Best iPad Apps – Peter Meyers
Best iPad Apps – The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders is a book by Peter Meyers, who was formerly an editor for O’Reilly Media and now writes about and designs digital books.
The Guide for Discriminating Downloaders is a series of books by O’Reilly which has covered iPhone Apps and Android Apps.
This book is targetted only to the iPad applications.
Summary
This book has over 200 pages with nice graphics, designed just like Apple’s range of products.
The applications being recommended are categorize as:
- At Work – Applications use for documents editing and calculations
- At Leisure – eBooks, reading, news, music, and radio related applications
- Creative Corner – A fun collection of digital tools like band jamming, drawings, and photos editing
- At Play – Best Games out there, Scrabble for iPad, Cut the Rope, Angry Birds, Need For Speed, Fruit Ninja
- At Home – Online shopping, Cooking, Educational apps
- Out and About – Travelling, restaurant guides, and language translation
- For Your Health – Health related apps, such as application for health references and general fitness
My Review
With the sheer number of applications in the Apple App Store, it would take a long time for one to pick the best app for the task of accomplishing something.
This might be the main problem for one who has just picked up the iPad.
With that in mind, this book is a god-send guide for first time iPad users who might not have the pleasure to purchase and try all the apps in a specific category and to pick up the best app.
However, users who have been using iPhone or the iPod Touch would probably have their own preference of applications.
The author has picked the ‘Best Apps’ with the purpose of selecting apps as elegant as the iPad itself and apps that are usable without much instructions. They should be intuitive for first time users.
That said, we all know that the content and applications published in the App Store is constantly changing, but this book might not.
So most of the apps are either official ones, such as Twitter app from Twitter.com or Scrabble for iPad. Then there are popular games such as Angry Birds and Cut The Rope.
It’s pretty safe to say for non-advanced iPad users, this book would be most beneficial, to have a quick start in using the iPad without wasting time trying apps or purchasing them one-by-one, as you have a review with very graphical description of the reviewed apps in this book.