We noted the introduction of the DailyFinance app in April, so without rehashing old business... It's time to move Stocks off of your main apps page. The multifaceted DailyFinance app from AOL has been updated to version 1.2 and AOL has made a great app even better.

DailyFinance provides real time price information from the BATS Exchange, the third largest trading exchange in the country. A broker can choose to trade on the NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX or BATS which covers over 6,000 stocks. The correlation between exchange prices isn't perfect but can be very close in highly liquid stocks. If a stock is listed on BATS and NASDAQ for example, both quotes are displayed in DailyFinance, with a notation that the NASDAQ quote is delayed by 15 minutes. Being a trader I can tell you that those 15 minutes are often critical and buying real time quotes can be expensive.

DailyFinance automatically syncs your Portfolios and Watchlists with the AOL Money and Finance web site.

New features of this already solid app include:

• The ability to set your default screen from your settings app
• Re-ordering of your Watchlists in the same manner as re-ordering Contacts
• Alphabetical sorting of Portfolio symbols
• Re-ordering, or deleting news categories
• Horizontal views of news stories.

The power of landscape mode is nicely put to use. When viewing a chart, tap compare to bring up a list of overlays including comparisons of your chart with markets, industry peers, seasonality, events (such as estimated earnings versus actual earnings), and other stock symbols. Tapping a chart while viewing a Watchlist brings up a CoverFlow view of all the charts in the Watchlist.

The app is elegantly executed, and serves as a one-stop portal for financial information. Market data is provided in a logical, easy to follow format that packs a huge amount of information on a small number of screens.

Download a free copy from the App Store and check it out for yourself. If you trade stocks, I think you'll be quite happy.

Note: AOL is the parent company of TUAW and Weblogs, Inc.

When word about the Pogoplug hit TUAW central, we debated to see who would luck out and and cover the device. Apart from a few cuts and bruises, nearly all of which will mend in a matter of weeks if the doctors are to be believed, I won. The past few days, I've had the pleasure of road testing a unit. And it's awesome.

The Pogoplug offers a USB NAS adapter, i.e. a network-attached storage system, that gives you network access to your data from home and on the road. With NAS you can use common protocols like AFP and SMB to connect to a remote disk. And you can do so easily. That's a big win, because choosing and setting up these remote devices has been a deal killer for many otherwise interested people. As Brad Dietrich, Pogoplug's CTO, told TUAW, "[Until now], the state of home networking has been too complicated and geeky for most people." Pogoplug provides a simple solution.

What Pogoplug brings to the party is a remarkable ease of use that crosses past any issues of firewalls and port setup and delivers remote storage to normal (i.e. read "non-geek") humans. It transforms remote file access into a consumer device. And best of all, it provides this for just $99.

iPhone 3G and 3G S owners now have an attractive, lightweight, and functional way to provide extra juice to their power-hungry devices -- the Mophie Juice Pack Air. Available in black, white, and purple, the Juice Pack Air is a slightly more svelte version of Mophie's Juice Pack. Compared to the original Juice Pack, the Juice Pack Air is .1" (2.54 mm) thinner and a full third of an ounce (9.44 grams) lighter.

I had a chance to try out the Juice Pack Air, and my impressions are quite positive, albeit with one exception. Read on for a TUAW road test of Mophie's latest battery pack.

It suddenly occurred to me that my needs for software have changed.

It was while I was browsing for a native Mac application for monitoring weight loss that I realized that little out there would suffice if it couldn't sync with my iPhone. While there are several popular online sites for tracking diet and exercise, I wanted something that would sync with my Mac and that I could maintain from both my desktop and iPhone without having to go through a third-party website.

I didn't find that hoped-for software, but I did discover Bento.

I've had a love affair with bento lunches since I began Japanese studies in 2000. They're still my favorite lunches to pack, and the concept behind them is simple: A compact way, yet attractive for those who put the time into it, of carrying a lunch. Everything is tucked away in its own compartment and it's easy to access.

FileMaker took this concept of bento lunches and used it to make Bento, a database application that works hand in hand with your Mac that we've covered quite a bit and also now has an iPhone version. It is supposed to be a database program for the rest of us -- you know, those of us who open up a spreadsheet in Excel or Numbers and suddenly go cross-eyed and immediately move onto something else ... or just never bothered using a database program in the first place.

"After all," I thought once upon a disorganized time, "I will never use something like this on a day to day basis."

FileMaker, Inc. provided one of the surprise announcements of the last couple of weeks with the introduction of Bento for iPhone and iPod touch. Designed a both a standalone database management application and companion app to the Mac version, Bento for iPhone is an inexpensive, well-designed, and usable app for collecting, searching, and displaying information.

