The Best IPad Applications

You've seen the commercials; Apps are what makes an iPad come to life. Here are the very best ones for work, play, creation, consumption and everything in between.

Social

Twitter: The official Twitter app for iPad packs in the features, giving you a full Tweet-and-browse experience. It can be a little bit overwhelming at first, but powerful things often are. Free.

Friendly: Friendly is the best unofficial Facebook app on the iPad because it does everything you'd want the non-existant official Facebook app to do: browse photos, make wall updates, check your profile, like and even chat. Free or $1.

Flipboard: A true testament to the iPad's transformative powers, Flipboard scrapes your Twitter and Facebook feeds for links and arranges them in a simple, beautiful magazine-style format. Free.

BeeJive IM for iPad: If you're looking for one place to corral all your chats, BeeJive is it. It's the best, best-looking IM client for the iPad, connecting to AIM, GTalk, Facebook chat and a handful of others. $10.

Entertainment

iMovie: iMovie on the iPad is great for on-the-go movie editing. There's support for gestures, an updated UI, templates and fully customizable transitions. Not to mention multitrack audio recording, Airplay compatibility and the ability to export movies in HD. $5.

GarageBand: GarageBand for iPad is a no brainer for any budding musician. It offers 8 track recording, over 250 loops, and is fully compatible with the Mac version of GB. You get a load of virtual touch instruments too and if you want, you can plug in your guitar and use the virtual amps. $5.

Korg iMS-20: A faithful reproduction of Korg's MS-20 analog synth, this is the app that will make your music-playing friend get the iPad. It's proof of just how powerful the tablet can be as a music production machine. $16.

Sketchbook Pro: The challenge with drawing apps is packing the most features in the most accessible way possible. Sketchbook Pro walks that line, offering up enough stuff to keep real deal artists busy while making it easy enough for schlubs like me to enjoy. $8.

Adobe Eazel: Adobe Eazel works as a standalone paint application and also connects to Photoshop, sending images that get automagically scaled to whatever resolution you want. What's especially cool is the five finger interface and the mixing of wet and dry paint for color blending, with an engine that allows paint to dry over time, just like in real life. $3

Remote: With AirPlay, Apple's signalled its intentions to not just sell you music and movies but to let you move them around your house, too. The official Apple Remote is a key piece of the puzzle, serving as a rich controller for iTunes or AppleTV. Free.

TED for iPad: TED talks are some of the best content the internet has to offer, bar none. The iPad, safe from the constant, pinging distractions of the internet, is the perfect place to watch them. Free.

Kindle: Even if you don't have an actual Kindle, Amazon's still the king of ebooks. Their iPad app lets you buy books from the vast Kindle library, and you can rest easy knowing that they're on a platform that's almost guaranteed to have some staying power. Free.

StreamToMe: The iPad doesn't play nice with many file formats natively. Along with a server app you install on your main machine, StreamToMe will re-encode pretty much any video you throw at it on the fly and beam it to your iPad. Magnificent. $3.

Netflix: I've gotta say, when you're curled up in bed streaming some old TV show to your tablet, the future starts looking like a pretty alright place. With great new Instant Watch offerings popping up all the time, a Netflix subscription is essentially mandatory. Free.

Google Earth: You haven't experienced Google Earth until you've experienced it on the iPad. Seamless swishing, flicking, pinching, and zooming. Free.

The Daily: Overall, it's probably the best iPad newspaper/magazine/multimedia experience/whatever to date. There's a tremendous amount of high quality content in a variety of sections, with sharp writing, beautiful photos, and well-produced video sprinkled throughout. Free, for now.

The Atavist: For some people, the iPad is the device with the potential to liberate long-form journalism from the distracting confines of the PC. It's with that noble aim that the Atavist, an app that vends long-form, multimedia-enriched articles, was created, and it's off to a promising start. Free, $3 per article.

