Apps! Apps! So many apps!

Cafe Society
1

So I am now the owner of a new iPad. My toy is very pretty.

I’ve downloaded a bunch of the apps I remember people telling me about (Angry Birds, Words with Friends, yadda yadda), but I want more!

Tell me about your favourite apps! I particularly like puzzle games, card games, word games. I also am keen on foodie/cooking/recipe related apps (but I have no way to tell which are the good ones), and any financial apps that are not pointless would be good too.

Also, any other tablet-related advice is appreciated. What functionality must I not miss out on? What must I never do?

2

Get iBooks (free) for storing and reading PDF and ePub (and possibly other e-book type files).

My girlfriend likes “Where’s my water?”, which is a nicely done puzzle game. For some reason, I don’t really like it.

I mostly use my iPad for browsing, though.

3

Plants vs. Zombies is great on iPad. Puzzle Agent and Puzzle Agent 2 are quirky and fun. Zombie Gunship is a great one-dollar zombie shooter. If you like Where’s My Water, you’ll probably like Cut The Rope. Osmos is a trip.

4

My favorites for cooking:
-How to Cook Everything: From Mark Bittman’s cookbook of the same name; contains over 2,000 recipes with variations, easily searchable, pick favorites, set bookmarks, forward recipes via E-mail to other people, pull ingredients out of recipes into a shopping list, set timers, option to turn off auto-dim/auto-lock when the app is open (so you don’t have to paw at the iPad with a dirty hand to get another look at the recipe during cooking).

  • How to Cook Everything Vegetarian: Same thing as above, but with his vegetarian cookbook.
  • Paprika: Does absolutely everything the first app does, but this is for your own recipes that you collected from relatives, other cookbooks, and around the web. Either type them in, or the app has a built-in web browser where you can surf to online recipes and automatically (for many recipe websites) or manually (highlight to capture each field) pull them into the app’s database. If you set up a free account with them, you can back up your database or even sync to a copy of Paprika on an iPhone/iPod Touch/desktop version for Mac. I have an optical character recognition app which I use with the camera to capture pages from cookbooks - it can require more than one image per page depending on the font type and size - and paste it into the app directly.

Optical character recognition (if you have the NEW iPad): TextGrabber. Works awesome on my iPhone, but the iPad 2 doesn’t have the proper autofocus capabilities to be able to use it, unlike the new iPad. Like I said above, depending on the text size and the font, you may not be able to accurately capture a whole cookbook page in one shot. Also, using in bright light is recommended.

Seconding the Puzzle Agent/Puzzle Agent 2 recommendations. They’re quirky puzzle games with a mystery story as the plot, plus neat hand-drawn-look graphics, and neat voice acting and music/audio effects.

The Kindle app for iPad is great if you like book shopping via Amazon and want to try out ebooks.

5

Missed the edit window, another cooking app:

  • Rick Bayless’s Mexican Essentials: A collection of 35 basic, delicious Mexican food recipes, plus 40 instructional videos, advice on ingredients, etc. Great intro to his recipes, especially if it’s still on sale for $3. Not optimized for iPad but runs fine on it.
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Thanks guys! I will have a look at all of these.

The optical character recognition sounds really cool, I will def. track that down – I didn’t realise that was possible yet.

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Caveat - I only tried it on my iPhone (great!) and iPad2 (didn’t work), but at least one review mentioned it was opened up for the new iPad.

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Word game: W.E.L.D.E.R.

Card game: Fairway Solitaire HD (Big Fish Games)

Other game: Jar of Marbles

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Osmos (mentioned earlier) is fascinating. It is relaxing and exciting at the same time, and the music is unique.

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I love Where’s My Water. I like it better than Angry Birds

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Witstream
Tapatalk (for this forum)
NBC Sportstalk
Flixter
System Status
Find iphone (there might be an ipad one, or this might work with it)
Urbanspoon
Sleepmachine
Bleacher Report Team Stream
Pageonce
Crackle
Dragon Go

12

The games that get played the most on my Fire are Cut the Rope and an electronic Sudoku. I also enjoy the Puss in Boots version of Fruit Ninja. The game play is slightly different and I prefer how it’s set up.

The next most popular app on my Fire is a texting app. I have a pay as you go cell phone so it’s nice to have a way to send my husband texts that don’t cost me minutes.

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Unblock Me
Fruit Ninja
Bubble Explode

For slightly more serious use - Convert Units has come in handy at times.

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So far I’m loving Fruit Ninja, Ski Safari, Angry Birds, and iBooks, Newsstand as well as the Kindle app. Looking forward to trying Osmos and Puzzle Agent. I am liking Where’s my Water?, Cut the Rope less so. Fairway Solitaire is relaly fun, but I’m underwhelmed with the regular Solitaire apps otherwise. Don’t know what I’m expecting really…

For some reason, iTunes runs slow and I find the interface a bit confusing. Also, the Video app keeps freezing so I can pause or ‘rewind’ – anyone had that happen/know a fix?

Thanks for all the suggestions; any more are very appreciated too!

15

of the apps which i use regularly, here’s five:

Atomic Web - a full screen browser plus other features the default one lacks.
Noteshelf - a scribble app for taking handwritten notes and more.
Flipboard - a magazine to keep tabs on the social media outlets.
Hero Academy - a vaguely chess-like “play-by-email” game.
Draw Something - there’s a current thread here. the larger screen on the ipad is well suited for the game.

16

If you subscribe to HBO through your cable or satellite provider you can get the HBOGO app to watch movies and full seasons of all their series.

17

You’ve got to get Osmos. Don’t ask, I can’t explain it, just get it.

Card Shark is the best solitaire app by far. It has, let’s see . . . sixty six games by my count. And the best interface.

No one has yet mentioned Bejeweled and Bejeweled Blitz? Simple puzzle-type that is good for wasting hours (one minute at a time in the case of Blitz).

Cows in Space. Again, don’t ask, just get it, it’s a great, great puzzle game.

If you try Plants vs. Zombies and like it, you might want to try Fieldrunners or Seven Cities or Tower Madness or Medieval.