TUAW has been able to put Bento for iPhone through its paces both as "just" an iPhone app, and as a synchronizable add-on to the desktop Bento. Check out my review of the app by clicking Read More.

I reviewed the Village Tronic ViDock a while back, and I was happy to have the opportunity to take a look at one of their more entry-level solutions for adding additional monitors to machines without an additional video port. This one, the ViBook, is a USB-to-DVI solution.

As was the case with my previous experience with Village Tronic products, I was duly impressed by their classy packaging. But I won't dwell on the shell here (no more rhyming, I mean it!). The device itself is compact, well-engineered and, yes, shiny. It connects to your computer via a standard USB cable plugged into any powered USB 2.0 slot.

It's designed to connect in one of several ways to the monitor: directly attached to the monitor's video port via a compact male-to-male adapter, via a cable directly connected to its embedded female adapter, or -- in a related manner -- via a short cable with the body of the device semi-permanently mounted on the back of the monitor with the included cradle and 3M adhesive pads. It's designed well enough that no matter where you put it, it will fit nicely and stay put (it has a studded rubber base, too). It is, by the way, both Mac and PC compatible. Read on for the rest of the review ...

When Tweetie for the iPhone was released late last year, many users begged for requested a desktop version for OS X. Today, Atebits complied and publicly launched Tweetie for Mac OS X.

When it comes to desktop Twitter clients, Mac OS X has a pretty great selection (especially when compared to our Windows and Linux friends). Just off the top of my head, I can list: Nambu (which Mat reviewed last week), EventBox, TweetDeck, DestroyTwitter, Twhirl, Lounge, and of course, the original, Twitterrific. While all of these apps vary in features and interface, the trend seems to be that the more advanced apps all use Adobe AIR, rather than Cocoa. That's not necessarily a good thing.

Adobe AIR has great potential, but when it comes to something like a Twitter client, I prefer native apps that don't hog my memory (and I have 4 GB of RAM, but TweetDeck and others have total Firefox complexes). Fortunately, Tweetie for Mac is both native and feature-rich.

Check out the gallery and read on for more details.

During the discussion earlier in the year about why Apple was blocking turn-by-turn GPS navigation apps for the iPhone 3G (it will be "legal" in iPhone 3.0), a reader pointed out that there have been a pair of turn-by-turn navigators in the App Store for quite a while.

Upon following the reader hint, I was surprised to find that XRoad G-Map US West (click opens iTunes) and East have the United States covered for navigation. These apps, US$24.99 each, don't have the voice prompts that most of us appreciate, but they do provide surprisingly accurate directions and a 3D navigation view that rivals the more expensive Garmin, TomTom, and Magellan dedicated navigators.

European and Canadian versions of the app are expected to be released by the end of this quarter, while Central / South America and Asian versions should arrive by the end of 2009.

Since I am the resident GPS geek at TUAW, I decided to give XRoad G-Map US West v1.3 a test drive and see how it performed compared to my Garmin nüvi navigator. While the XRoad product has some shortcomings, it's still worthy of a look if you're thinking about purchasing a navigation app. Click Read More to see how G-Map worked...or didn't.

Earlier this month I had the unhappy experience of using the iPhone app VoiceMail.[ App Store link] The U.S. $0.99 app was designed to send an audio message to another iPhone, or a PC or Mac. It failed almost every test I gave it, but the developers say they have been hard at work and have updated VoiceMail.

In my tests I have found the app to be much improved. The audio is no longer distorted, and the message plays back on any PC now. QuickTime is no longer required to play back the message, as it can come as a standard MP3 file. Uploading the message from the iPhone is still pretty slow, even using WiFi. A short 5 second message took 15 seconds to send.

This is a handy utility if you want to send an audio message and don't want to use voice mail, although it seems pretty useless for iPhone to iPhone messaging as you already have voice mail available.

I still have some nits to pick with this app. Clicking on the support link at the App Store takes you to a web site that just links you back to the App Store. Not too handy. Your voice mail sits on the developers server's, and that doesn't seem to be overly secure or private. The developers make no mention of a privacy policy.

I'm glad to see this app updated, and for some it may be very useful. It's clear it works now, but with MMS messaging coming in iPhone OS 3.0 and a Voice Memo app that may allow forwarding the sound file, the features of VoiceMail may be overtaken by the Apple update.

