Pimp my iPad

March 16, 2012 1:35 PM

I can't be the only person on Metafilter who's succumbed to temptation and gotten their new iPad today. So now that I have it, what apps will make it extra awesome?

I've had an iPhone for years, so I'm most interested in apps that are either iPad specific, or much better on the iPad than iPhone. The last iPad recommendation thread is from last year, so it seems reasonable to ask for an update.

Please don't recommend ridiculously addictive games - I have enough trouble with procrastination as it is - but other than that, I'm interested in anything that makes your life easier or more interesting.

posted by psycheslamp to computers & internet (61 answers total)

Air Video for watching videos over your home network.
Lots of seriously amazing audio stuff - Tabletop, Garageband, Animoog, Soundprism, iVoxel etc.
Night Sky
MegaReader (excellent all-round eBook reader)
Faces iMake (if there are any children around, or if you're having a childlike moment)
posted by le morte de bea arthur at 1:45 PM on March 16, 2012

If you have a Netflix account, their streaming app is actually pretty good.
posted by spinifex23 at 1:45 PM on March 16, 2012

Flipboard is fantastic.
posted by The Deej at 2:03 PM on March 16, 2012 [8 favorites]

If you're a reader, the Kindle app is great. And Amazon's selection can't be beat.
posted by dfriedman at 2:03 PM on March 16, 2012 [4 favorites]

I'll avoid games, and focus on apps where the iPad version requires a separate download or purchase, as opposed to a single iOS app which makes available both versions.

Unlike the smaller iOS devices, there's no weather app with the iPad, and The Weather Channel's free iPad app, though very much "cable channel" in appearance, definitely makes the most of the larger screen, with a five-day summary and very nice maps. Star Walk for iPad is worth the upgrade. Skype. Google Earth. Hulu+ if you're a subscriber or prepared to sign up for the trial.
posted by holgate at 2:05 PM on March 16, 2012

Google Currents if you're already using Google for RSS.
posted by Burhanistan at 2:13 PM on March 16, 2012

Seconding Flipboard and the Kindle app. I love the Weather Channel app. Other apps I use all the time: AllRecipes, PBS, Evernote, Zappos, Amazon
posted by smich at 2:16 PM on March 16, 2012

Instapaper.
ChromeSync or FirefoxSync if you need to sync your bookmakers across devices.
An RSS reader (I use NetNewsWire).
I've only had my own personal iPad for a few hours and already find the Dropbox extension completely indispensable.
Frotz if you ever loved text adventure games (sorry to violate the no-game pledge).
posted by gerryblog at 2:18 PM on March 16, 2012

Bookmarks, not bookmakers!
posted by gerryblog at 2:18 PM on March 16, 2012

Atomic Web Browser for a cheap, full-featured alternative browser with gestures, full screen, bookmarklets, ad-blocking, etc.

Aweditorium for free-form full-screen music discovery.

Fractile Plus is a fractal explorer that I'm sure would look gorgeous on a large retina display. Don't forget to try out the iterations, colors, and Julia Set alternatives in the settings menu.

Definitely Google Earth.

World of Goo HD is an amazing, beautiful game with a strict story mode, so it's not necessarily addictive like most mobile games unless you like going back and re-beating the same puzzles over and over again.
posted by Rhaomi at 2:18 PM on March 16, 2012 [1 favorite]

If you like to make music thumbjam is awesome.
posted by get off of my cloud at 2:28 PM on March 16, 2012 [8 favorites]

Readability over Instapaper

Reeder if you use google reader

Tweetbot if you use twitter on your iPhone (it will sync timeline position between devices)

MLB at bat, conditions being obvious

Apple Movie Trailers app
posted by Patbon at 2:33 PM on March 16, 2012

If you traffic in PDFs (the main reason I bought my older iPad), the combination of GoodReader and DropBox are essential. Whatever you do, do NOT download Plants v. Zombies.
posted by willbaude at 2:34 PM on March 16, 2012 [2 favorites]

MyRadar is helpful/fun if you are interested in weather or live in a weather-volatile area.
posted by cecic at 2:54 PM on March 16, 2012

Thanks so much for the suggestions so far! Stanza, Goodreader, Dropbox, and Evernote are staples on my iPhone and the first go to on the new iPad, and I'm definitely checking out your suggestions for feed readers and audio apps...please keep the ideas coming.
posted by psycheslamp at 3:41 PM on March 16, 2012

Mixel


Shuffler.fm
posted by mattbucher at 4:06 PM on March 16, 2012

I love the Epicurious and AllRecipes.com apps for recipes. It's great being able to use your iPad like a cook book in the kitchen.

