The nominations are in, and the poll is ready to go! The TUAW Best of 2011 awards are all about you -- the readers -- and what you think is the cream of the crop of Apple or third-party products and software. To vote, select one entry from the top nominations made by readers. We'll be announcing the winner in just a few days. Vote early and often! TUAW is asking for your votes for the best iPhone productivity app of 2011. Our readers provided a plethora of nominations in this category, but five apps really stood out. Springpad (free) captured the lion's share of the nominations for its easy to use interface, customizable notebooks, and ability to sync across platforms. A dark horse was ISMEStorage (US$4.99) a comprehensive cloud and local file manager that supports cloud services from Amazon S3 to Zimbra Briefcase and just about everything in between. The Read More

Springpad updated its iOS app, allowing users to record audio notes and share them with friends and/or followers on Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, the new app enables users to rearrange their Springpad notebooks and it’s one of the most user-requested features to date. As a matter of fact, I always wondered why it wasn’t included since version 1.0. Alas it’s here now, making it easier to differentiate between your more and less important notes, which you don’t need to access that often. Back to the Audio Notes support. Thanks to this feature you will be able to record “pure audio notes” or add audio to existing items. All audio notes automatically sync to the web app so you can listen to them from the web as well. Springpad recently reported hitting the 1 million registered users milestone. The note-taking service was used to capture more than 10 million items, which once Read More

Springpad is an application that attempts to provide you with an “all-in-one” mobile organization tool. You can record your ideas, products, restaurants and a ton of other information right from your iPhone and sync it up with the website version so you can access your stuff anywhere. This idea should sound very familiar to you, as it has already been done before. There are a ton of applications out there that accomplish similar tasks. Yes, Springpad has a few features that other apps do not, but overall, this just isn’t going to be the go-to app for all of your daily organizational needs. Adding your information to the system is fairly easy. You can choose the type of information you are recording and simply type all the data in yourself. For example, if you add a video camera, you can assign it a category and enter in the price, manufacturer and Read More

Springpad, a rival to Evernote's popular cross-platform note-taking service, has just bumped the competition up a notch with a new release that integrates semantic technology to automatically enhance the notes you save with relevant info. What this means is that if you save a movie, Springpad is smart enough to know it's a movie and it will offer you showtimes. If you save a product, Springpad displays price comparisons and links to shopping sites. Save a recipe and you get menu suggestions. And the list goes on. In other words, Springpad doesn't want to just be a note-taking app, it wants to be a fully realized digital assistant. While Evernote is, at this point, still the more robust product when it comes to supported platforms -the company offers Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android and Blackberry versions in addition to a platform-agnostic "web clipper" - Springpad is starting to catch up. Along with Read More