There is no denying that slicing up fruit with a ninja blade on a beautiful 10-inch display is a ton of fun, but surely there has to be much more to owning a tablet than just that. The good news is that there is. If you take a moment to step away from the games category in the app store, you will discover that there are all kinds of great applications designed to help you increase productivity. These aren’t just apps for the business man on the go, and all of them can in fact come in handy for just about everyone.
Dropbox is a cloud storage program that lets you take your pictures, documents and music to any of your other computers. Add a song on your laptop and it shows up on your desktop. Add a paragraph to your research paper with your iPad and the update appears on your iPhone.
Essentially, the point of Dropbox is to allow you to view and edit your files on any device. Dropbox can eliminate the need to email yourself files so you can update them on another computer and then email back the updated copy. Dropbox also eliminates the need to carry around your files on a USB drive from location to location.
Apple’s iPad is really a wonderful device. People use it for pretty much every imaginable task – from a media player to a portable internet device, mobile office and even business payment processor (just look at the restaurants using Square and an iPad to take orders and process credit cards).
Spotify is a free music streaming app for the iPad. After a recent update, which added a Radio feature similar to Pandora, Spotify is now the fastest growing music app in the App Store. The Spotify app features a great user interface, support for the new iPad Retina display, a “Now Playing” screen with search support, swiping gestures, Facebook integration, AirPlay integration and other features similar to those found on the iPhone/iPod touch version of the app.
Towards the end of May, Spotify for iPad gained another new feature: push notifications. The push notifications were implemented for the purpose of informing users when a playlist is updated and when new subscribers are added. Other fixes that launched in the same update include Retina album art being synced while offline, improvements to the Facebook login, and a fix for unresponsiveness when scrolling and navigating at the same time.
One of the neat things about a tablet device like the iPad is the ability to interact with media like never before. The app I’ll be discussing today is Skitch for the iPad, an app created by the folks from Evernote, that allows you to annotate your images with ease.
There are multiple reasons why you would want to draw on your pictures. If you’re just being goofy you can add a mustache to someone or scribble someone out of a picture. You can also start with a blank canvas and draw to your hearts content. If this sounds like a silly app, think again. There are professional reasons why you would want to sketch on a picture too.
Apple is approaching another milestone. Soon Apple users will have downloaded a total of 25 billion apps. The App store debuted in July of 2008 and has seen exponential growth ever since.
To celebrate the occasion Apple will be awarding lucky number 25,000,000,000 a $10,000 App Store gift card. There was some initial confusion as to whether the gift card would be for the Apple store or the App store, but I can confirm it is just for the app store. The prize essentially awards the winner unlimited app downloads for life. If you were to buy one $0.99 app every single day it would take you nearly 28 years to use up your gift card.
