The continuation of the series…
- QRANK – This rather fun trivia game has some good social competition aspects to it and is quite fun to play. The only thing I wish for this app would be a QRANK HD, so I wouldn’t have to scale it up from iPhone-App size to iPad size.
- Checkbook – Probably the most indispensable app I have on my iPad. I manage my budget of $260 a week with this app. As I spend I mark it in the app and it tells me how much of my budget remains and makes balancing my books on Sunday mornings very easy. I just look at the top line, add or subtract from 260, and that’s what I pay for my weekly expenditures. Very nice.
- 1Password – Without a doubt my number two go-to app. The heroin for this app is how it syncs with Dropbox, so I can have my 1Password database updated and ready for me to use on every single machine I use. My machines at home, my machines at work, my iPad, all together. This app I am sure has saved me tons of worry and kept my online life secure.
- News Apps – These apps are lumped together, there isn’t much to rave about here and I barely use them.
- NPR
- ABC News
- NASA
- Mashable
- NYTimes
- NewsRack
- MacLife
- Huff Post
- BBC News
- 3D Sun
- USA Today
- CNN
- Notable but little used News apps include:
- River of News – Lost out to Reeder due to Reeders interface design.
- Sandpit – I downloaded it, but never really used it. (huh)
- FeeddlerRSS – Useful in that you can save images from Google Reader Feeds. The interface is sluggish. If Reeder would have a way to save pictures this app would go out the window.
- Social Apps
- foursquare – iPhone-only App, silly game, I play but I don’t know why. I suspect it’s more knee-jerk than for fun anymore.
- Wikihood – Cute but limited. I used it a few times, it didn’t piss me off enough to earn a deletion, so it just sits around.
- BirdEye – Great for people with photo-heavy Twitter feeds.
- Scruff – Another gay chat talker. This one supposedly caters to Bears, but so far it’s just another litterbox.
- Grindr – Tounge-in-Cheek gay chat talker. Everyone is looking for sex but can’t say anything sexual. It’s where the frustrated and masochistic go. Another litterbox.
- FBF_Albums – Facebook Photo app. I can’t remember the last time I used it, probably should delete it.
- IM+ – Links up a bunch of instant messaging systems and has a neat push feature so the app can let you know there are incoming chats even if it’s in the background.
- VisibleVote – Cute and fluffy, but ultimately meaningless. Should delete this one as well.
- Jack’d – Again another gay chat talker. Much like Grindr it tries to be something that the Apple App Store categorically refuses to vend. I keep it around because it doesn’t take up much space.
- HootSuite – Annoying Twitter and Facebook app. It’s only claim to fame is that you can post to both Twitter and Facebook with one posting. It’s not enough of a feature to actually use the app.
- Kik – Doomed to failure because it is not ubiquitous. Perhaps it will gain traction sometime in the future.
- Tree To Go – Applet from Ancestry.com. Allows you to rattle off names and relationships but doesn’t really have much more to offer than that.
- Groupon – Coupons reinvented for Generation X and Y.
- Facepad – Behaves like the Twitter app does for Twitter, only for Facebook. Originally was oddly out-of-focus and a little annoying to use, so it’s relegated to the internment camp of the Social folder.
- Twitteriffic – Used to be my go-to app for Twitter before the Twitter app came along. Lacks some key features that the native Twitter app has, so it hangs out in la-la-land.
- Books
- nook – I don’t use it, but I have it!
- Kindle – Again, I don’t use it, but I have it.
- Discover – Turns Wikipedia articles into magazine-formatted booklets. Cute.
- Dictionary – Actually use this a lot to get new words, clarify meanings, and get pronunciation help.
- GoodReader – Has a lot of file features and is very manageable, however it collides functionality-wise with iBooks, so not a lot of use.
- Google Books – I don’t use it, but I have it. It’s not very good.
- iLife / Productivity
- Pages – I bought it for my iPad and my MacBook. So far, it’s quite a competent word processing app. It’s got all the polish and refinement that you’d expect from a native Apple app.
- Numbers – I bought this in a crunch because I didn’t have a good spreadsheet program on my iPad, and I needed to use a spreadsheet program that could understand Excel. Numbers fit the bill, the interface is a little annoying, but it does work.
- Dictation – I trot this out to display the how-cool-is-that feature of the app, but I don’t use it. I find I type far better than I dictate.
- iThoughtsHD – Once I got started using XMind I found myself with brainstorming sessions and all I had handy was my iPad. This app fits the bill quite nicely. I’ve done some very good work with this app and it really helps. It’s well worth the money.
- PlainText – This simple notebook editor syncs with Dropbox. It’s principal power is that synergy. Otherwise it’s very plain jane.
- Mercury Web Browser Pro – As a replacement for Safari it does quite well. Unfortunately the system is fixed to open websites with Safari, so this app doesn’t get the kind of use it really ought to. There are some clever settings it as, like the User Agent String adjustment, which is kinky. The only down-note to this app is that it can’t automatically pick up all of Safari’s bookmarks. You have to manually herd them yourself.
- Toodledo – My go-to app for tasks and one of the apps that I run a lot and almost always have in the background on my iPad. It syncs online, has a full-fledged iPad app, a nice website, and keeps me alerted to tasks that I need to accomplish at home and at work. Add in that I can email to my Toodledo and it creates tasks based on the emails and it’s damn near perfect for task management. I can’t recommend this app strongly enough!