The app thread - what apps do you use and why

We all know that 99% of the apps in the app store are complete garbage. Other than the top 100 (which hardly ever change) it's tough to find good apps unless someone tells you about it. Here we will list the apps we really like, are really useful, are really fun, etc... Also say a couple of words about what it does and why it's good.

Dropbox - This app is cool because you can also share things to other computers over the 'cloud'. You get 2 gigs free, you sign up online, put a folder on your computer called 'dropbox', and anything you put in the folder automatically gets synced with the cloud. You can then download dropbox for your iphone or ipad and share it with those devices too, and it's free if you just pick 2 gigs (you can get more for money).

Goodreader - This is a great PDF reader. I've used it very little, but it's nice because you can organize your PDF files, you can high light them, make comments, etc... I'm sure there is a lot more you can do with it but i've only just scratched the surface so far.

Games / Infinity blade - Most games on the ipad are mediocre or gimmicky. I find all of the shooters to be awkward and awful because they are not at all made for a touch input. Games like Rage and Dead Space try and make use of the touch screen, but it just ends up being awkward and feeling forced. Games need to be designed JUST for the touch screen, or be the type of game that is good for it. Things like angry birds, flight control, cut the rope, and world of goo are great on the touch screen and would be much worse with a mouse. Unfortunately a shooter will NEVER be better with a touchscreen and not a mouse or controller. I've never played a shooter on iphone/ipad that is actually any good.

Infinity blade is the first high end game i've played that is actually properly designed for the iPad and would NOT be good with a keyboard and mouse. Racing games are also really fun, and are better than on computers. You can tilt the ipad like a steering wheel, which is better than using arrow keys on a computer.

 

Is that an app, or are you just bored?

 

Nice, what is heywire?



Another one I like...

iTeleport - it's a VNC program that lets you control your home computer (windows or mac) from your iPad. On my old ipod touch 2g the screen was too small and the processor was too weak to make it that good, but on the iPad it's pretty great. Can be really handy if you need to log onto your computer with the iPad if you forget something (you could drag something to your drop box, for example). Also it supports multitouch, so you can zoom, expose, spaces, etc...


I have tried docs to go and pages, and find them both quite poor. I put a couple of word documents into my drop box, opened them with both programs, and of them screwed up my formatting. I had a couple of excel tables in them that had merged cells, and so neither program could handle that and un-mered them both. We really need MS word/powerpoint on the iPad!!!

 

Maybe you can spell it out for us.

I handed my girlfriend the iPad with plants vs zombies about 5 hours ago and she hasn't put it down, so I guess we can add that to the list of good apps.