After a previous post on iPad apps that were proving to be cracking downloads, I have since (obviously) been trying out loads more. Some of these have been corkers and so here’s a quick rundown if you are interested and own an iPad:
Zite (news) FREE
A wonderful, wonderful news app that adapts to your preferences of topic. There are a ton of suggested topics, and you can search to see if any more of your interests can be added too. The real WOW factor is the way it presents the articles as a newspaper: there is a main ‘edition’ of articles that suit your preferences as well as sections that contain themed articles. You can rate each with a thumbs up/down to help it learn what you like and it contains post options for the usual Twitter, FB, Instapaper, Delicious and email. Swiping and pinching between pages and articles is intuitive and it regularly update. It’s a beautiful thing…
Pulse (RSS feeder) FREE
I do like Flud, but this is a similar app with a similar interface. It can hook to your Google reader account to get to custom RSS feeds. Advantages over Flud are that you can rename the categories, so providing a more personalised experience, and you can perform a global update of all feeds. As Flud is ever-evolving, choosing between the two is going to be hard.
Photogene (image processor) £1.79 (with some in-app add-ons)
I was at a friends wedding and wanted to post some of the photos I took on Facebook. I shoot in RAW and was annoyed that the Photoshop app didn’t support this ?!? A bit of reading got me to this and it is a fabulous app when needed to adjust images when out and about. Sure, it’s no Lightroom, but it does do a good job with a wide variety of features familiar to the better-than-amateur photographer. There is a really nice Collage feature allowing you to organise up to six shots into a nice professional frame. For the money, it’s brilliant.
Halftone (comic images) £1.19
Bought purely for needless fun. It’s an image processor that turns a single image into a comic book frame. Sure, it doesn’t do whole strips or even simple sequences, but it does do a damn good job of what it does do. The control over the quality of rendering, choice of backgrounds, ability to add captions and speech make it very flexible. The extra graphical elements (e.g. KAPOW!) are a bit limited, the only slight downer. Great for informal, amusing creations when out and about.
Gravitarium2 (chill out) FREE
A chilled mix of music and lights that you can control with touch. The lights are configurable (slightly) and respond depending on the movement of touch and how many fingers you use (from 1-10). There is a ‘game’ element, but it just allows you to share what you are doing and people can ‘like’ you – not my cup of tea. It plays some nice music as you are chilling, with a variety of tracks. It is of no use whatsoever, just pretty shiny lights!
Bamboo Paper (notes) FREE (until end of June)
A terrific note taking app that allows you to quickly enter stuff using a stylus or finger. It has a great felt-tipped pen look to it! It exports as PDF, which could be very useful, and future updates are rumoured to include support for multiple notebooks.
