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Five diet apps that will help you lose those pounds!

LAST month, I talked about an application called MyFitnessPal. It's a full-service calorie-counting system. MyFitnessPal offers its free service across web, iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. This week, Mashable showcased five awesome dieting applications. Since I talked about MyFitnessPal in the past and it cracked the top five, I thought I'd share the other four apps.

Nutrition Menu is a $.99 application that ensures the food you are eating fits in the requirements of your diet. The app lets you search foods and once you've found the correct food item, it tells you the cholesterol, sodium, fat, trans fat, sugar, protein, carbohydrate levels, etc.

MyPlate is a part of Lance Armstrong's LiveStrong brand. MyPlate is much like MyFitnessPal, except MyPlate offers LiveStrong community-support groups. This is a fantastic application for $2.99.

MyNetDiary is another calorie-counting application. The unique feature this app bestows is that it allows you to add foods to your diary in various portion sizes, such as grams, ounces, and cups. MyNetDiary is free.

Tap & Track is a calorie counter that allows you to build your own recipes. This application costs $3.99. After using all of these applications, my personal recommendation would be to use MyFitnessPal. The reason being that it offers the service on every single platform and everything syncs perfectly. It also doesn't hurt that it's free.

Apple vs. Samsung verdict

IF you didn't know, Samsung and Apple have been battling in court for the past while now over patents and copyright infringement. In my mind -- and please take into account that I am somewhat of an Apple diehard -- Samsung is mad that Apple has the best product, and Samsung wanted to take legal action to try to diminish some of Apple's cool features they have patented.

The final verdict, which came down Friday, was that Samsung owes Apple $1 billion for copying Apple's intellectual property. Samsung lost every part of its case to Apple except the portion related to the iPad. The jury decided Samsung tablets didn't copy the iPad's design. It was a pretty neat trial to follow. If you want step-by-step analysis of the trial, head over to TheVerge.com -- it covered the trial extremely well.

Zite review

I have never been a tablet guy; I'm solely dedicated to my iPhone and my MacBook Pro. I've never found a way to incorporate a tablet into my workflow. I own a BlackBerry PlayBook, but it's currently collecting dust in one of my drawers. This week, I decided to get an iPad and start using it often. When going to meetings, I sometimes feel the iPhone is inadequate, but my MacBook Pro is too much. So when setting up my iPad, I looked into cool applications I would use daily. The first app I ran across was called Zite. This application is totally awesome. Zite is a magazine app that is tailored to your interests. When downloading the app for the first time, it asks you to input your Twitter handle. It then analyzes who you follow, what kind of links they tweet, what links you retweet and the general content of your tweets. After digesting this information, it creates a magazine for you. To put it simply, the app is magical. My custom magazine categories were as follows: social media, Mac news, technology, entrepreneurship, and fashion -- pretty spot on I think. So if you recently have acquired an iPad, or have owned one for a while and are looking for a daily news reader that eliminates all the fluff, Zite is the right choice!

Automate your social media

AUTOMATION of social media is important, I do not care what anyone else thinks -- its effectiveness is proven. How do you automate social media? The most popular application is called HootSuite. This app allows you to incorporate Facebook pages and Twitter streams all into the HootSuite dashboard. From HootSuite, you can create a post, select the stream on which you want to distribute it, and then you have the option of what time you want to send it out. HootSuite just offered a new service that's called Auto post. This takes content you've created and manually streams it at the best possible time for engagement. That's awesome. HootSuite is a free service that allows you to incorporate up to five streams into the dashboard. If you want to input more than five streams, or have the ability to view custom analytics, you have to pay a monthly fee. If you have any social media questions or needs, visit my company, iBXMediaGroup online.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 26, 2012 ??65535