Seconding Kindle, it's much better than iBooks.

The Pandora app for iPad is really neat if you care to learn about the music you're enjoying.

HowStuffWorks is really neat too, if you're interested in, well, how stuff works.
posted by erstwhile at 6:16 PM on March 16, 2012

If you blog, Blogsy is great.

FeeddlerRSS is a good RSS reader, but I actually prefer to read in my browser. I dislike Flipboard for RSS reading because it doesn't seem to distinguish between "read" and "unread" items.

I use Atomic Web instead of Safari. I don't remember why I like it better, but I do.

I use a lot of PDF, so I have dropbox on all my computers, then use Goodreader to actually read and annotate PDFs on the iPad.
posted by insectosaurus at 6:17 PM on March 16, 2012 [2 favorites]

Animoog and djay are sonic favorites. I have enjoyed losing myself for hours at a time, just mixing tracks. I mixed a couple Aphex Twin ambient tracks the other day, and they combine surprisingly well together. The interface is remarkable in taking advantage of the iPad's unique and original interface. Animoog is fun for sonic explorations.

Theo Gray's The Elements is awesome chemistry goodness. I love learning useless but fun trivia about barium, yttrium and other weird and wonderful elements.

I like doing NYTimes Crosswords, but I get stuck around Wednesday.

I use the Apple Remote app to control our Airport Express home audio nodes, so that we can listen to our various iTunes libraries all around the house, in the kitchen, living room, office.

I've played with PocketCam to be able to use my iPad and iPhone cameras for web conferencing, instead of the iSight camera in my MacBook Air. That way, I can point the camera anywhere I please, while still tapping away at my keyboard.

Seconding Air Video for viewing non-MP4 video from our iTunes library on the iPad.

I use Panic's awesome Prompt to log into my office workstation and manage basic programming and maintenance tasks via SSH. I've tried several SSH clients, and this one actually seems written by another developer like myself, who requires key combinations that work with emacs and shell scripting. Works very well with the Apple Wireless Keyboard.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:40 AM on March 17, 2012 [2 favorites]

I just got a new iPad and I'm liking Reeder so well I may switch to it on my iPhone.
posted by immlass at 1:37 PM on March 17, 2012

Quickvoice--voice note recorder

My Clock Free--alarm clock

Calculator--nice big buttons

iBooks--greatly improves PDF reading

Pulse News--general news app

Zite--similar to the aforementioned Flipboard

LogMeIn--remote desktop app

iTunes U--free university courses

Overdrive--library audiobooks
posted by aerotive at 1:39 PM on March 17, 2012

Splashtop Remote Desktop is like logmein but waaaay better and cheaper. Best way to access your Mac or windows machine from your iPad. It even intercepts the audio of the machine you are connecting to, and you don't have to be on the home network to access them.

Flipboard for rss and discovery.

Tweetbot for twitter.

Instapaper for reading articles.

Thinkmessage if you use google voice to read SMS messages.

"calendars" for a calendar replacement.

Fahrenheit for simple weather.

Wikinvest hd for watching your portfolio

Mint for managing money.

Snapseed for editing photos.

Qwiki for learning about anything.

Zite and Feedly for content discovery.

IMO.im for instant messaging.

Skype with an online number and with just wifi you can make and receive phone calls even!
posted by dep at 2:07 PM on March 17, 2012

Instapaper justifies the existence of the iPad. (I haven't tried Readability's brand-new iOS app on the iPad yet.) And Netflix makes it magic.
posted by waldo at 5:42 PM on March 17, 2012

Oh, if for some crazy reason you want a Windows 7 desktop with Office 2010 on your iPad then check out On Live Desktop. The free version lets you access your files from a browser.

There's also Splashtop which lets you mirror your Mac or Windows desktop, including playing videos (though not full screen games).
posted by Burhanistan at 7:19 PM on March 17, 2012

Some of my favorites, without comment:

* GoodReader
* Read It Later
* Writings
* Photosmith
* FlickrStacker
* Boxee
* Reeder
* Evernote
* Penultimate
* Snapseed
* Splashtop
* Living Earth
* GoodPlayer
posted by muckster at 2:33 PM on March 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

Couldn't do without:

- PlainText (for quick-but-intelligent text editing)
- Pages (for full-scale document creation-editing)

Good but not perfect (yet?)
- Book Keeper (sort-of-a Delicious Library clone for indexing/archiving your real books; would love to hear of any better alternative...)

