Series continued…

1. ComicZeal4 – This app proves that the iPad can be a home for open-source non-DRM comic books. This app can read CBR and CBZ file types which are just ZIP or RAR compressed groups of JPG images with their extensions renamed. The filing system for ComicZeal4 is quite good and it’s trivial to establish a connection between Dropbox and ComicZeal4. Not only can you import comics over the iTunes File Sharing setup, but you could also copy your books into Dropbox and then open them one at a time using Dropbox and ComicZeal4. This app is one of the few that I have running constantly in the background. I’ve written at length about how comic books should adapt to the new device or perish, so we’ll save everyone the arguments which have been made before.
2. Food Apps
   1. Epicurious – A pretty well fleshed out collection of recipes. I’ve only used it from time to time. There is a display glitch last I checked for the “Back” button, and the only way to fix it is to unlock rotation lock and fiddle until it comes back. Not enough to stop using the app, but enough to stop using it for other apps.
   2. Lose It! – A great calorie tracking app with only one glaring problem. If you are like me, your food intake is principally novel with little dependable repeatability and creating new foods reliably is a headache. It’s the principal reason why I haven’t used this app, after a while it runs off the rails and you just don’t have the time or interest to bang-in dishes I have once and never try again. The program could benefit from a meal-guess entry “I think I ate 650 calories”. *shrug*
   3. ShopShop – A shopping list app that on first glance is very good, but on extended use you eventually find that the logic used to construct the app is not the same logic that someone would use when trying to use the app in real life. The app just languishes because it’s not really convenient or usable.
   4. Urbanspoon – Answering the question “Where can we eat?” this app does a great job. The only glitch with this app is no way to pre-define your login to the web portion of Urbanspoon, so you have to scrabble at the login screen, crash the app, and try it again and hope that you catch the website with its pants sagging, enough to “get it on”.
   5. Cookbook by Betty Crocker – Quite a number of “American Standards” but I haven’t explored it enough to form an opinion.
   6. Yelp – A social reviewing site, I suppose it’s useful but haven’t gotten it to work locally enough to see how useful or not it is.
   7. GoMealsHD – This app resembles LoseIt! in functionality but it’s usability isn’t enough to have it out of a folder or feature it on the front screen. I haven’t used it since the start and will likely delete it for space.
   8. Convert Units – This is an overdone unit converter. It’s “minimally useful” and will likely be replaced with another app when I get around to shopping for a replacement.
   9. Meijer Find-it – I was so surprised to see this in the App Store that I had to get it. It only works for supermarkets in Grand Rapids, but I have hope that they’ll expand the program. For the time being it’s just a conversation starter.
   10. AllRecipes – Supposedly a bigger repository of recipes but I haven’t used it enough to feel confident that I have a good enough opinion of how it works.
3. Comics
   1. DC Comics … and…
   2. Marvel Comics – are both powered by Comixology’s basic app functionality. These apps fail because their host companies don’t take digital comic books seriously enough. So instead of going to these apps to read my comic books I go to ComicZeal4. The people who defend Comixology love to chat up the panel-by-panel enhancements which I agree are very nice, but until DC and Marvel take digital comics seriously, I’ll be on the periphery looking in. I would love to spend money, but if they don’t take it seriously, I can’t either.
4. Arcade
   1. Pinball HD – Super fun and a great conversation starter
   2. Labyrinth 2 HD – Incredibly fun and addicting game. Worth every penny
   3. Sudoku Tablet – I wouldn’t play Sudoku without this app.
   4. Bubbles – I found this floating around from my old iPod Touch before it died. I discovered quite to my shock that this app is surprisingly Universal.
   5. Pocket Pond – Good to relax to and a good conversation starter.
   6. Words HD – It took a while to realize that the only way to win is to play dirty with a Scrabble dictionary. I haven’t played in a very long while.
   7. Words – Not very good as an iPhone-only app, but it’s got the Scrabble dictionary in it and helps you come up with words when you don’t have all the letters.
