Everyone is a critic, and thanks to encouragement from TUAW, and the surprising hit-count on my Apple iPad Review I’m going to review my Apple iPod Apps that I find, use, and enjoy. I’m going to spread these reviews out not by theme, but by where they live on my iPad screen. Two birds, one stone. 🙂

Being the inaugural post, I will cover the iPad Dock first, these are the lifeblood apps:

1. Safari – The only web browser available for the iPad. This version of Safari is more stable and thanks to the A4 processor more snappy than the Safari in my 1st Generation iPod Touch. It works wonderfully well and frankly I haven’t missed flash one bit. Until Apple approves Opera for the iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad this will likely be cemented in place.
2. Mail – Much like the ubiquitous Mail.app on my myriad Macintosh computers the Mail app has grown up out of the little niche that is my iPod Touch. The application is acceptable as a Mail application, it has some tweaks, but it won’t be stellar until they have a unified mailbox. Thankfully Steve Jobs has indicated that this is coming, so we will reserve our pitchforks and hot tar for later.
3. Photos – The Apple iPad shines when it comes to displaying photos. With the proper bracket to hold it properly this device could double as an awesome photo frame. This application, the Wifi built-in, and the long battery gives me hope that someone will create an app that can stream photos from local computers just as StreamToMe can stream video content. Then I’ll have reached that Nirvana – being able to queue up my giant amateur photography library and have it display without having to futz around with a 64GB memory stick.
4. iBooks – What a wonderful application. The iBooks app contains all the ‘epub’ format books that you have either purchased or created for yourself with Calibre. This isn’t the first time I’ve worked with ebook readers but it is the first one I’ve actually taken seriously enough to use from day-to-day. This application continues to surprise me, as I discover that there are more features to it than what you see just on the iTunes Store page. It remembers how far you’ve read in each book in your iBooks Library, it uses a yellow-highlighter mark for its bookmark system, it has access to the system dictionary, and as we discovered last night, if you point at a word you can use that gesture to find that word in other places in the text. As Scott mentioned to me when he discovered that feature, it would be a landslide blessing to research, to have that functionality. Thanks to Calibre you can convert any open format into the ‘epub’ format, and iTunes is adept at managing the files. There are so many killer apps for the iPad, but this is the showcase app.
5. Toodledo – This app pairs with the Toodledo website and I find it indispensable in my line of work to not have competent todo management. This app synchronizes with the Toodledo site and any one of my devices save for my iPod Classic can access and sync data back and forth so I’m never without my todo list. For anyone who is event-driven in their lives or their work, this application and site are built expressly for you.
6. Twitterific – I love this Twitter client application. It presents, in portrait mode a very pleasing view of my Twitter stream, with pleasantly large text and color-coded rectangles indicating the source of each particular tweet, part of the stream, a reply, or a direct message. The application is somewhat stable, I’ve only run into one glaring problem and I believe it was some sort of snafu in synchronizing the Twitter Stream with what is cached in my iPad. The fix was to remove Twitterific and re-install it. I’ve only had the failure once and it has not reappeared. My iPad has the ability to play sounds, so this is the first time I’ve heard any sound effects from my apps. The chime and bird sounds are a delightful touch.

Next up is the first line at the top of page 1 on my Apple iPad…