Marvel Comics: Comic books for the 21st Century. Marvel serves up its host of heroes in a slick, easy-to-read app. Issues can be purchased a la carte or gobbled up buffet-style with a $50/year digital subscription. Free, about $2 an issue.

TWCable TV: Luckily, if you're unlucky enough to deal with Time Warner as our cable and internet provider, you get an iPad app that streams 32 channels of Live TV...for free. It basically adds another TV to your house littered with channels of ABC Family, BET, Comedy Central, MTV, and others when you're on your home Wi-Fi. Free.

VinylLove : VinylLove for iPad is a music app that beautifully mimics a record player. You can thumb through alphabetized crates of records (the songs on your library), move the needle (to fast forward) and even hear the digitally added slight crackle and pops. There's a history to that mp3! $5.

SnagFilms: It's a free streaming video app that specializes in documentaries. The selection is pretty decent, ranging from the popular like Super Size Me to super interesting subjects like Young Yakuza. A great app to have in your arsenal when you want to wrinkle that brain of yours. Free

Planetary: Planetary is an iPad-only music player that renders your music collection as a stunning universe of stars (artist), planets (albums), and moons (songs). It's a totally new way to explore music and brilliantly executed. Everything looks great, responds to touch and filled with clever details. And it's free. Free.

HitPad: Hitpad is your explainer for all things going on in the world, or well, all things going on in the world according to the Internet. It finds the current 'trending topics' and gives you the news, tweets, videos, web and photos about them. It's a tidy and attractive app that keeps you up to date.

NASA Visualization Explorer: The NASA Visualization Explorer app brings a new topic from the space agency to your iPad each week. It's chock full of images, videos and scientific information. From Polar studies based in Antarctica to the movement of marine deserts, you'll get to see a side of NASA that doesn't often make the front page news. Free

Snapseed: Snapseed is a photo editor for the iPad with clever controls and snazzy textures and filters. The coolest part about Snapseed is how you use it though. You just select the effect or adjustment you want to make from the bottom bar and then cycle through the options with a vertical swipe and adjust your settings with a horizontal swipe. $5

Games

World of Goo: The smash Wii Ware hit somehow makes even more sense on the iPad, like this is how it was meant to be played all along. Pure gooey physics fun. $5.

Osmos HD: One of, if not the most, immersive, unique iPad games in the App Store, Osmos makes cellular life captivatingly beautiful. $5.

Dead Space: A new, tablet-optimized extension of the popular console shooter series, Dead Space shows just how robust an iPad game can be. From the visual details to the spooky sound design, it's got the full package. $10.

Infinity Blade: How good can an iPad game really look? Uh, check out Infinity Blade to find out. Spoiler: really f-ing good. $6.

Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: The iPad's big touchscreen breathes new life into the LucasArts classic, and its smart UI stays out of the way while you enjoy the puzzles, humor, and animations you remember from way back when. $5.

Flight Control HD: It was one of the best games when the iPad came out and it still is—directing air traffic can quickly turn from meditation to mayhem. Both modes are fun. $5.

Words With Friends HD: With its recent expansion into the wide world of Android, there have never been more friends to play against. Words With Friends looks its absolute best on the iPad, allowing you to survey the board like a general overlooking a battle field. $3.

Labyrinth 2: Remember that game where you turn the knobs to navigate a little metal marble through a maze without letting it drop in any of the holes? Turns out that's just as fun when there are no real knobs or marbles involved. Fun for both kids and kids at heart. $8.

The Incident: 8-bit pixel revival at its finest, the Incident is at once retro and fresh, apocalyptic and hilarious. $2.

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP : A game that's an epic experience. One part 8-bit graphics, one part beautiful original music, one part adventure, and one part RPG combine for a game that's essentially about exploring and brings your childlike wonder back. $5.

Battleheart: RPGs are intimidating! But Battleheart is adorable and addictive with delicious graphics and a control scheme designed around poking, prodding, and swiping. You control four characters and go on your RPG quest. $3.

