I was asked recently by a new iPad owner what apps I thought were
“indispensable”. Here’s my list in no particular order, all linking
back to iTunes. It’s the end result of buying and trying far too
many apps for a long time. These are my keepers and favorites.
Note that I’m not listing any games. I’ve purchased several but still
find myself rarely playing them. I far prefer the iPad over the
iPhone for games, but I just never have time to play. At one point I
did, however, get way too into Angry
Birds.
Social
A Twitter client. There are plenty of Twitter
apps available, but what I like about this one is that it syncs your
last-read position between the Mac, iPhone, and iPad apps. It has a
few quirks I’m not thrilled about, but it’s also pretty full-featured
and the ability to sync cements the deal.
If you still actually do any instant messaging, this is a good choice.
It works with all the IM services.
A Facebook interface. For some reason,
Facebook is completely ignoring the iPad. This app is an unofficial
interface into Facebook and does a decent job. I’m not exactly a big
Facebook user so I don’t know if this app is really lacking anything
or not. I know a lot of people like it. There’s also a free,
ad-supported version available. You might be happy just using
Facebook in the browser.
If you aren’t familiar with Google Voice,
check it out. It provides some fantastic phone features for free.
Google Voice is Google’s official app, but
it’s iPhone-only. It runs on the iPad, of course, but is in
iPhone-mode. The one advantage to this is that it will provide alerts
for Google Voice activity. GV Connect is
an iPad interface into Google Voice and it’s really well done. But it
doesn’t provide any alerts, so I just have both installed and only
really use Google’s for alerts.
Notes
There are plenty of note taking apps available. This one in
particular I use for two things: journaling and quick notes. It’s got
a decent interface for such things and more importantly it syncs with
Evernote. I use Evernote for storage of anything that
fits in a “note” category. It’s handy to have quick
notes and my journal synced with the Evernote service.
If you’re an Evernote user you’ll understand the need
for this. If you’re not an Evernote user you should check it out.
A great mindmapping app. This is my goto choice for the times I
actually want to take notes in a meeting.
A pretty full-featured general purpose note-taking app, supporting
drawing, typing, finger writing, and more. If, for some reason, I
didn’t want to mindmap things with iThoughtsHD, this
is the app I would use instead.
Feed Reading
Yes, I use three different feed readers. All of them sync with
Google Reader, but each is unique in
some way.
This is my favorite feed reader. I like the way it handles reading
feeds where I want a good look at every article, which is the case for
almost all my feeds. I can rotate the iPad to vertical and easily and
quickly swipe through each entry.
This is generally the favorite feed reader of the masses, and may be
the only reader most normal people would want. It excels at speed
when syncing. For some reason this app can sync much faster than
any other. That’s handy when you’re in a hurry to get some quick
reading done and move on. Or when you want to load in your feeds and
quickly mark some sections as read to clean them out before reading
everything else in another feed reader.
This reader is particularly good at what I call “sparse reading”. If
I want to go through feeds and only look at the title and first little
bit of the post, occasionally opening one up for a full read, this is
the feed reader I head to.
Reading
The king of book readers. Although I actually prefer
iBooks as a reader, I buy all my books in Amazon Kindle
format. Why? Because I have a way to break the Kindle encryption and
backup the book in an open format that I can convert to anything in
the future. iBooks books still can’t be stripped of their
encryption. So I buy the book from Amazon, break the encryption,
convert it to an ePub, and load it into iBooks. Works great for me.
And note that even though I’m getting my books in a DRM-free format in
the end, I’m still paying for them. It sure would be nice to buy them
DRM-free to begin with…
Some people prefer the Kindle app for reading, some prefer
iBooks. I’m an iBooks guy. I just don’t buy them there. (See the
Kindle entry.)
There are many PDF reader apps, but I believe this one is the best.
It’s very mature and has a lot of really nice features. You can even
use it to do a wide variety of annotating on a PDF.
If you’re not familiar with Instapaper, you
should go there right now and learn about it. It’s a fantastic way to
quickly save web items for later reading, and the developer does a
great job making this app to read those saved articles very usable.
Zinio basically lets you subscribe to a
magazine in a digital form that’s an exact copy of the printed
magazine. It works pretty well on the iPad.
Utilities
Of course there are hundreds of calculator apps. I settled on this
one because it was available free one day, but I’m pretty sure I’d pay
$2 for it anyway. It’s a basic calculator with a few scientific
functions, but it’s got decent sized buttons and it lets you edit past
calculations on the virtual paper tape that it keeps. That comes in
handy far more often than you might think.
1Password is the best
password (and more) manager for the Mac. If you get this app you get
easy access to all your passwords stored on your
computer—particularly easy if they’re stored in a
Dropbox folder.
There are many apps out there for doing stuff to photos. I’ve
purchased and tried several, and this is the one I liked best for
all-around manipulation. It handles all the stuff like cropping,
adjusting exposure, adjusting colors, and more.
There are many choices for a dictionary on the iPad, but this one is
free and seems pretty decent. Why look further? It’s a thesaurus
too.
Although you could just hit the Wikipedia
website from the browser, an app like this makes the interface a
little nicer on the iPad. This one is free and always seemed good
enough to me.
Excellent flight tracker. Lots of features, including alerts. If you
fly or want to track other people’s flights, this is a handy app.
