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What can I do with my iPad?
December 28, 2010, 12:28 am · 12 comments · Filed under: Apple
’Tis the season. A friend of mine was gifted an iPad for Christmas. After ‘32 hours of playing Scrabble,’ she asked me what else she can do with it. This is the list I sent her.
Now, I don’t own an iPad myself. However, I do own an iPhone and I build iPhone apps for a living, so you could be forgiven for assuming that makes me an authority on the best on offer in the App Store.
Truth be told, when faced with the task of making recommendations, I had a few ideas, but many of the apps listed below are ones I dug up in the course of a little research. I’d be curious to hear what apps you can’t live without in the comments.
- TED – This app is the primary reason I would consider buying an iPad. If you love TED talks, there is no better way to consume them.
- NPR – Great content, great format.
- Kindle – The best books app.
- Flipboard – I haven’t used it myself, but this innovative news consumption app caused quite a stir when it was first released.
- Instapaper – I love, love, love Instapaper. When I see an interesting article on the web and don’t have time to read it right then, a click of a bookmarklet and, bam, it’s saved for later.
- Pandora – Music discovery engine par excellence.
- Epicurious – More recipes than you can hope to follow in a lifetime, organized along numerous facets.
- Kayak – Kayak.com is my first stop when planning a trip. The iPad app looks nicely done.
- Google Earth – You could argue that some of the novelty has worn off, but Google Earth is still great fun for exploring far off lands or checking in on the street where you grew up.
- Point Inside – Maps of malls isn’t really my thing, but I can see how it would be handy.
- Bento – Life organizer. I could use a little of this.
- Evernote – I’m a recent convert to Evernote. I use it as my outboard brain.
- Dropbox – I love Dropbox. It’s the simplest way I’ve seen to share files across multiple computers.
- Wikihood – History and photos of where you live. This is a great fit in a place like San Francisco. I’m not sure how useful it would be in places with less coverage.
- Howcast – How-to videos on every imaginable topic.
- Sketchbook Pro – Real artists ship. And use Sketchbook Pro.
- Sally’s Spa – Every female I’ve seen pick up Sally’s Spa has been immediately engrossed. I don’t make the news. I just report it.
- Angry Birds – This game is #1 on the paid apps ranking for a reason.
- Flight Control – An iPhone classic, this beautifully crafted game is even better on the ‘big’ screen.
- Tap Tap Radiation – OK, this one’s here mainly because my company built it. Still, we must be doing something right considering the success of Tap Tap Revenge!
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12 comments
Great list, besides Angry Birds, my top favorite game is Fruit Ninja! My top score is 774 in arcade more, top that!
Beides that, there is:
Friendly: A Facebook app (not made by FB) Kayak HD - Actually makes finding and buy airplane tickets fun and easy. Netflix - YES! VLC - The popular open source video player that can play ANY video / audio format. Has an easy way for you to drag/drop videos. Tweetdeck - I’m not much of a tweeter - but the IU is great for this format.
And lastly,
Looking at your photos in iPhoto - AWESOME. Watching HD videos on vimeo - AWESOME Viewing PDF’s in iBooks - AWESOME and way better than a Kindle
Christine & Mauvis, thanks for chiming in with some great suggestions!
One thing I forgot to mention that a person can do with their iPad, apparently, is run a country.
Some of my favorites not mentioned in your post, Andrew:
- BioDefense HD ($1, tower-defense game)
- Blokus HD ($1 today on sale, the board game)
- Carcassonne ($10, one of the best board/card games is great on iOS)
- Galcon Fusion ($5, strategy)
- Harbor Master HD (Free, I like this better than flight control)
- NinJump HD (Free, simple jumping game, but I can’t stop playing!)
- Nonograms ($5, if you ever liked sudoku…)
- Solipskier ($1 today on sale, I posted about this one on my blog, along with some others)
- The Incident ($2, extremely clever jumping game)
- Tilt to Live HD (Free, that’s all you do, tilt!)
- Words with Friends HD ($1, you can see the entire board, much easier than the iPhone version)
And some non-games:
- Amazon Windowshop (Free, mesmerizing)
- Netflix (Free, monthly subscription)
- ZumoCast (stream video from your computer)
Hmm, I see now that ZumoCast isn’t currently available. That’s a shame. It was free when it was there. Apparently you can sign up to be notified when it comes back: http://www.zumocast.com/
I’ve got tons of others that are probably only worthwhile if you get them while they’re free or on sale. What I’ve listed above are definitely worth the prices listed, if not more. Even Carcassonne, though I got it for $5.
I would only add a few things not already listed:
- Geometry Wars Touch: Awesome shooter/puzzle hybrid.
- The Incident: A simple, addictive yet hard vertical puzzler/game
- TrainYard: Deceptively simple color puzzler (see a pattern? lol)
- Bills for iPad: Great little Bill Minder app
- Budgets for iPad: Budgets too!
- Penultimate: Like an iPad moleskin. Nice lil writing notepad
- DropText: Text Editor that saves/loads from Dropbox. Genius.
- Weather Station: Awesome weather app w/ themes and location options. Reminds you a total weather dock/device from Sharper Image minus the Sharper Image premium.
- Monster Dash: Marathon running game. Jump over chasms and shoot mummies/vampires/monsters.
- Tetris: I mean, why not?
There’s a few more apps I know I have and use regularly, just can’t remember off the top of my head. A symptom of “too-many-apps-on-too-many-platforms-itis”
Cheers!
How about a way to have login profiles? I play, so do my kids! Woils like it separate for their games vs. my apps.
Phillip, Jayson, great additions!
Andy, if I understand the question correctly, the answer is that the way iPad works now, it’s up to individual games to implement support for multiple user profiles. It would be nice if, like on Mac OS X, you could have user logins to the device itself. I suspect Apple doesn’t do that because it would significantly complicate the user experience.
Oh, yes! Trainyard! I scanned my iPad to come up with my list, and forgot to check my iPhone. Trainyard is brilliant.
Maybe for the new year, I’ll post about my favorite iOS apps and games. That would be fun.
Christine, I saw you link to this article, Getting Started with the iPad. It’s maybe a little basic for my friend (I’m pretty sure she gets how to turn it on and off!), but could be helpful, nonetheless.
So far I am finding the iPad an excellent alternative! http://theipadexperiment.wordpress.com
Another resource: Tim Difford wrote up a nice blog post about which apps you can use to do an impressive demo of iPad’s capabilities.
I’d recommend Plants vs. Zombies HD as well. I don’t think I’ve wasted as much time on any other app as I did on this one :)
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Great list to start with, I love my iPad a lot… here are some of the apps I’m using: Early Editing was one of the first RSS readers I picked up and I still love it to pieces, 2Do is a really useful & beautiful to do app with calendar etc, PlainText is simple, clean organised notes (CrossCheck is worth a look too), Air Hockey is totally fun on the iPad and Dead Runner I picked up for the holidays and it’s perfect for iPad (running in a forest game)! SimCity DLX works amazingly well if you like sim games. iAnnotate for making notes on PDFs, Audiotorium is a brilliant idea, it records audio and you make notes that accompany it, great for students, meetings etc… I could go on but I’ll leave it there :D Good luck!
★ Posted by: Christine · December 28, 2010, 5:31 am