NBA Jam: I was gonna have to go Ron Artest on EA if they bungled the iPad port of this classic, but thankfully they've turned out a excellent, faithful update of the original. "He's on fire." "Boomshakalaka." Big head mode. It's all there waiting for you. $10.

Tiny Tower: A free 8-bit style game that lets you channel your inner landlord. You build floors on a tower to attract "bitizens" to live in it and then control their lives (manage, hire, give a job, evict). It's like SimCity but actually fun.

Lifestyle

NightStandHD: If you happen to dock your iPad next to your bed, you might be thinking, "Hey, this thing could probably make for a pretty beautiful clock." You're right! NightStandHD has a handful of beautiful clocks both analog (looking) and digital. $2.

Epicurious: You like food, right? Epicurious has got tons of recipes presented in a nice, photo-friendly format. Show this to your Mom to justify your iPad purchase. Free.

Wired: No one's really made the slam dunk tablet magazine yet, but if you want to get a sense of how the magazine of the future might look, Wired's leading the pack. $4.

Gravilux: Most people looked at the iPad and saw a device for creation or consumption. Scott Snibbe saw it as the perfect platform for interactive art. Gravilux, a whirling, touch-baed gravity simulation, is addictively purposeless. $2.

New York Times for iPad: After a somewhat clunky start in the app world, NYT has pulled it together and put together a clean, content-packed tablet edition of their paper. You'll have to start paying for it soon, but for now it's free.

CNN: There's so much going on the world right now that I keep my eyes glued and fingers pressed to the CNN app on the iPad. There's breaking news, top stories and the clincher, at least for me, great videos of everything CNN covers. Free.

New Yorker: The first great iPad subscription: $6 a month or $60 a year. If you want the print and web version along with your iPad subscriptions, it's only 10 bucks more at $70 a year. Which is to say that this is all a pretty damn good deal as each issue of literary excellence only costs you a buck fifty.

Yelp: The preeminent food-finding service goes great on the tablet. Just make sure to wash your hands before you pick it back up. Free.

Qwiki: It's like a visual Wikipedia. Which is to say it's a super pretty way to learn stuff. How so? Instead of delivering information in text and hyperlinks, Qwiki provides a narrative to the topics you search for with an audio commentary and relevant images. Free.

Pennant: With a staggering amount of data for every game dating back to the '50s, Pennant isn't just a valuable resource for baseball nerds but also an example of how beautifully a dataset can be brought to life on a tablet. $5.

IMDB: A recent facelift makes the mobile IMDB a significant enough improvement over the website to warrant inclusion—IMDB has all the movie information you could ever want, as well as trailers and showtimes for the here and now. Free.

NBA Game Time Courtside: The only app you need if you love basketball. It gives you video highlights, player stats, box scores, play by play reports and if you have NBA League Pass, you get to stream live NBA games too. Free.

Crackle: From Sony, Crackle gives you free streaming of big time TV shows like Seinfeld and Married with Childen and movies like The Da Vinci Code and Stranger than Fiction. Selection isn't huge but it's free! Free.

HBO Go: If you're smart enough to order HBO with your cable, HBO Go will let you watch every episode of every season of The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Rome, and any other awesome show HBO has ever made. Oh, and you can stream movies too. Free.

WatchESPN: If you have the right cable provider, you can stream ESPN, ESPN2, ESPN3 and ESPNU straight to your phone. Works over 3G or Wi-Fi and lets you watch all the biggest sports moments on the go. A must have for any sports fan. Free.

Infographics: The app has about 50 different infographics created by the design company for its clients. There's trivia-filled images for technology, sociology, learning and more. Perfect for those moments when you have a few minutes to spare and want to read something besides boring news.

Thrillist: If you live in a sizable city like New York or San Francisco, you'd know Thrillist can be an indispensable tool in figuring out what's happening around your city. The iPad app has a lovely carousel that lets you flip between categories to help narrow down your going out options.