   8. Game Table – Another conversation starter. I’ve yet to find anyone who wants to play the old board games using the iPad.
   9. Dice HD – Silly little toy, mostly a conversation starter.
   10. iMahjong – If you like Solitaire and/or Mahjong you’ll like this app. It’s a great way to burn time.
   11. Osmos HD – Antother addictive game, this immersive one is very clever and the best way to enjoy it is to dive head first into it.
   12. JirboBreak – A ball-breaker game, nice way to waste time.
   13. uzu – Not really a game, more of an interesting way to provide a workout to the graphics and touch processing subsystems in the iPad. 🙂
   14. UNO – Love playing this game to just piss away the time. Lots of features and sounds and multiplayer mode, which is nice.
   15. Clinometer – Makes the iPad a balance bubble using its internal sensors. Cute.
   16. MagnetMeter – A display interface for the iPad’s internal compass, I suppose it’s useful, but I haven’t figured out how.
   17. WordSearch – Find the words game, easy.
   18. Planets – In the summer I’m looking forward to using this with my telescope.
   19. Mixology – I’m a drunk. Come on.
   20. Solitaire HD – If you like Solitaire games this works nicely.
5. Streaming Media
   1. StreamToMe & ZumoCast – These two apps do very similar things. They have a server component and a client that sits on the iPad. You can then call up your home computer from anywhere on the Internet and bring up your library of music or video stored there. In design this makes living with 16GB of storage on my iPad a non-issue. In practice however these apps don’t really work that well. Mostly the calling-home feature works if you are lucky.
   2. Pandora – A great app to run when you need background music for dinner or entertaining.
   3. Boxee – Remote control for Boxee. This would be more useful if Boxee wasn’t a fragile pile of broken glass.
   4. Netflix – Good for what it does.
   5. TuneIn Radio – A great way to get streaming radio stations over the Internet on your iPad. For all those stations that don’t have agreements with TuneIn Radio, you’re pretty much left in the cold. Not enough to keep me from using it.
6. Time
   1. Night Stand – A great app to have displaying the time during meetings. Keeps people from asking “What time is it” questions. Also a great way to throw a fake alarm to get out of an awkward situation.
   2. ZazenLite – A nice little meditation timer.
   3. WhiteNoisePro – I can’t fall asleep unless there is a random white noise in the background. This app fits every little “background sound” niche there might ever be wonderfully.
   4. Chronology – Best cooking timers and “take a break” timers EVER are in this app. It sucked terribly before iOS 4.2.1 because the timers would never work properly while the app “wasn’t working” but now that it does work in the background, it’s everything you’d want in multi-timers.
   5. Observatory – I don’t understand much of this app, but it’s a pretty conversation piece.
   6. Clock Radio – TuneIn Radio has replaced this one, it’s heading for the dustbin.
7. Cloud Services (Networking)
   1. Box.net – Ever since Drop.io sold out to Facebook and left us high-and-dry we switched to Box for our needs. This app works adequately.
   2. Dropbox – Everyone needs to get a free account and install this on their iPad right now. Stop reading, get it. Come back, resume reading. 🙂
   3. Air Sharing – I thought I’d get more out of this app, but with all the other storage options out there, it never really wound up to be much and not enough to purchase.
   4. VNC – A quick and dirty VNC client for remote access. The mousing feature is broken or not-even-written so I only use it when I don’t have access to my MacBook or any other computer when I need to do a remote control operation.
   5. Offline Pages – At first this seemed really neat, but I never really used it much, so it languishes.
   6. Speed Test – Basic network test, great way to catch cablesystem sales people with their pants down.
   7. Transfer – At first this was useful, but only had a few uses before it lapsed into uselessness. It languishes.
   8. Shazam – Everyone gets this app for the cool-neat-whizbang when it works. It doesn’t work well and fails quite a bit. It is a good conversation starter especially when it behaves.