Music-making
- Bebot
- iKaossilator

Also cool
- Liquid Scale (for intelligent image resizing)
- Voxel
- Vellum (albeit for iPhone; actually, it seems it's not being sold anymore at all - what a shame...)
and, if you happen to be going to Barcelona, TMB Maps.
posted by progosk at 3:40 PM on March 18, 2012

Regarding crosswords, take a look at, well, Crosswords. Downloads them daily from a variety of online sources, including some older classic NYT puzzles. $10 and worth every cent.
posted by jquinby at 4:31 PM on March 18, 2012

Wikipanion is a nice iPad app that interfaces with Wikipedia better than using a web browser. Available in free and paid versions, the paid version includes offline reading and personal bookmarking.

Alternately, Discover For iPad turns Wikipedia articles into a nicely readable magazine. It features the article of the day and picture of the day, but also can be used to search for content (without inline links, however).

Free Books is a really great library shelf interface for things like Project Gutenberg and other free book sources.

Frequency is an interesting online video watching and discovery tool.

Band Of The Day profiles a different band every day with audio links and articles about each band.

There are a slew of alarm clock etc apps out there. I use Clock Pro and Night Stand in various ways.

Skype for iPad is pretty robust. FaceTime will only let you do video chat with other Apple users. Skype gives you the full features of Skype (voice calls, video calls, text chat, file transfer) with anyone else who uses Skype.

If you're an irc person, I recommend Colloquy as a client.
posted by hippybear at 4:37 PM on March 18, 2012

If you're an academic: Sente's iPad app is amazing. Its ability to sync between desktop and tablet, and its annotation function are literally the first things that made me realize exactly what a tablet was for.
posted by R. Schlock at 6:40 PM on March 18, 2012

Seconding Flipboard and Thumbjam. So much goodness there, though I'd love it if I could put RSS feeds directly into Flipboard instead of having to go through Google Reader's hateful desktop interface.

iPhoto is a no-brainer. I mean, they showed it off as a flagship thing at their big reveal. Of COURSE it's gonna be worth it.
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:42 PM on March 18, 2012

Crux is a better app for crosswords than either Crosswords or the native New York Times Crossword app.

There are a lot of fun board games that have been ported to the iPad. Check out Ticket to Ride, Small World, Carcasonne, and many others. Boardgamegeek puts up a list of iPad ports every so often.

Goodreader is my PDF editor of choice, but uPad is my favorite app for doing freehand edits to PDFs instead of just adding comment boxes. I love doing issues of Panda Magazine in uPad.

Other downloads to check out: Paprika, How to Cook Everything, The Economist, Comixology, Zen Pinball, iA Writer.
posted by painquale at 9:04 PM on March 18, 2012 [3 favorites]

Economist
Animoog
Tenori-on
IA Writer
BBC
Zite
Calvetica
Omnifocus
posted by epo at 4:41 AM on March 19, 2012

I've been using my iPad as a rompler, triggering it with my Yamaha keyboard. I had been waiting a while for the ability to do this and now only need to bring one keyboard and iPad with me to get a bunch of cool sounds when I play out. To play through Midi, you'll need an interface like iRig, and then a program, some of them free, some not: Sampletank, Pocket Organ C3B3 (great Hammond emulator), Absynth, Sunrizer. A

Also, 123D Sculpt is a lot of fun for making 3D sculptures. Explain Everything is the best I've found for starting your own Khan Academy. The Desmos graphing calculator is sweet!
posted by CaptainCaseous at 5:26 AM on March 19, 2012

First, you need to solve some of the weird quirks of the iPad:
Storage is a pain. Get Dropbox, and use that (many programs play well with it). If you need to work with iWork (which stores stuff in iCloud) and DropBox, try Otixo (web app). It is free and it solves the problem of cloud storage in multiple places with free WebDAV.
If you need windows access, OnLive Desktop rocks.
Goodreader is an absolute necessity if you want to read PDFs, and it plays well with the cloud and with other Apple apps.

General Apps
Also, I agree with everyone else: get Flipboard, Zite, Evernote, Kindle, Kayak. All are free.
Mendeley is great if you are an academic.

