Updating regularly, to get this post up to the original aspirations of that which it was created upon - listing and [slight] reviewing my top picks for iPadOS front-page desktop space on my 2019 7th Generation iPad - which is an iPad of several other iPads and iOS devices that I've previously owned, thanks to iCloud backups, and an iPadOS of much aspirations and expertise in several fields, as well as many nights of invested App Store browsings.
Alright, so I’ve got my iPad 7th Generation 128 GB iCloud-restored, everything fine and exciting for me, having been away from my fond iPigeonPad workstation and development tool since I traded it for an iMac several weeks ago. As a token of my happiness for having a new-model iPad, I’m offering a quick review of hundreds of apps that I have on my device, which I’ve found to be indispensable (or useful, at a minimum). These apps will fit on as small as 32 GB on an iPadOS device.
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| I’m hopeful that my particular screen layout is a beneficial set of organizing folders that you might find highly useful, as a creative professional (or, in the making). |
If you’ll notice, my app groups are pretty tight woven. I’ve got, perhaps, 200 or so, apps on this first page, alone. The rest of the pages are a few app items that I hadn’t gotten around to organizing yet.
- Communication
- I kept Calendar second, and at the top, because of the frequency of usage, and for the sake of that this, and the other familiar Apple logos are comforting features, to me, of the iPadOS interface, and I like to use them, despite other options.
- Photography
- Internet Various
- Web Develop
- Phys
- Wavelength Gen
- AudioUnits
- AudioKit
- Art Design iC
- Maps GIS
- Writing
- MIDI
- Daily Stuff
- Weird Music, etc.
- Bleeding Edge
- Video Post
- Adobe
Okay, now. Here I go with the breakdown of what’s in each folder / group, why I chose it, and why it fits here [my app groups are several revisions in, at this point in time]
Communication
- This one has 4 apps. I’m a bit of a solitary enterprise, at the moment, and I don’t keep too close to a lot of people, through my direct contact, on my device.
- FaceTime. I’d obviously like to be able to know where my FaceTime is, for showing face amongst my contacts and clients. A very useful tool for keeping in touch, giving lessons or consultation, etc.
- AirCall. I click on this one, and it’s a fair mystery to me. I don’t know what it does. Then I looked it up, and apparently it’s a call center and CRM (customer relations manager). Perhaps I’ll get to it.
- Google Voice. A beautiful tool for choosing and managing a second phone line on your iOS device, (or other mobile device). In the case of the iPad, it’s a first phone line, since the iPad doesn’t officially do phone stuff, of talking and speaking to others while held to the ear. (Okay, ... somewhat like that).
- Home (by Apple). Apple’s HomePod and iPad-as-a-Home Hub are great interfaces to launch the newest upcoming communications technologies of our IoT, proximity, communicatory, switch, and sensor-based devices, founded on the Apple mFi technology, as it’s known. In addition, the HomePod has a host of familiar home and work assistant-environment features such as incorporating Siri in to it. The Home app is a central location to manage HomePods and iPads used as Home Hubs, as well as scripting and automated actions that can be programmed for these devices to be triggered by.
Photography
- Here, I have apps that are for capturing photos and for photography effects.
- C4LA2+. Camera for Line Art 2 is a camera app which breaks down the edges, light and dark of the visual space before it, and makes them in to lines, such that cartoons might be founded upon, as well as works of illustrative line art aside from cartooning. A good app for tracing lines, visualizing vector art(-esque, not actual SVG here [scalable vector graphic]). Another app that does this effect quite nicely (better) is imagenomic.
- Hydra. A high-definition and HDR camera photo-and-video capture app. This app does successive clicks of the shutter to capture higher definition photos, up to 32 megapixels, high-quality HDR photos, and it also captures video in HDR at 1080p. If you’re not on a higher-end photography camera-equipped newer model iPhone or iPad, the higher definition comes in handy, at times.
- Enlight. An all-around handy and helpful quite of common and some special (rarer) effects that extend beyond the Apple built-in effects suite. Highly recommended.
