long winded (If you want more chitter chatter, check out this site).  Get the app.  The end.