Have you ever gotten one of those ideas that won’t go away? Some persistent notion about something you want to build, rearrange, tinker with — and before you know it, you just have to give it a shot?

That’s what’s happened to the Five Tips blog: We just couldn’t leave it be.

It isn’t that we’ve managed to cover every possible IT tip during this blog’s first year. In fact, we topped out at around 1,275 tips, so we probably missed one or two.

But we got this Other Idea, and we had to give into it.

Five Apps?

The concept is simple. Everybody loves lists. And everybody loves a good app. The problem is, you can’t always find the app you need for a particular situation, task, or project.

So presto change-o, now you have a resource that can help. The new Five Apps blog will provide concise lists to help you get your hands on the right tool for the job — and to help you steer clear of the clunkers that aren’t worth your time. Things like:

  • Five image editors for graphics novices
  • Five Windows Phone 7 apps for escapists
  • Five highly cost-effective Web-based tools
  • Five Linux apps that are too bloated for practical use
  • Five cloud apps for secure file sharing
  • Five free add-ins to optimize Word 2010

And so on.

And that brings me to the plaintive-request part of this post: Send us your ideas! Please. Tell us what types of apps you need for what types of tasks, and we’ll do our best to round up five strong contenders.

The newsletter

If you subscribe to the Five Tips newsletter, you’ll notice that it has shifted to Five Apps as well. And if you’re not a subscriber, now would be a great time to sign up. That way, you’ll get to see which apps we’ve recently covered. Every Tuesday.