Speech-to-text. This works surprisingly well. You record yourself,
tell it you’re done, the recording gets shipped off to the clouds and
translated into text, and very quickly fills your screen with what you
said. At that point you can copy it for pasting into any other app.
There are times when this is very handy.
This is a case of where I learned my lesson. I went for the big
solution and paid big bucks (the world of
Omnifocus) and found
that it was too much for me. I went back to my old friend Toodledo
and couldn’t be happier (or more productive).
Toodledo is a free web site for managing task
lists (with premium levels available if you need it or want it) with a
really good set of features. This is an app interface into it that
syncs up really well. I don’t believe you actually need a web
account to use the app, but it’s free so why not?
Content Creation
The iWork trilogy, and they’re all great. If you think you’ll ever
have a need to create or edit documents, spreadsheets, or
presentations, just get these apps. Amazingly enough, Apple knows how
to push the iPad to the limits in creating great interfaces. I use
Numbers in particular quite often.
Lets you design iPad or iPhone mockups. It’s more capable than you
might think, and although not perfect, it’s pretty darn good. There’s
also a free viewer available so anyone with an iPad can see your
mockup.
Make music. Fun, amazing version of GarageBand for the iPad. Very
capable, very easy.
To be honest, I don’t have either of these. I’ve almost bought one,
but never quite had the need to pull the trigger. I love Omnigraffle
on the Mac and
everything I read says that the iPad version is similarly fantastic.
However, it’s $50. TouchDraw looks like it accomplishes the same
purpose, gets good reviews, and only costs $7. I think the day I want
something like this the $7 app will win.
Entertainment
The official app from IMDB. This is a really nice interface to IMDB
data. I use it all the time.
What’s on at the movie theaters? Previews, movie times, etc. Includes
rotten tomatoes ratings on everything, which is nice.
Free player for shows on ABC.
Sony’s entry into supplying some streaming TV shows and movies. It’s
free, so what’s not to like?
Play videos that are stored on your computer at home. This app has
been out a while and is pretty mature. It’s a handy way to have a lot
of videos available on your iPad without taking any space on your
iPad.
Access all the movie and TV content on Hulu. Only really useful if
you’re a Hulu Plus subscriber, which we are.
The big daddy of streaming movie and TV content. If you have a
subscription already then this is a must have.
Access a lot of content from PBS. It’s free, so why not?
Finance
Access all kinds of financial information. I don’t really use it for
news, but it’s a nice interface when I want to check in on one of the
few stocks I own.
Take credit card payments on your iPad. This is a free app and
they’ll even send you a free device to plug in so you can swipe a
credit card instead of typing in the number. They take a small
percentage, but sometimes it’s still convenient to transfer money this
way. I imagine it would be really handy to have for a garage sale or
the like.
Networking
A cheap, but really nice browser. It’s based on WebKit, of course,
but they have tacked on a ton of extensions on top. It’s worth $1
to have this available for times when it’s handy. For example, you
can tell it to identify your browser as something other than “Safari
on iPad”. There’s also tabbed browsing, ad blocking, private mode,
etc. Another excellent use that is important for me is that it
supports video out—an important feature on an iPad 1 that doesn’t do
video mirroring.
If you ever access sites using Citrix, you’ll know what this is for.
It works pretty well.
If you don’t know what Dropbox is, immediately
go find out and sign up for a free account. It’s basically cloud
storage that syncs seamlessly with all your computers in real-time.
This app give you access to everything in your Dropbox account.
LogMeIn is a really great service that lets you
remotely control computers. They sell a service to do this, but they
also have a free level of service available that’s always been plenty
for me. The LogMeIn app itself is not cheap, but I’ve never regretted
purchasing it. They did a very good job implementing it on the iPad.
You’ll find it a breeze to drive your desktop.
SSH clients. Prompt is very nice and user friendly, and
it’s relatively cheap. That’s the one I have, simply because it was
on sale one day and I don’t really do that much with SSH. However,
I think if I were serious about it I would try iSSH. By all
indications it’s very complete. It’s also twice the price.
Shopping
Really nice interface into Amazon.
AppShopper provides a nice, free service to
keep track of apps you’ve purchased or are interested in maybe buying
in the future. They provide a little utility that you can run on your
iTunes computer to automatically load in the list of apps you’ve
already purchased. This app is an interface to the website and your
personal account. One very handy thing this provides is notification
alerts when apps you are tracking go on sale. I’ve bought many an app
for less than normal price—sometimes all the way down to free.
A decent package tracker. It has quirks, but works pretty well.
Nice interface into eBay if you ever have a need
for such a thing.
Nice interface into Craig’s List if you ever
have need for such a thing.
Weather
There are fancier weather apps out there than I list below. But I
have an affinity for NOAA forecasts and
perhaps want something a little different from my weather apps than
other people might.
My favorite weather app is actually only available on the iPhone:
Weather Alert USA
Very basic, just gives a 5-day day/night NOAA forecast. What I like
about it other than the clean, clear display is that there’s an easy
button to push to get to the NOAA website if I want more data.
Very simple app that only does one thing. It would suck if it weren’t
free. But since it’s free, it’s a great one-touch access method into
the NOAA hourly weather graphs wherever you’re currently located.
Somewhat expensive (relatively), but provides a direct link to all of
the NOAA radar data in real-time. It’s more detailed and more
up-to-date than what you get in other weather apps. This is a
fantastic app to have when there’s a storm brewing. You’ll know
exactly where the worst weather is occurring and if it’s headed toward
you.
