Our favourite iPad and iPhone apps of 2010

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Here are (just a few of) our favourite apps…some of them are geeky, some of them groovy, and some are fun but futile. What are yours?

AirSharing turns your iPhone into a portable hard disk drive (HDD) that you can read/write from WiFi. It means you can use the iPad as a file storage system.

We’re absolutely blown away by Word Lens.  It’s an augmented reality app. You point it at a sign (or any printed writing) and it replaces the words on the sign with their Spanish translation.  The free version of the app just reverses the characters in the word but, while technically useless, is still completely amazing.  Another example of how the hype about AR is being slowly replaced with solid, useful things that still make you go “ooohh!”

Flipboard for iPad Once you use it, checking  your social network feeds any other way seems dull. Leaps and bounds ahead of the web based Paper.li, which uses a similar idea, Flipboard transforms all social network updates into a beautiful magazine format. We think it’s justifiably one of TIME’s top 50 innovations of 2010.

The free iView app from the ABC includes the full content available on the ABC’s site, including access to the ABC News 24 service. One nifty feature only
available on the iPad version is Watchlists, which lets you bookmark the series you watch regularly. This is one app that really enhances the experience of watching television and the UX is lovely.

It’s fairly obvious that having a calendar and your contact list in your pocket is a big help for busy people on the move, but some great tools for getting organised we love include List Master – for making lists, obviously.

Another nifty app for the iPhone (for people who never do today what they can put off until tomorrow?) is Today or Tomorrow – if you’re not doing the task today, flip the item to tomorrow’s list. Ad infinitum…

A nice organisational tool is What do I need to do? which uses the concept from Steve Covey’s “7 habits of highly successful people” to divide all tasks into combinations of urgent and /or important.

ANZ Money Manager is a site, rather than an app, but it uses the US designed Mint.com interface to allow you to access your Australian bank account securely and has built in budgeting and goal setting for saving money.

We love the clever interface of Scrabble for the iPad.  You can also download an app on your iphone called ‘Tile rack’ that allows you to use your iphone as the tile rack and you flick tiles onto the ipad. It’s great for travelling and holidays and has social networking sites neatly integrated.

Other games we love – Angry Birds with its new 15 level upgrade (the morning commute’s just not long enough any more!), the ridiculous virtual stress reliever Bubble Wrap (you pop virtual bubble wrap and it never runs out. Yes, really.) and Dactyl - can you beat Sarah Vick’s highest score of 308…?

On those rare occasions we’re not in the office, we love RunKeeper and Get Running,which takes you from 0 to 10k in 9 weeks. That’s the length of the run, not the speed you achieve.

If you’re a bookworm, the best eBook reader we’ve found is Stanza.

Honourable mentions also go to:

Shazam! – it’s not new, but it remains one of the most popular apps – solving a problem people didn’t know they had, and arguably keeping pub disputes about who the singer of that song on the jukebox is a little bit shorter.

The Foxtel Guide app is the easiest way to search and schedule recordings (sadly, it’s easier to do so on the app than on the IQ itself or the Foxtel site)

Remote  – to control music on your laptop from your phone (it sounds lazy, but it’s quite cool) and some of the nice short cuts offered by sites like BOM and Google Showtime. While not apps themselves, they offer a faster way of accessing content than via a Safari bookmark.