Favorite iPad apps

Here are some of my favorite iPad apps so far:

WordPress: If you have a WordPress site, this is pretty essential. The iPhone version is pretty good too, but obviously the iPad is perfect for this. I’ve found the WordPress admin to be wonky on Mobile Safari, so this is the best way to edit a WordPress site on iPhone OS.

MaxJournal: This app is a great example of an iPad app — it does one thing and it does it well. It looks great, has elegant date navigation, and strips a journal down to the bare bones. It needs a password feature, but apparently, the feature is done and waiting for approval. The developer is very responsive to feedback, which is a good sign.

Kindle: Kind of obvious. The advantage over iBooks is that the books you buy are available on the iPhone or your Mac or PC (some books have a limit, I hit that with one of my books)

Tweetdeck: Free and supports lists and other custom filters, which are essential for reading Twitter.

NewsRack: RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader. Well done, stable, with some nice touches.

And the disappointments:

CraigPhone: This is an iPad version of Craigslist. Tons of bugs. The app has an apology right on it (they put it in the AppStore without testing it on a real device). It’s free, so I guess that’s ok. Something about the interface just feels wrong though — I suspect that they are using HTML views with some JavaScript drawing parts of the UI.

Tweetdeck: It’s the only usable twitter client for me, but it is crashtastic. Tweet-boom, tweet-boom — move a column, buh-bye. Anyway, it’s free and I assume that they are working on it — they need to check out my post about debugging memory crashes on the iPhone and it probably wouldn’t hurt to run a Build and Analyze once and a while.

NYT Editor’s Choice: First, you can’t find this app by searching the store for “NYTimes” or “NY Times” because they named it with NYT. And, you don’t get the whole paper? But, I do if I go to the website? I don’t get that — just charge me.

No Google apps or Facebook: Pretty surprised that these big players with great apps are absent from the AppStore on day one. Google made GMail work great on an iPad, though — if they had done the same with Reader, I might not have bought an app.