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

Echofon Pro

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.

BeejiveIM for iPad

If you still actually do any instant messaging, this is a good choice. It works with all the IM services.

Friendly Plus for Facebook

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.

GV Connect/Google Voice

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

Awesome Note HD

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.

Evernote

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.

iThoughtsHD

A great mindmapping app. This is my goto choice for the times I actually want to take notes in a meeting.

Notes Plus

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.

Byline

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.

Reeder for iPad

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.

Mr. 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

Kindle

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…

iBooks

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.)

GoodReader for iPad

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.

Instapaper

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

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

Digits

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 for iPad

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.

Photogene for iPad

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.

Dictionary.com

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.

Wikipanion for iPad

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.

FlightTrack

Excellent flight tracker. Lots of features, including alerts. If you fly or want to track other people’s flights, this is a handy app.

Dragon Dictation

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.

Toodledo

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

Pages/Numbers/Keynote

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.

Blueprint

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.

GarageBand

Make music. Fun, amazing version of GarageBand for the iPad. Very capable, very easy.

Omnigraffle/TouchDraw

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

IMDB Movies & TV

The official app from IMDB. This is a really nice interface to IMDB data. I use it all the time.

Movies by Flixster

What’s on at the movie theaters? Previews, movie times, etc. Includes rotten tomatoes ratings on everything, which is nice.

ABC Player

Free player for shows on ABC.

Crackle

Sony’s entry into supplying some streaming TV shows and movies. It’s free, so what’s not to like?

Air Video

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.

Hulu Plus

Access all the movie and TV content on Hulu. Only really useful if you’re a Hulu Plus subscriber, which we are.

Netflix

The big daddy of streaming movie and TV content. If you have a subscription already then this is a must have.

PBS for iPad

Access a lot of content from PBS. It’s free, so why not?

Finance

Bloomberg for iPad

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.

Square

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

Atomic Web Browser

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.

Citrix Receiver for iPad

If you ever access sites using Citrix, you’ll know what this is for. It works pretty well.

Dropbox

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

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.

Prompt/iSSH

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

Amazon

Really nice interface into Amazon.

AppShopper

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.

Delivery Status

A decent package tracker. It has quirks, but works pretty well.

eBay for iPad

Nice interface into eBay if you ever have a need for such a thing.

Lifelike Craig

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

AniWeather US HD

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.

Hourly Weather

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.

RadarScope

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.