HeliumFoot Software, developers of the popular Mac apps Mercury Mover(reviewed here) and Highbrow have released their first iPhone app, GroceryList . Keith really took his time with this app and it shows. I particularly like the interface, nimble and quick.

Free for 48 Hours and the perfect Superbowl companion.

I’ve started using the free Verisign VIP security token application on my iPhone and I’m impressed. Once set up, your online retail accounts (including eBay and Paypal) will send a token number to your iPhone or iPod touch. This becomes an additional gate to the transaction and changes within minutes. It adds an extra step, but if someone gets your Paypal ID and password they are out of luck.

I am a big fan of the voice recognition software. I use Nuance's Dragon Dictate on the PC and MacSpeech Dictate on my Mac. I was very pleased to see that Nuance, the developer of the Dragon engine, has released a Dragon Dictate iPhone app. For now, at least, it is free. I immediately downloaded and tried it out. Indeed, this post was written using it.

With no training whatsoever, the application immediately began recognizing my speech. This application does not perform the speech recognition on your iPhone but instead sends the voice file to the Dragon servers which do the heavy lifting and then send it back. It is all rather seamless. However, in order to work, you must be on a wi-fi or internet connection.

The only frustration is that it only works in short bursts. After two or three sentences, it will stop, send the voice file to the Nuance servers, processes your blurb, then be available for you to resume dictation. It also doesn't like swear words, as discovered by Andy Ihnatko.

If you've ever been curious about dictation software, go download it now.

Update on Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 10:01AM by David Sparks

The license agreement requires your consent to upload your contacts to their servers. I presume this is to help with the speech recognition but be warned.