It's not a big risk for less than a buck, and I was glad to see the developers respond so thoroughly to my earlier review and fix most of what I complained about. If you have use for the features it offers, and can live with some uncertainty about privacy, you can certainly give it a try.

This review has an interesting history. Back at the end of January, Polaroid sent a note to TUAW requesting that we ask our readers to join in asking Apple to support Bluetooth printing from the iPhone. Polaroid had a very good reason for doing this, since the iPhone is a phenomenally successful smartphone. Those millions of iPhone users would make a very good market for Polaroid's new PoGo Instant Mobile Printer, a tiny pocket-sized photo printer that prints out 2" x 3" borderless prints.

I asked Polaroid if we could test a PoGo for our readers who don't own iPhones, and also to see how it works with the Mac. The results of our tests follow, along with details of a giveaway where two lucky TUAW readers can win a PoGo and a 30-pack of the special paper that it uses.

Before the release of the original Amazon Kindle a little over a year ago, there were a number of electronic book readers that tried to create and capture the market for a replacement to traditional "dead tree" books. There have been readers for just about every handheld unit since the Newton, as well as a series of devices that all required would-be readers to hook their book to a PC or Mac to transfer the content.

Amazon changed all that with the Kindle by creating a device with built-in 3G networking that delivers books to you the minute you buy them. I was one of the people who purchased the first-generation Kindle, and though it delivered on wireless purchase of books, it was a clunky, poorly designed device.

In the meantime, Apple introduced the iPhone 3G and the App Store, and several ebook reader apps have worked their way onto the home screens of millions of iPhone owners. So, is Steve Jobs right? Is there no need for a dedicated electronic book device like Kindle?

I've used both the original Kindle and the new Kindle 2, and I've also read my share of electronic books on the iPhone. Which of the reigning champions of the ebook world is the winner? Read on to find out.

I don't know about you, but I have a tendency to accumulate junk on my Macs. I start off with a nice, fat, clean hard drive, and before you know it I'm starting to panic about running out of space.

Sponge, from Dare to be Creative Ltd., is a US$26 program designed to look for the space-wasters on your Mac and help you get rid of them cleanly. There are other applications that do the same thing, Smith Micro's Spring Cleaning being the primary example of this. I actually shied away from cleaner applications since an earlier version of Spring Cleaning did a little TOO good a job a few years ago and rendered a Mac unusable until I reloaded the OS.

So it was with a great deal of trepidation that I decided to use Sponge to try to clean up my MacBook Air. It's a first-generation model with an 80 GB hard drive, of which 74.1 GB are actually usable. Since I was down to 16 GB of space, I figured that a quick cleaning might be in order. Read on for more about Sponge.

The wizards at Mariner Software have been around the Apple world for a long time. Their first product, a HyperCard stack that charted stock prices, came out in 1989 as a shareware product. After twenty years of developing cool Mac apps, Mariner has just released a useful product for the iPhone: MarinerCalc, a feature-packed spreadsheet application.

During the past few days, I've been putting MarinerCalc for iPhone (US$9.99, click opens iTunes) through a series of tests on my iPhone 3G. My assessment is that MarinerCalc is an excellent spreadsheet app. If you have any need to manipulate, create, or even just view spreadsheets on your iPhone, this is the app to get.

Read more about MarinerCalc by clicking the (you guessed it!) Read More link below, and be sure to visit the gallery for plenty of MarinerCalc screenshots.

MovieWedge and MiniRizer essentially do the same thing: they provide a stand for your iPhone, iPod, or other teensy portable device (BlackBerry Storm?). If you've ever sat for an hour on a plane, holding your iPhone in your hand like a dope, staring down at the screen trying to enjoy, let's say, Koyaanisqatsi, then you realize there's a market for these things. I had a hard time choosing a favorite here, but I have to say that MovieWedge wins by a nose.

MiniRizer is by longtime manufacturer Matias, and it's a miniaturized version of their iRizer -- a laptop stand. The MiniRizer is comprised of two clear plastic rectangles, designed to fit into each other to form a shelf with a backplate. This is perfect for the majority of phones or portable media players out there. But of course, it's really perfect for an iPhone or iPod touch.

The MiniRizer provides two slots for assembly, which gives you two viewing angles: 40 and 50 degrees. The two plastic pieces fit into an envelope that comes with the product. Finally, the plastic "lip" where the iPhone would sit includes a little rubber for gripping the device. As anyone who has tried to sit their iPhone up on a desk, it's the slippage that winds up being the pain (I have been known to carry a large rubber band from a bunch of broccoli in my pocket to fashion an improvised anti-slip surface).

Read on for more, or check out the gallery below.