Games:
Infinity Blade II is good
Pocket RPG
Waking Mars
Sword & Sworcery
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa! A Reckless Disregard for Gravity

Interactive books:
The Waste Land (seriously, amazing)
Elements
Inside the World of Dinosaurs (Narrated by Stephen Fry)

Kids:
Toontastic is great (make and aninmate cartoons, good for younger or older kids)
Bobo and Light (science book)
Magic School Bus in the Ocean
posted by blahblahblah at 8:38 AM on March 19, 2012 [7 favorites]

Oh, and the best newsreader is Reeder, hands down.
posted by blahblahblah at 8:40 AM on March 19, 2012

Also - the American Heritage Dictionary has an iPad version. If you buy the hardback version, it comes with a code that will also let you download the app to one device.
posted by jquinby at 10:30 AM on March 19, 2012

If you're into getting movies/TV from, um, sources other than iTunes then you can both play most any file format and wirelessly transfer them to your iPad via AVPlayer HD.
posted by Burhanistan at 1:09 PM on March 19, 2012

iAnnotate PDF is an amazing PDF reader. It shines when you have a computer (OS X or Windows) that can serve as an over-the-air repository for PDFs.

What's amazing about it, besides it offering many features for marking up PDFs, is that it can sync those annotations back to your computer and those annotations are available to other PDF readers including Apple's Preview and Adobe's Acrobat (Reader and Pro).

If you take it a step farther and use the open source Skim you can turn those annotations into something that any OPML software can handle.

This is important because you can than take those annotations and treat them as separate, searchable, manipulable objects that can take any shape you want, HTML export for one obvious example.

iAnnotate PDF is a nerdy researcher's/instructors dream.
posted by mistersquid at 1:25 PM on March 19, 2012 [3 favorites]

Omnifocus (productivity app based on David Allen's GTD philosophy designed exclusively for iOS UI)

Omnigraffle. You use it to draw shapes and flow diagrams. If you do anything conceptual, like modeling or work processing kinds of stuff, it's like the thing you always needed and wanted but didn't know it.

Omnigraphsketcher. You would think you could just get away with using Omnigraffle to do these kinds of simpler diagrams. But this is really for drawing the sort of stuff on two-dimensional coordinate space, as opposed to just pictures. It's perfect for what I do (which is teach economics), because it lets me draw supply and demand curves really easily. On the iPad, I think I might just have an out of body experience doing it though.
posted by scunning at 9:27 PM on March 19, 2012 [1 favorite]

I've been working on compiling a list of good iPad apps for some time. Here:


Don't use FirefoxSync ($0.99). Use the free, official Firefox Home instead.
Dolphin HD is the favorite non-Safari browser of Lifehacker.

World of Goo HD is good, but in my experience a bit buggy.

GoodReader makes the iPad basically useable IMO. It has both Dropbox and box.net support. There are a number of ways you can get 50GB of space for free on box.net, it's worth looking into.

Kindle is good. Apple's iBooks app is no slouch either (and serves as a good, free to GoodReader where PDFs are concerned).

CloudReaders is what I use for CBF/CBZ.

Readability is new, free, and a good way to transfer articles you're reading on PC over to the iPad for on-the-go reading and reference. Longform is also free, has Readability support, and also support for many other good websites.

Notability is the best notetaking program I know of on the platform. It has a very clean UI without skimping on features.

Reeder is excellent, yes.

Khan Academy just released a free app that allows for watching courses with in-app captioning, progress tracking, video downloading for offline viewing and even achievements and score tracking! It is great. Along similar lines: NPR and TED's apps, and the AV Club's TV Club.

For free instant messaging I'm currently using Textfree iPad.

NYT Crosswords is very good yes. Other excellent games, from my own personal Games folder: Pac-Man CE, Nethack, King of Dragon Pass (awesome narrative driven RPG/sim, the best RPG-style game on iOS), Sword & Sworcery, Frotz (free, runs any Z-machine game), Sid Meier's Pirates (warning: 500MB), The Wasted Land (basically Call of Cthulhu Tactics in World War I!), Civilization Revolution (it's not full Civ, but I actually prefer this style of play to the rather overloaded recent PC versions), Pinball Arcade (extra tables are in-app purchases, but the fee to play Ripley's Believe It Or Not!, a neglected Pat Lawlor classic, is well worth it), and Minecraft PE (so far it's feature-poor compared to the desktop version, but there is reason to believe great things will come of this).

