These Are a Few of My Favorite (iPad) Things

My iPad is always at my side

I’m sick of reading about offensive tweets by 50 Cent, gay bullying and evangelical bigots. So, let’s lighten it up with a review of my five favorite iPad apps. Criteria for my review:

• Frequency of use
• Ease of use
• Interface and design
• Usefulness
• Cost

Well, let’s dive in.

1. Flipboard

This app turns your social media (Facebook, Twitter – or any individual Twitter feed) into a readable magazine. It takes full advantage of the touch-screen aspect and high-resolution to highlight photos, provide graphic headlines and retaining the ability to comment, reTweet, like and otherwise share content. It is, in my opinion, an iPad “killer” app – which I believe are apps that integrate social media and web behavior into an app that moves users away from ever using the same app in a web browser again.

You can create a Flipboard magazine for me with my fascinating Twitter account @dannation.

2. Instapaper

Ever want to save a web page until later and didn’t want to bookmark in your browser? Instapaper allows you to click “read later” on a browser or within an app (like Flipboard) to save the content (minus photos and other capabilities) as a book-like file within the iPad app. Better yet, it allows you to read the content offline and delete when finished. It also synchronizes across your computer, iPhone and other gadgets. Now that I have the 3G iPad (as of yesterday), it will be interesting to see if I use this less; when I had the entry-level Wi-Fi iPad, I would read my saved stories while on the train. And, with my faltering eyesight, reading the ibook-like format made my reads easier on my eyes.

3. Dropbox

While this app originated as an external storage service via your computer, the iPad (and iPhone) Dropbox apps make it much easier to view stored files, photos and other goodies that you don’t want taking up limited storage on mobile devices. Instead of syncing all my photos to my iPad, I sync them with Dropbox and they are viewable (and changeable) across all my mobile devices, work laptop and personal computers. Whether or not this app will work on the new Apple TV will cause me to orgasm when I can view a work spreadsheet on my HD at home. I just keep the dirty photos in a “special” folder so they don’t accidently show up on my office computer screensaver.

4. Sketchbook Pro

Wow! I’ve always dabbled with drawing and oil painting – and this app brings it to my iPad. While it works better with my stylus over my fat fingers, I’ve created some amazing drawings and had a bunch of fun in the process. You can see some of my work here.

5. MobileRSS

I’ve been reading blogs regularly since I started DanNation in 2005. With over 150 or so that I read each day, I have relied on Google Reader to keep me up to date. While Google works fine on my laptop, accessing it via iPad Safari seems contrary to the iPad spirit. MobileRSS provides a streamlined interface to get me through the news of the day. This is a rapidly-growing app category, so if anyone has a better alternative that they’ve find, let us know in the comments.

Anyways, back to the other news of the day. Fuck off you shit bag 50 Cent! We need an app to shut the ‘phobes up.

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