Despite the popularity of social networks like Twitter and Facebook, RSS readers are still arguably the best way to monitor and manage daily news items and subscriptions on both our computers and mobile devices. With the pending death of the Google Reader, we on the lookout for alternative RSS reader clients that go beyond Reader’s capabilities. One of the newest readers on the block is NewsBar for Mac and iPhone. Even though I’ve been a longtime user of NewsRack, I was immediately impressed with the NewsBar’s features.

There are dozens of notes apps in the iTunes App Store, and if you’re an iPhone or iPad user, you probably have a few notes apps on your device already. Ever so often an app comes along with so many great features that it pushes similar apps to the side. Agile Tortoise’s Drafts is one such app that’s not just for taking and saving notes, it is also for sharing notes to dozens of other apps and services.

As part of the first day of its Goole I/O tech developer conference this week, Google launched a subscription-based streaming music service called Google Play Music All Access. During the annual event, held in San Francisco, Google’s engineering director for Android, Chris Yerga, announced the new service, which is set to compete against existing music-streaming sites such as Spotify and Rdio.

This past Tuesday, image-sharing site Pinterest released some updates for its iOS 2.4 and Android 1.4 apps, which now include an activities notification feature, the ability to mention and notify a Pinterest friend in a pin comment or note, plus search term suggestions.

I’ve written several articles about Mac automation, including a MUO Automation Guide on how to get started with Apple’s Automator and the built-in OS X features for creating smart folders, playlists, albums, and mailboxes. But next to the application called Hazel, which I also recently reviewed, the classic automation program Keyboard Maestro ($36.00) is my most used application for getting things done on my Mac. You can download it for a 30-day free trial.

Similar to cloud-based storage and sharing sites such as Dropbox and Google Drive, Amazon has now added a way to backup photos to Amazon Cloud Drive via its new Amazon Cloud Drive Photos app for iPhone, which joins the existing Cloud Drive apps for and Android, Windows and Mac. Amazon Cloud Drive provides users with 5GB of free storage space, which Amazon says is enough to store up to 2,000 photos.

In the last several months, the iOS versions of Evernote have undergone a significant overhaul of their user interfaces, closely mirroring the design and features of the counterpart web and Mac applications. We have added the iOS versions of Evernote to our Best of iPad Apps, and Best of iPhone Apps pages where they sit alongside our other picks for the platform. Today I will be looking at these iOS versions in detail.

These days you don’t have to get your hands dirty with photo chemicals and paper in order to enhance your images. There are several relatively easy to use photo enhancement iOS apps that require little or no prior knowledge about photo processing in order to produce quality images. One such app for the iPhone and iPad is Nik Software’s Snapseed, which is listed on our Best iPad Apps page, and is a free universal app that works on iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

Google announced on Thursday the launch of a pilot program designed to offer paid channels on YouTube with subscription fees starting at $0.99 per month. The program kicked off with a small group of partners including the producers of Sesame Street, Big Star Movies, DHX Kids TV, National Geographic Kids, Primezone Sports, and TYTPlus.

The true meaning of mobile for me is pulling out my iPhone and getting something done quickly while waiting in traffic at a stoplight, in line to order fast-food, or in the morning after my alarm goes off. I use Triage for quickly checking emails, Pastie for pasting quick snippets to text, Swipy for quickly emailing myself, Reach Fast for quickly locating contacts, and Scraps for quickly writing notes and saving or exporting them somewhere else – and now I’m going to tell you why.

I have previously written an entire MUO guide about using Apple’s smart folders and Automator program, but a classic third-party application called Hazel is one of my personal automation assistants that works in the background, requiring no keyboard shortcuts and mouse clicks on my part. Hazel is an automation program that essentially goes into action when files are added or changes are made to designated folders.

I don’t know about you, but I still find checking, writing, and managing email a tedious task. Two recently released iOS mail clients, Mailbox, and now Mail Pilot ($14.99) make great use of the iPhone and iPad’s gesture navigation features to help you turn your inbox into a to-do manager for the email you receive. Today we’ll be looking at Mail Pilot, a client that’s not just about checking and reading email but also performing actions with those messages so you can get things done.

Jawbone, a company that develops human-centered wearable technology and audio devices, announced on Tuesday its new UP Platform for iOS. The new platform adds integration between the UP wristband and app system, which keeps track of your walking and sleep activity as well as your meal and drink intake, and 10 existing iOS apps you might already be using.

If you are holding meetings without agendas, or keeping minutes on plain old Word documents, your meetings and minute reports are probably not as useful as they could be. While most of us don’t look forward to attending meetings, there are nevertheless awesome online tools that can help make meetings more productive and less time-consuming for those who plan and facilitate them.

If you’re wanting to use your iPhone as a remote webcam, Apple’s FaceTime is probably the best option, but there are a few other free and inexpensive apps that are useful and offer a few features missing in FaceTime. I downloaded and tried out a handful, and while I found none of them to be perfect, I did discover a few that will work well in a pinch. They are also less expensive than purchasing a dedicated remote wireless camera.