Great iPad Apps

Here are some of my favorite iPad apps. Unless otherwise noted the apps that I’ve listed below are free…

Productivity
Adobe Ideas is a good sketching app. If you are into Mind Mapping, iThoughts ($7.99) is a polished app, and the Notes, Mail and Calendar apps that come with the iPad are all solid and integrate well with GMail and Google Calendar.

Reading
The three main choices for purchasing and reading books on the iPad are Kindle for iPad, iBooks, and the recently launched Google Books app. All three offer tons of free content, and they each have their strengths and weaknesses. I suggest downloading all three. One of my favorite apps is Reeder ($4.99). Reeder offers seamless integration with Google Reader and offers offline reading, which is great for folks who want to download their Google Reader feeds before heading out on a long train ride. I also like GoodReader ($2.99) for reading PDFs and CloudReaders for reading comic books in CBR format.

Video
ABC Player and PBS for iPad are both video apps that offer some free content. The included YouTube app is also decent. And to play non iTunes-friendly video files on your iPad look no further than VLC Media Player.

Music
iTunes and Pandora are both essential music apps. I also like the user interface and songs available at Aweditorium.

Games
Rather than openly admit just how many games I have on the iPad I’m only going to suggest two. Scrabble for iPad (normally $9.99, on sale for .99) is a great single-player or multiplayer diversion. The ultimate pick-up-and-play game for the iPad is Angry Birds. If you get it or any other games on the iPad that are tied to GameCenter feel free to add me to your list. My GameCenter name is christophervigliotti

iPad + Accessibility

I’m working on a research project in which I have to identify accessible hand-held technology solutions for disabled users. I was shocked to learn that two of the portable devices that I already own (iPhone & iPad) offer a host of accessibility features.

VoiceOver Is Almost Perfect

VoiceOver is Apple’s built-in screen-reader solution. I spent a bit of time using this feature and am impressed with the implementation. After about ten minutes of tinkering I was able to navigate around the iPad’s user interface as well as read web pages and e-books. When reading web pages in Safari I was able to easily alter the behavior of VoiceOver from “read the entire page” mode to “navigate the headers of a document” mode by accessing the “rotor”. The rotor is a virtual knob that is accessed by performing a dial turning gesture.

One Drawback

In my testing the one area where the iPad lacked good VoiceOver support is when reading PDF files. Both iBooks and the third party application GoodReader failed when attempting to navigate a PDF file. If anyone has any information on portable text-to-speech devices that can read PDF files please share your knowledge in the comments.

More Info

Here are a video of VoiceOver in action.

Users can also pair a braille display with their iOS device. Here is a video of the these two devices working together…