3 Must Have Apple iPad Apps
After a week and a half with Apple’s revolutionary device at a magical price (or something to that effect), heretofore presented are 3 of my favorite apps to this point.
An extremely addictive app for news readers and web surfers, Instapaper is a must have. If you’re browsing the Web and you find an article that you can’t read at the moment, click the bookmarklet in your browser and that article is instantly saved to a queue of articles at Instapaper.com. When you have time to read it, it is right there waiting for you.
iPhone users no doubt may have some familiarity with the app, but on the iPad its true value is revealed through the larger screen and better resolution. While this is a great iPhone app, it’s even better on the iPad with its bigger screen and better graphics resolution. Instapaper Pro runs on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, and it’s priced at $4.99. The free, ad-supported Lite version handles 10 articles while the pro version, a free upgrade for those with the pro version already purchased for their iPhone, can store up to 250 articles.
A Netflix fan are you? I am, and this app is grand. This app that lets you watch streaming movies and TV shows from your Netflix queues on your iPad.
The UI is nearly identical to the Netflix Web site, if you stop watching a movie or show at any point without finishing, the app is designed to remember where you are and resume again after you close the app and return later. The app is free, but requires an unlimited rental membership from Netflix, which begin at $8.99 per month. With the ability to watch anything in the Netflix library, at any time, the money spent on the membership is certainly worth it.
I am not a TweetDeck fan on my iPhone or MacBook, but given that HootSuite, my favorite third party Twitter client lacks an iPad app at this point, I turned to TweetDeck. . It’s a version of the free desktop client that’s popular among Twitter power users. It has the familiar multicolumn view, which you can customize to show messages from all your friends, @mentions, direct messages, saved searches and your Twitter lists. TweetDeck also shortens URLs.
It isn’t perfect. In portrait view, the upper third of the screen is blank, used to compose your tweets or view individual tweets. Further, links are not clickable in the tweets column — you have to open the tweet separately and tap the link. Regardless, it is the best iPad app for Twitter I have used so far.
Those are my selections, and no doubt will have more positive and negative reviews of apps. What are your favorites to this point and why?