With a ton of apps to choose from, wading through Apple's App Store can be a doozy for iPad users. Here's a running list of apps your guide has personally tried along with a quick take on each of them. Links will be updated for each individual app when a more thorough review is available. For more iPad-related info, don't forget to check out our Apple iPad Central page.
Adobe Ideas
Price: Free
Category: Entertainment (Productivity)
This a neat sketching app for entertaining your creative fancies. You can start with a blank page and draw your heart away via the touchscreen or even work on images that you already have. You also have access to various color palettes. Keep in mind that results will be as good — or as bad — as your artistic skills.
Bloomberg
Image © Bloomberg
Price: Free
Category: Finance
A good alternative for folks who love business news but don't want to deal with the extra payments required by the Wall Street Journal app. The Bloomberg app features content that includes various market indices, currency and bonds markets, equities and commodities. You also have access to podcasts plus a customizable "My Stocks" section for keeping track of your stocks. News is limited to a selection of content from the last few days. Don't forget to swipe your screen to the left to see more news categories.
FatSecret
Image © FatSecret
Price: Free
Category: Healthcare & Fitness
Providing dietary info on a wide range of restaurant fare and popular supermarket brands is enough to make a good app. But throw in a diet manager, exercise diary and weight tracker and you've got the makings of an excellent app. Even with the outcry from many FatSecret fans for the removal of Weight Watchers points, there's still enough info in this app to make it a worthy addition to any iPad.
Epicurious
Image © Apple
Price: Free
Category: Food
With thousands and thousands ... and thousands of recipes to choose from, the Epicurious app is a great program for home cooks. You can search for recipes by ingredient, meal type (i.e. breakfast, brunch, appetizer, etc.), season, occasion or even dietary consideration (e.g. low-fat or low-carb). There's even a separate category for drinks. Many recipes also have colored pictures, which is always nice.
iBooks
Image © Apple
Price: Free
Category: Books
A must-have app for book lovers, iBooks provides access to to all sorts of published works, from bestsellers and books by your favorite authors to free versions of classics you've grown up reading. It even comes with a free version of Winnie the Pooh in neat eBook form.
NBA Gametime Courtside
Image © NBA
Price: Free
Category: Sports
Just a wealth of information for any basketball nut. For the playoffs, for example, you can zero in on a particular series and look at any game for quarter-by-quarter stats, shot charts by court area, player stats and all sorts of data. There's also a news ticker with updated news, videos and Twitter feeds. To steal a line from the NBA, it's faaan-tastic.
Now Playing
Price: Free
Category: Entertainment (Movies and DVDs)
A neat app for movie buffs. Besides info on show times and locations for theaters, you can also check trailers plus easily cross reference any movie or DVD release with sites such as Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, Metacritic, Wikipedia and Amazon. You can even link it to your Netflix account.
Tap Tap Radiation
Image © Tapulous
Price: Free
Category: Games
The popular iPhone/iPod Touch app goes big for the iPad in Tap Tap Radiation. The iPad version of the popular rhythm tapping game features a new "floating" interface to touch with your fingers instead of the Guitar Hero-like interface from older versions. The game is also free to download, with optional paid downloads for additional music packs from other artists.
Toy Story
Image © Disney
Price: Free
Category: Books
The free Toy Story app introduces Disney's line of children's books for iPad users. The eBook chronicles the adventures of Woody, Buzz and the rest of the Toy Story gang in vividly illustrated pages. Toy Story also features a voice narrator for each page but avid readers can also record their own voice for posterity. Besides the, um, story, Toy Story has other extras as well, including a coloring book function, two music "videos," and a parachute drop and maze mini-game. Just a great app for kids who love bedtime stories.
Toy Story 2
Photo © Disney
Price: $8.99
Category: Books
Toy Story 2 is the follow-up to the first Toy Story and follows the second adventure of Woody, Buzz and rest of the Toy Story cast. Toy Story features the same bells and whistles that make the first Toy Story digital book a treat, including colorful page illustrations, a coloring book function, music and games. It would've been nice if it didn't rehash the same games from the first Toy Story. But it's still a solid effort overall.
Warships
Image © I-Play
Price: $2.99
Category: Games
In an age of jazzed-up, high-tech games such as Crysis, it's surprising to see how a classic game of "Battleship" still holds up. Warships is a digital twist on the old, "guess-where-your-opponent's-battleship-is-on-a-grid" gameplay, with the option of using either classic ships, modern ships or even space ships. Besides a quick play option, there's also a campaign mode with various levels plus a ranking mode. I actually found myself saying, "OK, one more game and I'll stop" several times.
WeatherBug Elite
Photo © WeatherBug
Price: Free
Category: Weather
If you're looking for a free weather app but don't want to deal with the ad-filled version of the Weather Chanel app, then you can check out WeatherBug Elite.
The app allows you to view a map with animated weather pattern overlays a la your local TV report. You can also change map info settings to display stuff like temperature, humidity or wind speed. You can even use the map like an actual, well, map.
To view weather at a particular area, you basically choose a weather station point. While alerts are limited to the U.S. you can still view weather data for other areas worldwide. I was able to check the weather close to my hometown in the Philippines, for example.
