Four more iOS apps for IT

Network World - Last week I took a look at three products for iThings (my catch-all term for iPhones, iPod Touchs, and iPads) that IT would find useful (see iPad meets IT - three tools you need]. OK, maybe the last one, the iGrill wasn't strictly "useful", so as a penance this week I have, for your delectation, four more iOS apps that I think you'll want. If you have any to add to the list, let me know. You can also check out my picks as a slideshow.

First up, RoamBi, published by MeLLmo, is an amazing tool for creating and viewing interactive data presentations on iThings. Although this app looks amazing on the iPhone and iPod Touch, it's gorgeous on the iPad because of the screen real estate.

You upload your data to the RoamBi site (Excel, CSV, Google Spreadsheets, Crystal Reports, Salesforce CRM, SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos, and Microsoft Reporting Services are all supported) and select which view you want to use (there are several choices including Cardex, a card file view; Superlist, for tabular data; and PieView). Next you can add customizations and finally, publish.

When you open the (free) RoamBi app on your iThing and provide your account details (the basic personal account is free), your latest RoamBi visualizations will be automatically downloaded. (With the multiuser Pro and Enterprise subscriptions new versions of your visualizations are pushed to you in real time.)

What will amaze you about RoamBi is just how slick the visualizations are. You can make selections, drill down, take screen shots and share them via e-mail and create events. RoamBi gets a rating of 5 out of 5 (I like this app so much, I'd give it a 6 out of 5 if I could).

Next, I have Nuance's free Dragon Dictation, an app that will perform speech to text translation on your iThing without training, which is pretty remarkable.

All you have to do is press the record button on the app screen and start speaking. The audio data is sent to Nuance's servers (obviously you have to be online for this to work) and the translated text is returned. The accuracy is remarkable and you can send the results to e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter or keep them as notes and edit them if you wish.

This app works amazingly well and, while its user interface is somewhat dull, it is useful and the price is right. Dragon Dictation gets a rating of 4.5 out of 5.

Now, isn't it the case that every IT person needs a set of basic network test tools on every device they use? IThings are no exception. A simple app I discovered that fills this role nicely is IT Tools ($4.99) by Kevin Koltzau, which provides traceroute, DNS lookup, ping, routing tables, ARP tables, interface statistics, and a list of active connections. IPv6 is also fully supported, including reverse DNS.