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My Favorite iPad Apps: Productivity edition

April 28, 2011 · 4 min

Among the gajillions of apps for the iPad, there are some real gems. Here’s a rundown of my favorite productivity apps. Enjoy!

I’ve tried quite a few note taking apps for the iPad, and Noteshelf really stands out. It’s simple to use, has a great Zoom-to-write feature, and syncs to Evernote! I mostly use it to take notes in meetings and I usually get asked about it.

Evernote is an awesome cloud-based note taking app. You can take notes on your desktop (on both Windows and Mac), through the web site, by emailing to a special address, and with your favorite iOS device.

Probably the coolest Evernote feature is its ability to search handwritten notes. Coupled with Noteshelf, it lets you search through handwritten meeting notes and it works surprisingly well.

Flipboard presents information from various data streams in a magazine-style layout. I’ve written about this gorgeous app before and it continues to amaze me. In fact, this is usually the app I use to show off the iPad to other people. Flipboard has gotten even better with recent releases: you can post to Facebook right from it, it can pick up your Google Reader streams, etc.

Instapaper is another fantastic idea that is perfectly executed on the iPad. With it, you can mark web pages you want to read for later. When  you do, Instapaper takes just the text and the relevant images (and not the other cruft), and presents it to you in a beautifully simple way. Recent updates allow you to search curated archives for more stuff to read as well as see what your friends are reading.

Todo is a great note-taking app for the iPad. Aside from looking great, it syncs with Toodledo, which means that your tasks can live in the Cloud. What’s even better is that Toodledo syncs with Outlook, which means that you can get your Outlook tasks on your iPad and vice versa.

It’s probably odd to write glowing reviews about a calculator app, but Calcbot is pretty awesome. It’s beatifull, functional, and can create a recording of your calculations (just like an old-school tape calculator).

If you use Google Analytics, this is a really nice app for getting statistics. It’s well designed and has most (if not all) of the reports that the Analytics website has.