With the economy in continuing decline, keeping tight control over your money is no longer just for obsessives. These financial apps for Google Android help you count every penny.

Personal Budget Droid is a simple budget- and bills-tracker that lets you create multiple monthly budgets for groceries, housing costs, and so on. You enter every budget name and transaction by hand, but the app keeps a transaction history and calculates how much you have left for each category.

The more sophisticated FireWallet works with budgets inside various accounts and protects your information behind a four-digit pin you change from the all-zero default. It's a bit trickier to navigate, but also shoehorns in more options. In addition to a more refined interface, FireWallet has graphs and charts to help visualize your spending, and a rudimentary tool to alert you of upcoming bills. Both it and Personal Budget Droid are missing templates and more powerful features to optionally suck in real-time data from your checking, savings, and stock portfolios. Time for a mobile version of Mint?

Flick to either side for a calc that rounds up; up or down gets you a breakdown of numbers to pass around.

(Credit: TouchTip)

TouchTip is our current favorite tip calculator for Google Android. Flick a finger left or right to slide between a simple tip calculator that rounds up to the nearest dollar or ten dollars, and one featuring a ten-digit keypad. Both views use the bill total, tax, and number of diners to calculate your total payment. Flicking up or down produces a breakdown of what you owe that you can pass around the table to friends.

Personal Tip Jar hails from the same developer as Personal Budget Droid, and shares a few visual characteristics, including a useless "news" tab. Yet Tip Jar is a great niche nod to those whose incomes are built substantially on tips. While a fuller budgeting app could easily accommodate gains from tipping, this application provides a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly summary at a glance.

Stock apps on Android are extremely mediocre, but the simply named Stock App is better than other skeletal tickers. This one opens with Dow, Nasdaq, S&P 500, Yahoo, and Google presets. You can add your own by pressing the menu key, and can browse frequently traded stocks. Stock App displays the value and percentage change up front; double-tap an entry to see more stats. While it's functional, Android is sorely missing the completeness of a stock-tracker like Bloomberg for iPhone. Get to it, developers.

Not all companies have suffered a decrease in the amount of traffic coming to their applications. Causes, which I previously featured, has seen their traffic soar 1000 percent in the past three months. One of the main reasons that is that the application is one of two members of the great applications program that Facebook announced at f8 earlier this year.

Their traffic has appeared to slow over the past few day though and while Causes is by far the largest individual application (2.5 million more monthly active users than second runner SuperWall), it is the company’s only application. RockYou and Slide still dominate the developer leaderboard going back and forth with each other for the top spot.

It it surprising to see the two companies which were the first widget developers on social networks retain the lead positions? I don’t think so. The companies clearly have the most resources allocated to developing on social networks with large funded social gaming following close behind. For now it looks like RockYou is on target to eclipse Slide in relative size on Facebook but it’s clear that the two companies remain neck and neck as the fierce competition continues.

For all those who are still not sure what Cooliris is, it is a browser plugin that enables you to surf the Web with a cinematic style. The wall on which it shows thumbnails of images, videos, news pulled from various sources and so on, allows you to be fully immersed in a 3D environment. You can easily surf the Web simply by dragging, sliding, clicking and selecting the thumbnails with your mouse.

On the iPhone, you will get a similar experience to that in your computer browser. There is the same 3D wall loaded with rows of picture thumbnails. What is different is that you are using your finger to slide, click and select rather than using the mouse.

To slide the 3D wall across the screen, you just need to do a ’swipe’ left or ’swipe’ right with your finger. Alternatively, if you are too lazy to use your finger, simply tilt iPhone up, down, left, right and you can see the wall move accordingly to the direction you tilt.

When you tap on a thumbnail, Cooliris will zoom the image and position it to the center of the screen. Description of the image and its URL will be loaded at the bottom of the screen. There is also an ‘email’ and ‘download’ icons so that you can easily share the image with your friends.

To checkout the image’s URL, simply tap on the URL and the mobile Safari will load within Cooliris. Once you are done, tap on the ‘Webview’ and it will bring you back to the Cooliris interface.

There are two main features in Cooliris for iPhone: ‘Discover’ and ‘Search’. The Shopping function that is found in the browser version is not available in this iPhone version.

In the Discover section, Cooliris can cleverly detect your location and serve you the information that is closely related to your locale. It is just like an image-based StumbleUpon for iPhone, except that it is more customized to your preferences. You can also select from the channels to get it to display interesting images/videos/news. Personally, I like to use the Wallpaper channel to discover and download new wallpaper for my iPhone.

The Search function allows you to search from a variety of sites, including Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Flickr, deviantArt and SmugMug. I do not have any success with the YouTube search. When I perform a search in YouTube, nothing loads up even after 5 minutes of waiting. I have no problem searching and playing video in the in-built YouTube app, so I guess this is one of the bugs on the Cooliris app. Other than this, the search on the rest of the search engine works perfectly fine.

