20 iPad Apps Librarians Should Download

Just getting started with your new iPad and wondering what to download? Here are 20 popular apps to get you going in the areas of News, Reference & Education, e-Book Readers, Productivity Tools, and Social Tools. News 1.) Flipboard Cost: Free Browse through your news and social media feeds such as Twitter and Facebook in a stunning magazine-style layout. This beautiful app lets you aggregate news, photos, videos, and updates your friends are sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Instagram. 2.) NPR Cost: Free View NPR’s content in a magazine style, similar to Flipboard. All of the features of the iPhone app are available including playlist, hourly newscasts,station finder, and sharing. 3.) New York Times Cost: Free Read the New York Times on your iPad through this app which offers enhanced material including vertical swiping between sections to help you more easily scan headlines and more content with blogs, videos and slide shows. 4.) USA Today Cost: Free USA Today also offers a virtual newspaper view of their content. Reference & Education 5.) EasyBib Cost: Free Scan any book’s barcode or manually type in the title to create MLA, APA, and Chicago style citations instantly. EasyBib also lets you manage your works cited and email citations to yourself. You can also export your citations to EasyBib.com’s bibliography management service. 6.) Wikipanion Cost: Free Access a beautiful view of Wikipedia’s content through the Wikipanion app. This app displays a table of contents to the left of each entry, multiple search methods, bookmarking capabilities, and viewing history by date. 7.) The Elements: A Visual Exploration Cost: $13.99 This absolutely stunning app has presents ach element in the periodic table in a rotating, 3D animated view. Users can click into each element to view more detailed info including live statistics from Wolfram Alpha. 8.) Wolfram Alpha Cost: $2.99 Access the computational knowledge engine via the iPad through this easy-to-use app which allows Facebook sharing of results. 9.) Star Walk Cost: $4.99 This amazing augmented reality application allows users to hold up their iPads towards the sky and move it around while it displays information about exactly what what stars, constellations, and satellites you are looking at in real-time. You can also see what the sky looked like at any point in the past…or in the future as well. 10.) TED Cost: Free Access over 900 TEDTalk videos from some of the world’s most fascinating people: education radicals, tech geniuses, medical mavericks, business gurus and music legends. Bookmark or download your favorite TEDTalk for playback anywhere. 11.) IMDB Cost: Free Access info about over 2 million movie and TV titles, as well as over 4 million celebrities, actors, actresses, directors and crew members with this stunning iPad app. e-Book Readers 12.) Kindle Cost: Free Access over 1,000,000* books in the Amazon Kindle Store plus over 100 newspapers and magazines with the Kindle for iPad app. 13.) iBooks Cost: Free Download and read eBooks from Apple’s iBookstore and view all your titles on a beautiful bookshelf. Books and pdfs can be organized into Collections. Features such as highlighting, bookmarking, and note taking are all available. Productivity Tools 14.) WordPress Cost: Free If you have a WordPress blog, you can easily blog right from your iPad with this free app. Create or edit posts and pages, and add images or videos with this handy application. 15.) iWork Cost: $9.99 per app The iWork productivity suite from Apple is now available for the iPad. Users can download each of the apps Keynote, Pages and Numbers for $9.99 each in order to create stunning presentations, documents, and spreadsheets. 16.) Dropbox Cost: Free Store and share all your files in the cloud with the Dropbox iPad app. Upload photos, docs, videos, and other file types for convenient online access wherever you are. Dropbox will sync your files with all your devices. 17.) Evernote Cost: Free Create text, photo and audio notes that will Auto-synchronize your Mac, PC, and the Web. All notes include geo-location information for mapping and search. 18.) iThoughtsHD Cost: $9.99 This is a beautiful and feature-rich mind mapping tool for the iPad. Easily create brainstorming, concept, and project planning maps that can be exported to popular desktop applications and synced with Dropbox and Box.net. Social Tools 19.) Twitterific Cost: Free This beautiful, award-winning Twitter client is easy to use and chock full of features. Read and compose tweets, search Twitter.com, filter message types and much more. 20.)Hootsuite Cost: Free HootSuite will let you post status updates/tweets to social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Foursquare at the same time. You can also schedule updates to post at future times, track statistics, and monitor keywords, #hashtags, and lists.