Another thing about iOS is that it has an excellent selection of board games, for pass-around, internet and computer play. Miles better than the likes of Monopoly. Favorites: PuzzleManiak (actually a collection of excellent randomly-generated puzzles), Puerto Rico HD (one of the best board games around, a little difficult to learn from the iOS port though), Small World (unfortunately only supports two players in the iOS version), Caylus (a recent addition, and excellent), Dominion (get it while it's free -- when the official app comes out this version is going away), Wabash Cannonball, Forbidden Isle (very, very much like quicker, more focused Pandemic, from the same designer), Tigris & Euphrates, Carcassonne (possibly the best board game implementation on iOS), Ticket to Ride (very easy to learn and tied with Carcassonne for implementation quality), and Eradicate (a clone of Pandemic). Also it's worth mentioning: Risk is much, much easier and faster to play on iOS, so don't neglect that version.

Sprite Something is the best pix art program I know of on the platform. For other purposes, there's now a version of Photoshop that runs on iPad 2s and better. It's $10.

And in the meta category: AppAdvice is what I use to keep track of new apps, and it also posts a daily list of one-day free app specials, which is mostly drek but once in a while comes through with a gem.

If you have/want to jailbreak the machine, on Cydia I vouch for the emulators: NES.emu and Snes9x EX. Two Cydia-only apps that are indespensible IMO are iFile and the bittorrent client iTransmission -- the latter is difficult to install however, as the author makes it available in .IPA form, meaning you have to resort to the shady piracy enabling program Installous to install it. You can find it as a .deb (the format Cydia installs) if you look around long enough though.
posted by JHarris at 9:55 PM on March 19, 2012 [7 favorites]

Oh, and 100 Rogues (although it was designed by a friend of mine).
posted by JHarris at 9:57 PM on March 19, 2012

(It's a game. Bleah.)
posted by JHarris at 9:57 PM on March 19, 2012

(And about emulation on an iPad: most emulators on the platform now offer Wiimote support! It is entirely worth it to get a Wii Remote entirely for iPad emulation use.)
posted by JHarris at 9:59 PM on March 19, 2012

And a few more!

IM+ is the best instant messaging program I know of. It has a free ad supported version.

Downcast is the best podcast client, and offers inventive features like background downloading, playing video podcasts as if they were audio ones, search and playlists.

Blogsy takes some getting use to, but it's the best blogging client on the platform, hands down.
posted by JHarris at 10:02 PM on March 19, 2012

If you have/want to jailbreak the machine, on Cydia I vouch for the emulators: NES.emu and Snes9x EX. Two Cydia-only apps that are indespensible IMO are iFile and the bittorrent client iTransmission -- the latter is difficult to install however, as the author makes it available in .IPA form, meaning you have to resort to the shady piracy enabling program Installous to install it. You can find it as a .deb (the format Cydia installs) if you look around long enough though.

Unfortunately there's no publicly-available jailbreak for the iPad 3rd generation yet. If people are interested in this, I'd recommend following the Dev Team Blog for news (they're the main jailbreaking team).

(For future reference, you can also get an iOS port of Transmission from a default trustworthy repository in Cydia just by searching for "Transmission" in Cydia and tapping the one available from BigBoss repository. I haven't tried it though, and it might be different from that iTransmission client.)
posted by dreamyshade at 2:31 PM on March 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

Really? I didn't know there was a default-repository version of Transmission, will have to check that out, thanks!
posted by JHarris at 9:44 PM on March 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

Nine iPad music apps that will rock your world
posted by Vibrissae at 10:48 PM on March 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

I've been using gMusic to access my Google Music account.
posted by Burhanistan at 7:51 AM on March 21, 2012

Seconding iAnnotate -- whenever I have a conference where the presenters make their slides available ahead of time, this is where they go. Taking notes and following along, and referring back later is a joy.

I didn't see anything above about kid applications, this is a whole subset of the application question and there are amazing things to educate, entertain, or just shut up your child depending on your parenting goals.
posted by Slarty Bartfast at 12:56 PM on March 21, 2012

1. Notes Plus, the most amazing notepad app (written, typed, video, sound, graphics you name it). The latest version is excellent.
2. Popcap games have been slowly porting their stuff over to the iPad, and I've been playing way more Bejeweled 3 and Zuma than is probably healthy.
3. Good old iBooks. I use Calibre on my desktop to convert various ebook formats to epub.
4. I like Sudoku for relaxing, and Bad Weasel's Big Bad Sudoku book has a bajillion of them at all skill levels.
posted by L'Estrange Fruit at 3:36 AM on March 22, 2012

If you're into recording music, get Saitara's AC7 Core app. It allows you use your iPad as a controller for your DAW (Logic, ProTools, Cubase etc) over a wifi network.