Cooliris for iPhone has given a new definition to Web surfing on the iPhone. This is not just another app that you use to ‘wow’ your friends, but an app that truly maximizes the touch action and accelerometer of the iPhone and brings your Web surfing experience to the next level. This is definitely the app that I would recommend to everyone.

Cooliris for the iPhone is available for the iPhone/iPod Touch and can be downloaded for free in the iPhone App store.

(By) Damien Oh is an all-out technology geek who loves to tweak and hack various operating systems to make life easier. Check out his blog at MakeTechEasier.com where he shares all the tips, tricks and tutorials.

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Men in Black playing on Joost's new iPhone app.

If ever there was a Web service that experienced a rapid fall from grace, it was online video start-up Joost. What started out as a much anticipated new service ultimately fell short of expectations and has recently struggled for attention. Friday, Joost released an iPhone app for its service that might be a game changer. Joost's iPhone app lets users stream and watch any of Joost's 46,000-plus videos for free.

Say what you will about Joost's library of content, the concept behind this app is fantastic. The ability to stream a movie, TV show, or other piece of video content on the go is great. I know the technology is nothing revolutionary--after all the iPhone has had a YouTube app, complete with streaming video, since the device launched. Even given that, when you load up Men in Black on Joost, it just feels like a whole different ballgame. This isn't a video of a dog on a skateboard anymore. This is real, Hollywood-produced content, delivered to your phone, for free.

I have not experienced the major hiccups that very early users, like MG Siegler did, so those issues seem to have been taken care of. I did notice some occassional stuttering of the stream over Wi-Fi. I am, however, disheartened by the lack of streaming support over EDGE or 3G. Joost requires a Wi-Fi connection to work.

Even though Joost appears to have a really slick UI (in many ways it does), it breaks some of the conventions for UI design set forth by Apple. Flicking to view the next page of search results does work. However, it does not slide over as you would expect, rather a spinning wheel is displayed while the next page loads. Joost also did not implement the incremental find that we have all grown accustomed to for searching.

For me, Joost's iPhone app falls just short of greatness. I really like what they are going for here, but I would certainly like to see more content added to Joost's library and support for 3G at the very least, if not EDGE. Even though the videos appear to choke at times, even over Wi-Fi, 3G should be more than capable of streaming video.

I hope that Hulu and Netflix, with their expansive content libraries, are paying attention to what Joost is doing because they are both prime candidates for this sort of mobile application. I get excited just thinking about having access to all of those videos (almost) anytime I want.

The horrendous attacks in Mumbai, while covered extensively by mainstream news outlets, have also been credited as another landmark moment for social media sites like Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. CNN called the Mumbai attacks Twitter’s “coming of age“, while one Flickr photoset has received in excess of 70,000 views.

How to make sense of the outpouring of social media from Mumbai? Social timeline Dipity has just served up a particularly useful account tracking how events unfolded, pulling together news stories and YouTube videos and posting them along a timeline (embedded above).

Some things to try while playing with the above widget:

1. In Timeline View, click on the first bubble, then continue hitting “next event” for the easiest navigation.

2. Hit the Flipbook View, then click on the far right of the timeline to flick through the events of the most recent attack (the Mumbai timeline goes right back to 2001)

3. Click List View for the simplest representation of the data - a list of the videos in reverse chronological order

4. Click Map View to see videos plotted on a map (largely useless in the Mumbai case, but a good Dipity feature)

Dipity is imperfect, for sure: you can quickly lose your place while navigating the timeline. And yet, there is so much social media content created during world events that new ways to view and navigate that data are becoming invaluable. Perhaps even more telling: use cases like these are helping social media to shake off its stigma of being a tool for narcissists or a wasteland filled with life’s minutiae.

See also: Dipity 2.0’s Social Timeline Opens to the Public, Show Off Your Activity Stream on a Timeline with Dipity 2.0

What social media tools are you using to track the events in Mumbai?

---
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In his session, Dylan covered numerous topics related to Dojo and Adobe AIR including:

• An overview of the recently released Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR
• Examples of how to create a video player from within Dojo
• Background on his team's experience building the Dojo Toolbox
• Using the Adobe AIR update framework
• Debugging tips

The new App is a completely different from the previous version, so let’s start afresh.  The first screen you see upon opening the App is a brief instructional page about the voice recognition system.  Simply place the phone to your ear and the App will “know it” because of the proximity sensors.

You’ll hear a short series of beeps and you can state your query.  When you are done speaking, take the phone away from your ear and you’ll hear another series of beeps to indicate completion.  A little sound wave diagram comes up on the screen (presumably the analysis of your speech, but it may be rotating clip art for all we know) and it processes for a while.

The longer your statement, the longer the processing time. Once it is complete you will be greeted with one of two screens.  For general “Googlings,” you’ll see the search results in a layout very conducive to the iPhone’s screen.  You’ll also have the option to change from Web to Images, Local, or News, all of which work about the same as they do on the regular webpage.

On the other hand, if your query sounded close to one or more of your contacts, Google will guess that you’re looking to quickly call one of your friends. The screen brings up all similar sounding contacts that match the voiceprint and you can choose to call them directly.