- ProShot. A manual-settings camera. Adjust the shutter-speed, the ISO, aperture, frame size, mode of photography, etc. I was originally very taken by the light-painting feature of this app. I believe that’s what led me to purchase it. The other modes are time-lapse, video, and slo-motion. The modus of vanishing point and perspective is a bit different than the Apple camera app, and you will notice that structural features of a photo differ when using this app.
- iMeta and Exif Photos. Two birds of a feather which allow users to have access to richer details in their photo library in a rich content | forms setting. View location data, edit rights and copyrights, descriptions, software used, commentary, etc. about photos, for high-quality indexing and exhibiting of individual photographs. Good for when the photos taken require additional merits about them because of their importance.
- Pixlromatic. Made by Autodesk; aficionados and software legacy veterans alike would recognize that Autodesk is a long-standing fixture of fine offerings of software for architects, engineers, pre-visualization and digital imagery performance and projection. Here, we have what is somewhat standard to see, upon first opening the app; a carousel of presets for photos, as well as an in-app camera capture, to begin with, yet the presets are just a lot more special, it seems, in quality and in uniqueness of the looks available, on account of Autodesk’s technology and software engineers behind the photo-alteration programming that went in to the app. A true gem.
- DFT. (Digital Film Tools) by Tiffany is also a long-standing offering, simulating effects and techniques from the days of analog photography, before digital came out, such as lenses, color grading, standard lighting, temperature, and other slider effects of photo editing, all with expert presets of classic photo and film lab settings.
- HDR Merge. A simple yet elegant High Dynamic Range photo camera capture, multi-shot compositing, and post effects on the composite photos.
Internet Various
- Here, a mixed bag of apps that correspond to various internet-related tasks.
- Acoustigram. This app features sound clips from various contributing creators, each with their own story to tell. At the moment, the app is not running at full mast, as far as being burgeoned with content. There are but several recordings on the app. The format is somewhat similar to a location-based news delivery service.
- Reality Composer. Apple’s iOS Augmented Reality creation developer app features several handfuls of functions for placing and creating content, amidst a visual backdrop of the world around (camera-facing) the user.
- Indoor Survey. An Apple Business Program app, based on hyperlocalization data gathering of a working environment. I believe that this app allows the user to delineate not only the latitude and longitudinal confines and expanse of a space, but also the elevation.
- Transocks. A speedy SOCKS VPN server, based in China, most likely, so there’s possibly some concern over data privacy, for privacy buffs; I’m like, “whatever” on that note. They can see my traffic, use my camera, get my location, if they want to. The automatically-set-up one-button push process of establishing the VPN was simple enough, and the increased speeds of the server-sideloading have gotten me some good graces of surfing the internet and downloading needed files when time and location was in a crunch (not to mention that I’d run out of tethering for my iPad, at that point in time.
- Inspect. This app allows the user to inspect SSL certificates, as well as Certificate Authorities, as a listed item in contextual uses in web-browsing applications such as Apple’s Safari or Google Chrome.
- Ads Calculator. An advertising revenue calculator that allows the user to set goals and percentages in growth, over periods of time. The calculator returns various integrals of time, with the projected revenue attached to it.
- AirPort Utility. A scanner of the user device’s WiFi neighbors, as well as for internet connectivity through AirPort routers and the presence of AirPort routers themselves.
- AdSense. Google’s content me,Giza Timon program for content creators is AdSense. The app allows the user to monitor daily, weekly, week-over-week, etc. earnings reports that pertain to the major analytics stats involved in Pay Per Click advertising. The app also returns the biggest performing ads, location data, revenue per 1,000 impressions, etc.
- Cloud Search. Search (potentially) all of Google’s user cloud resources, including mail, drive, sites, groups, and calendar for user files and keywords found within entries or documents.
- Beacon Tools. Provision a device as a beacon, with a unique device identifier ID.
- Creative Preview. Members of Google’s Marketing Platform can preview ad creatives.
Web Develop
- Rest-O-Matic. An interface for making REST gets, calls, and more (such as headers and device user identity).
- iSource. A standard simple browser that allows the user to also see the html source code of the page, Whois information, console, headers; that sort of thing.
- TRUSTe. A long-established and familiar name in the scope of the internet; this app provides the user with a set of options in opting out and naming interests, for the sake of ads that would be served during internet browsing and app usage.