Handy so you don't have to make endless runs between your PC and microphone when recording takes on your own.
posted by TheAlarminglySwollenFinger at 9:16 AM on March 22, 2012

Ascension is simply put the best $8 ($5 for start, $3 for expansion) in gaming you can spend if you like strategy card games at all.
posted by andreaazure at 7:38 AM on March 25, 2012

Buying tip: iTunes gift cards sometimes go on sale from various retailers like Best Buy, OfficeMax, or Mejier. They can be discounted up to 20%, and sometimes are 'delivered digitally', instead of being shipped or requiring store pickup.

The reason why this is useful is that stocking up accounts with these cards is the equivalent of getting 20% off on all apps (or anything else one gets through the iTunes store).
posted by ZeusHumms at 8:31 AM on March 26, 2012

Responding to andreaazure, you can still get that iOS version of Dominion for free.
posted by JHarris at 9:14 AM on March 26, 2012

if you read comic books, or want to start, reading hd comics on COMIXOLOGY is as good as paper or better.
posted by Avenger50 at 1:09 PM on March 26, 2012

Buying tip: iTunes gift cards sometimes go on sale from various retailers like Best Buy, OfficeMax, or Mejier.

They're also regularly discounted at Costco, if you have a membership there or know someone who does.
posted by hippybear at 5:48 PM on March 26, 2012 [1 favorite]

Some more:

Oplayer HD--enables playback of video from computer on your LAN, no upnp server required. Free version has ads.

Squrl--Video discovery app, best one I've come across.

Glow Hockey 2--Air hockey game, fun and colorful. Has ads.

Age of Pinballs--Pinball game, unlike most all the other free ones it has plenty of tables. Solid physics.

Onlive Viewer--watch other people play high-end PC games for free. Novel way to fight boredom.

Art Of Glow--Very simple drawing game. Bright and colorful; good for kids?

Stitcher--Podcast streaming, supports subscriptions.

AceMusic--Music streaming app, connects to upnp servers like tversity and mezzmo

500px--Photo discovery app

ExploreFlickr--Flickr photo discovery

AirAV--similar to AceMusic, but for photos

Hootsuite--the only ipad twitter client I've found that can properly do searches

Mocha VNC Lite--VNC client. Has wake-on-lan built in though right clicking is disabled.

SketchBookX--paint and drawing app

Battery HD+--detailed battery and battery life remaining. Has ads.

All About iDevice--system configuration and monitoring

Fing--a network scanner

ClipSwap--clipboard utility, useful for when you need to copy and paste more than one item

Planetary--takes your around stars and planets while your music plays. Not useful at all, but relaxing.

NBA Courtside--detailed NBA games stats



Also two programs that don't run on the ipad itself, but improve the experience:

Fingerprint--enables printing to most any printer, not just Airprint ones

Privoxy--web proxy that is functionally similar to adblock.
posted by aerotive at 8:37 PM on March 26, 2012 [2 favorites]

Machinarium is a beautiful throwback point-and-tap adventure game. Sure, it's been around for a while on various platforms (including Steam), but it is a great fit for the iPad. My only wish is that the artwork were retina resolution, but even so, it looks great.

Osmos is another beautiful game which has been available in many forms (again, including Steam) but really seems to work especially well on the iPad.

Oh and I should note that both of these games allow for a relaxed, leisurely pace while employing a very pleasant, soothing soundtrack.
posted by Potsy at 2:39 AM on March 29, 2012

(Oh, and by that last point I mean that they don't really fall into the category of "ridiculously addictive" as you specified not to recommend, but rather tend towards simply, easy downtime. They are both pleasantly unusual in that regard.)
posted by Potsy at 2:46 AM on March 29, 2012

IntellicastHD is an amazing weather app. Seriously, I didn't realize a weather app could excite me, but after I got it I had to tell my family and friends to get it, too.
posted by corn_bread at 7:08 AM on April 15, 2012

It should be noted, about Fingerprint, that there is a whole category of programs like this, that exist to get around Apple's silly limitations. None of them seem too difficult to program, and most of them cost money, usually around $10. This industry is one of the great undiscussed suckpits of iOS.

A program that would let you do this, but is merely donationware, is AirPrintActivator.
posted by JHarris at 10:57 AM on April 15, 2012