After you’ve used the search feature a few times your “home screen” for the App will (by default) populate with your previous searches.  If you want to change this, you can go into the settings and point the home page to other parts of the App instead.

If you want to type in your answers like an old fogey (or someone who can’t pronounce Francisella tularensis in a way that a voice recognition program will understand - like me), the App offers “search as you type” that works just as well as the regular online version. It will also make suggestions if you have them turned on in the preferences.

Google never misses an opportunity to pimp their webapps, so the middle category button is completely dedicated to listing all of their Apps. Clicking any of them actually takes you to Safari, so the whole thing is kind of lame. It’s no different from having Home Screen bookmarks (actually it’s worse because it requires more clicks). That being said, if you remove all but a few of them from the screen (notice there is an “Edit” button in the upper right), it might come in a little more handy.

Lastly the settings give you fairly decent control over the types of things searched for and the level of “safety” in your searches. You can even tune the webapps to come up for your custom domain instead of the general Google account screen (if your domain has been tied to Google).

Overall, this is a great App and a fantastic upgrade from their rather mediocre first attempt.  The voice recognition is about as good as it gets.  If you have experience with this kind of technology you know that you shouldn’t expect a perfect result every time, but when you speak clearly and use words that it will have a prayer of deciphering, your odds are pretty good.  By those standards the App performs admirably.  If you disagree, please let us know!

Personally I think I will be using this App from time to time, but with Safari’s new, easier to use Google search box, it may be a case of Google making their service to easy to use that an App is just extra bells and whistles.  Good luck Googlers!

(By) Jimmy Rogers is a biology major at George Mason University and an avid freelance tech blogger. Check out his blog, Mason Tech Beat.

Enjoyed the article? Please leave a comment and tell us what you think about it

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The new App is a completely different from the previous version, so let’s start afresh.  The first screen you see upon opening the App is a brief instructional page about the voice recognition system.  Simply place the phone to your ear and the App will “know it” because of the proximity sensors.

You’ll hear a short series of beeps and you can state your query.  When you are done speaking, take the phone away from your ear and you’ll hear another series of beeps to indicate completion.  A little sound wave diagram comes up on the screen (presumably the analysis of your speech, but it may be rotating clip art for all we know) and it processes for a while.

The longer your statement, the longer the processing time. Once it is complete you will be greeted with one of two screens.  For general “Googlings,” you’ll see the search results in a layout very conducive to the iPhone’s screen.  You’ll also have the option to change from Web to Images, Local, or News, all of which work about the same as they do on the regular webpage.

On the other hand, if your query sounded close to one or more of your contacts, Google will guess that you’re looking to quickly call one of your friends. The screen brings up all similar sounding contacts that match the voiceprint and you can choose to call them directly.

After you’ve used the search feature a few times your “home screen” for the App will (by default) populate with your previous searches.  If you want to change this, you can go into the settings and point the home page to other parts of the App instead.

If you want to type in your answers like an old fogey (or someone who can’t pronounce Francisella tularensis in a way that a voice recognition program will understand - like me), the App offers “search as you type” that works just as well as the regular online version. It will also make suggestions if you have them turned on in the preferences.

Google never misses an opportunity to pimp their webapps, so the middle category button is completely dedicated to listing all of their Apps. Clicking any of them actually takes you to Safari, so the whole thing is kind of lame. It’s no different from having Home Screen bookmarks (actually it’s worse because it requires more clicks). That being said, if you remove all but a few of them from the screen (notice there is an “Edit” button in the upper right), it might come in a little more handy.

Lastly the settings give you fairly decent control over the types of things searched for and the level of “safety” in your searches. You can even tune the webapps to come up for your custom domain instead of the general Google account screen (if your domain has been tied to Google).

Overall, this is a great App and a fantastic upgrade from their rather mediocre first attempt.  The voice recognition is about as good as it gets.  If you have experience with this kind of technology you know that you shouldn’t expect a perfect result every time, but when you speak clearly and use words that it will have a prayer of deciphering, your odds are pretty good.  By those standards the App performs admirably.  If you disagree, please let us know!

Personally I think I will be using this App from time to time, but with Safari’s new, easier to use Google search box, it may be a case of Google making their service to easy to use that an App is just extra bells and whistles.  Good luck Googlers!

(By) Jimmy Rogers is a biology major at George Mason University and an avid freelance tech blogger. Check out his blog, Mason Tech Beat.

Enjoyed the article? Please leave a comment and tell us what you think about it

New here? Get your cheat sheets and freebies at MakeUseOf Downloads. Enjoy!

Related posts

• Slide, Don’t Type On Your iPod Touch or iPhone (1)
• MakeUseOf Your iPhone: Wikipanion (Wikipedia App) (2)
• MakeUseOf Your iPhone: Set Up Voice Dialing With Cactus (2)
• MakeUseOf Your iPhone: Palringo Instant Messenger (4)
• MakeUseOf Your iPhone: iPhone as a Remote Control for iTunes (6)