- DNS Override. Establishing a Virtual Private Network setting on your home or business local “intranet,” out to and throughout the internet, as you browse, is somewhat like a mid-side plug-in, for those of us who do live audio microphone monitoring, in the public relations and ad marketing business. A powerful kick in the jaunt, for the right setting. (I’ll get to the audio section soon enough, if you’re not familiar).
- iCurlHTTP. A web-crawler and console feedback app for pinging webpages for HTTP responses.
- Manual. (bash #) “man” pages of so, so many bash commands for the Bourne Again SHell, one of the most formative Terminal command line interfaces. Here you’ll find rich and overflowing resources of documentation to take with you when you go to pwn in your own Terminal UNIX system administration (on Mac or Linux). [Doing Terminal stuff in iPadOS is <_ ...="" i="" just="" not="" okay.="">really all that fruitful.
- Discovery. Simple. A Bonjour (local area network, local devices) browser, based on Apple’s Bonjour protocol.
- VNC Viewer. An essential, since there’s a lot of choices in the realm of remote viewing of other computers or devices you own, or are servicing. This one does a remote viewing client well, to the counterpart of the VNC Server being established and running on the remote device, whether it be an Arduino project, Raspberry Pi, or if you want to control your desktop or laptop, for example, with your iPad, it’s possible, through using this app.
- iDatabase. A simple interface to catalog and create index entries of DB’able stuff, such as records of items and events. Several presets are offered, as well as customization options.
- TestFlight. Apple’s beta software intermediary app. Installing any beta version of a software offering, whether it be an Apple Developer beta or a third party developer, will have to go through TestFlight, rather than the App Store, for the download of the beta app.
- CocoaAssist. This app seemed to have a much more illustrious purpose, based on its App Store listing, as far as the CocoaPods package management system is concerned, and the app’s claims to that matter being documented in the App Store listing. I wasn’t able to figure it out, but there were not many other similar apps available that could claim to do what this app claims it will do. Web and app design isn’t my most particular premier skill set, at this point in time; hopefully the developer has some good documentation I can peruse, at some later point.
- Developer. The Apple official app for the annual Worldwide Developer Conference, headed by Apple. Here, you can watch videos from all of the topics covered in the conference; there’s 2019 material up on there, at the moment.
- Domainr. This one is a custom domain (website) broker and cute search engine. They list their available Top Level Domains and General gTLDs, country-specific ccTLDs, etc. in this app, which is featurably largely its search engine and results of the TLDs that are available for purchase, through the Domainr company.
- Playgrounds. Although, ostensibly, one ought to know some fair amounts of coding, in order to “get into” coding, this app < somewhat > has a good grasp on establishing a lower nexus learning curve threshold, in that options for “what to type” in to the coding text editor are listed as options, and per stylistic and proper usage; say, for example, in between parentheses, [], or {} - which is helpful. Proper syntax and placement tips, updating live, as the user loves about the textual spaces and contexts of coding that is the Swift language. Aside from that, the app can compile and execute programs that are created here, in Playgrounds. I haven’t much gotten in to the meat and potatoes of all of that, quite just yet, personally.
- Shortcuts. Similar to “Automator,” of the Mac OS X and macOS offerings, this is similarly a place where one could devise, structure, and implement automated triggers, when something happens, system-wide, or within apps, or contextually, such as when the sharing button is pushed. A potentially significantly powerful tool for making shortcake of the interface and the user’s need to do quite everything themselves, which would otherwise be more intricate and, as well, common enough to be a blockage in the workflow, at least somewhat (as a minimum).
Phys
- Investigations of the physical properties of the world around us.
- WebMO. Allows the user to create 3-dimensional models of molecules and investigate more nuanced features, such as investigating what the molecule is known as, in external database looking at orbitals and electrostatic potentials.
- Electronic Lab. This app simulates many fundamental forms and components of electronics and associated devices, generators, meters, etc.
- Science Journal. Google’s Science Journal app utilizes the on-device sensors to gather and document raw sensor data, with specialized readings of the app pertaining to each sensor, such as lumens, for light sensing, and amplitude, for audio.
- Vibrometer. As simple as it sounds - a vibrometer. Similar, somewhat, I suppose, to a seismometer, this app measures X, Y, and Z values of the iOS or iPadOS device being moved around, in real time.