   9. Boxcar – Notifications for everything. This app is great and I would install it on any iPad. The notifications are a little too much, but I’ve gotten to the point where I prefer to see them and have them interrupt me than not. Each to their own.
   10. Google Earth – It could be in Arcade, but I only use it for conversation starters and Gee-Whiz-Look-At-This demo stuff.
   11. Find iPhone – Now that I’m managing a batch of other iPads for work, this app has become more useful.
   12. Junos Pulse – Our organizational VPN system requires this app, that’s the only reason it’s loaded. A necessary evil.
   13. StumbleUpon – For those that enjoy StumbleUpon, it’s a great app. I never really end up using it much, but not because of the design, but mostly because of time.
   14. Picbox – Mass uploading of pictures to Dropbox. At first it seemed a great idea, but the file-at-a-time slowness really is quite draggy and there are usually better ways to get photos off my iPad, even if I have to wait until I can get to a computer with a USB port.
   15. FIleBrowser – At first this was a mistake purchase, but after I realized that my institutions wireless system was the culprit I can endorse using this app. It allows for SMB access to whatever servers you have on the Internet. It was one of those missing features that my coworkers asked for and the app does it’s job well, as long as the network path is plain and untroubled.
8. Arts
   1. Brushes – Wowed by an ad. Realized that drawing is not for me. 🙂
   2. iDraft
   3. Comic-Con
   4. Voice Memos – Quite neat if you ever need to record voice memos, otherwise not so much usefulness.
   5. Eyewitness – Pretty pictures from the news.
   6. Galleries from Reuters – Same as Eyewitness.
9. Entertainment
   1. ABC Player – I used it to watch an episode of Lost and then lost interest.
   2. Flixster – Works very well to find new movies that are playing and works very well for our local Rave Theater to buy tickets.
   3. Phases – Knowing the phase of the moon is important for a Cancerian! 🙂
   4. VLC – I got it before they removed it from the App Store. It plays lots of different file types and is good for Windows Media files.
   5. U-Verse – If we spent more money on U300 this app would be kickass, since we don’t, it doesn’t.
   6. Choices – Random selection app, don’t use it much.
   7. Compass – Supposedly is useful, haven’t found an application for it yet.
   8. Tally Counter – A neat little iPhone app for counting. Eventually may find it useful, not yet.
   9. iTranslate – Good for when you need to bang out some text in a foreign language, but otherwise it languishes.
   10. IMDb – Great to resolve movie questions and “God that person seems familiar” questions
   11. Brain Wave – Quite fun little app that has proven to me at least to help me nap, sleep, and sometimes stay awake at work.
   12. BinauralBeat – Mostly pre-canned programs, not as useful or as adjustable as Brain Wave, it languishes.
   13. redbox – An iPhone app for accessing the Redbox system. I suppose it’ll come in handy when we need to make some serious use of the Redbox system.
10. Finance
    1. eBay
    2. PayPal
    3. Calculator – The iPad needs this very badly, however this replacement one I don’t use very much.
    4. WindowShop – I wish I could use this Amazon.com app to manage other Wishlists and maybe buy gifts through it, but currently it only works for your own lists and getting things for yourself. Not as useful as it could be.
    5. Bloomberg – Answering questions about Gold or Stocks despite not really caring.
    6. Deliveries – An app that maps and tracks delivery service details. Great for FedEx, DHL, and UPS – utterly useless for USPS.
    7. Calculator XL – Better calculator than I’ve found in a long while.
    8. PNC Mobile – Access to my PNC accounts. Works well, but can’t take background existence in iOS 4.2.1. *Shrug*
    9. CheckPlease – Way more useful on iPhone than iPad, only because I usually don’t have my iPad with me when I go out to dinner.
    10. Alice – This site sells grocery type items such as cleaners and air fragrances and toothpaste. I was curious enough to download the app, but not really to use it after that.
    11. PNC VirtualWallet – Much like the other PNC app, I wish it had an iPad version that would display more *shrug*