Trulia: Trulia, an impressive real estate search engine and a respected name in the real estate game, has an iPad app that makes finding a new place a lot less intimidating and almost even fun. Poking around to explore apartments and homes with your finger is somehow much less frustrating than clicking around on a website.

Productivity

Instapaper: Reading, it turns out, is just about the best thing you can do on this crazy futuristic tech-slab of yours. Instapaper strips all the web junk from the articles you come across and leaves you with the sweet, pure text. $5.

Reeder: Thanks to RSS feeds, you will never, ever run out of cool stuff to read. Reeder is the cleverest, prettiest way to sift through it all. $5.

Zite: It's a personal magazine app that customizes its content just for you. It learns what you like from your Google Reader and Twitter account and displays stories you'd probably ejoy reading. The app gets bette the more you use it, as it becomes more familiar with your tendencies. Free.

Elements: An attractively sparse text editor for the iPad with a handful of features—like autosaving to the cloud via Dropbox—that set it apart. If you're used to cumbersome, feature-soaked text editors like Word, Elements is a breath of fresh air. $5.

SimpleNote: SimpleNote is the longstanding holder of the minimalist note taking crown: It lets you take notes and keep them in sync across your iPad, iPhone, and the web reliably and simply with zero distractions. Free.

Dropbox: Wanna see what this "cloud" fuss is all about. Start dumping your files in Dropbox on your PC or Mac and watch them magically appear in the iPad app. It's quick, it's clean, it works, and it's free.

Screens: VNC can get confusing, but Screens makes it dead simple. Turn internet sharing on on your Mac (or PC, or Linux machine) and Screens will let you control it. You can even use all your favorite multitouch gestures. $20.

Pulse: So you like the idea of RSS—news coming to you, instead of you going to it—but don't want to deal with adding feeds and endless lists of headlines. Pulse makes the whole thing visual, giving you swipeable columns and rows of stories and sources. Free.

PhotoSync: With PhotoSync, you don't have to plug in your iPad to transfer photos and videos to and from your computer. It transfers your photos and videos wirelessly and is plenty fast. You could even swap photos from your iPhone to iPad too. $2.

iA Writer: Very possibly the best and most elegant text editor on the iPad. The typography is stellar, the interface is perfect for just writing as there's no distracting autocorrection or scroll bars. There's an added row for arrow keys and even a focus mode blurs everything but the three lines you're working on. Syncs with Dropbox too. $1.

LogMeIn Ignition: It's the best VNC app on the iPad. LogMeIn Ignition gives you pretty much control of your PC/Mac through your iPad. It's speedy, refreshed with a clean UI, and lets you wake your computer up from anywhere in the world. $30.

iCab: The Safari browser is great and all but iCab has a lot more features, like full screen mode and tabs. Tabbed browsing on the iPad is absolutely necessary. $2

Penultimate: Penultimate is a scratchpad for your iPad where you can handwrite quick notes with your finger. It's as useful as using a pen and pad but so much slicker. You can print or e-mail your handwritten notes too. $2.

Wacom Bamboo Paper: It's an iPad app that turns your iPad into a digital notebook (or sketchpad). Even without Wacom's Bamboo stylus, your finger is perfectly suited for writing—it really does feel like ink is bleeding from your fingers (or stylus). Free, until June 30

iChromy: It's an iPad browser that looks and feels like Chrome. And since I use Chrome every single day, that's a good thing! It has tabbed browsing, an incognito window, and an omnibox (a shared box for typing in URLs and search terms) too. As close as you'll get to Chrome on an iPad. Free

Blogsy: It's a blogging tool for your iPad. Which means, it can replace your blog backend when you're on the iPad. Why would you do that? Because Blogsy makes all the html formatting you need for blogging—bolding, italicizing, linking and even adding pictures—a lot more iPad friendly. $5