A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

So here is my first week of good and bad apps, I have spent way too much trying things out. My motto — “Buying iPad apps so you don’t have to!”

These look good and I actually use them:

• iAnnotate. As previously discussed, the user interface is byzantine, but it works largely as promised — i’ve read and annotated close to 100 pdfs now. One commentor says it dies on large PDFs so not perfect yet.
• WordPress. Really a much better interface than the iPhone version. It is not bugfree, a lot of people including me are having problems with copy/paste. But nice.
• Evernote. Solid effort, works well.
• Wolfram Alpha. Now that the price is no longer insane, this is a great app to have. I wish it failed a little more noisily when the wifi connection was lost, but still good.
• Pages. Nice looking and adequately featured.
• Kayak. Nice extension of iPhone app.
• Tweetdeck. I find the portrait display to be a little odd but in landscape mode does a nice job of using screen space.
• Weather HD. Doesn’t display nearly enough forecast data, but it is beautiful. The night scenes make me feel like I am getting forecasts for a moon of Jupiter.
• NPR. I’m not a major NPR junkie but a lot of useful info in here.
• Bloomberg. Don’t know if this is the best stock app but it is free!
• Soundhound. Nice looking and faster than Shazam.
• Minigore HD. Beautiful, my timewaster of choice on the iPad.
• Statsmate HD. Might all be available in Wolfram Alpha but I find this useful as a way to quickly get stat table info.
• Apple’s calendar app. It looks beautiful.

Close but…

• Papers. I really really wanted this to work but I cannot get Web of Science access to work via UW proxy. Sigh.
• Kindle and iBooks. Both look fine and I am glad I have them, but I will still do most of my reading on the Kindle, better battery life and easier on the eyes and lighter.
• Apple’s mail app. OK it works and in landscape mode has a nice message list, but not much else featurewise.
• Marvel. Beautiful and I could see using this, but difficult to figure out what to buy/try.
• Crosswords. Looks nice but fatally fatally fatally flawed. Won’t download the NYTimes daily puzzle here on the west coast at 7pm the previous evening when it is available. Pisses me off. I will stay with 2 Across even tho it is lo-res because it downloads at the right time.

Kind of a waste:

• Apple’s Contacts and Maps apps. All this new screen space and nothing notable feature wise. Yawn.
• The iPad store. I use this a lot but boy does it need work. With a kajillion apps, it is hard to find what you want, hard to remember what you’ve already mentally discarded, etc.
• Numbers. Does not have enough spreadsheet functionality to be useful.
• USA Today. No depth.
• Twitterific. All this screen space and I get one lame list.

Never used — what does that say?

• Apple’s iPod and iTunes apps. I just don’t use this as a music consumption device.
• Apple’s Notes app. This one is so lame compared to so many of the other billion alternatives.

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