- LissaLab. This Lissajous curve generator simulates a device that would otherwise be known as an oscilloscope. Useful for visualizing various harmonic forms and geometries created with subtle modulations of the wavelength frequencies and associated parameters.
- Harmonograph. A simulation of the mechanical devices known as harmonographs, which use pendulums to create geometric images known as Lissajous curves, or perhaps more complicated drawings. There are various setup controls for the drawings, which are essentially options within the X | Y fields, such as amplitude, frequency, phase shift, dampening factor, diagonals, rotary movements, etc. Similar to a spirograph. This app could conceivably have gone under the next category, Wavelength Gen.
- PrismScope. An endlessly beautiful interactive canvas on your iOS / iPadOS device screen, in the form of a Prism-based camera, allowing users to capture prismatic images generated through user selection. A simple yet lovely app.
- Hydrogen! This app is apparently not available on the App Store, anymore, but hopefully that will change. Hydrogen! creates beautiful visualizations of the hydrogen molecule, in its various electromagnetic and orbital phases.
- MMDS. The Mobile Molecular DataSheet app provides chemical structure and reaction drawings, access to web services, generation of graphics, data sheet management, and more, pertaining to molecules.
- TRACE. This app documents a list of the nuclear radioactive materials that are found in your vicinity.
- Atomify. Presents simulations of various physical phenomena in atomic form.
- Molecule. Draw molecular structures.
- CompTox. Search molecules by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, monoisotopic mass, and plain old name.
- Neuronify. A tool to investigate how neurons and neural networks behave.
Wavelength Gen
- A niche in the audio and shortwave radio wavelength frequency generation category wavelength generators are essential for audio, visual, and radio wavelength researchers and scientists. iPadOS and iOS provide a rich platform for developing and researching wavelengths of many various forms.
- RF-Gen. A wavelength frequency generator (apparently) in the MHz range, which is inaudible.
- iSweep. This app is a true gem. It does what many users would love a wavelength generator to do, in offering multiple wavelength frequencies (2, to be precise), but it has several other functions that make this app an indispensable “kit” app for shaking things up, in terms of neat audio effects. This app includes both linear and logarithmic waveform functions, as well as a reverse function. The app gets some truly amazing and rare wavelength audio functions out of it.
- A-E-2DF. An electron-trajectory 2D space mapping app.
AudioUnits
- BandShift
- djay Pro
- VoxSyn
- ReSlice
- iVoxel
- GarageBand. An Apple-branded classic. Although GarageBand is the low-end audio app of the macOS (X) world, here, on iPadOS, Apple’s offerings of software instruments, features, and sound libraries truly shines with this app, which is a many-ways winner for multi-track audio.
- shape synth
- Soundbeam
- Music Memos. Music Memos will create a great harmonic-progression audio wavelength memo of a recording.
AudioKit
- VirtualRoom. Move left and right channels around in relation to a movable first person perspective, pictured in various-sized rooms, with the left and right channels also being pictured as movable objects within the stereo field.
- Concertina. I had become interested in isomorphic musical instruments through working with digital virtual instruments, so I decided to look in to historical isomorphically-apportioned instruments.
- Wilsonic. A great app for modified instruments and microtonal scales.
- AudioCopy. AudioCopy provides some functionality within the iPadOS file management and contextual menu / sharing options that are not found natively. An essential app for working with audio files.
- AudioShare. AudioShare provides some much-needed iPadOS and iOS features, in terms of working with audio files inside of the iPadOS and iOS operating systems.
- Audiobus 3
- M/S Processor. This app really powers vocal audio monitoring well, with a lot more potential punch and really gain-y presence. This app works as an AudioUnit plugin.
- AUM. A nicely done audio input and output with effects chain and access to all of the audio-related components of your device, MIDI, and network channels. AUM is one of the truly indispensable audio recording chain apps; here, in a lean version presentation.
- Rooms!. An impulse response reverb recording and implementation app, with some fully digital convolution reverb settings also available.
- OttOrgan
- StrandOrgan
- Brusfri. Simple and effective noise elimination and reduction standalone app and AudioUnits plugin for a digital audio device chain. Select a noise sample from your existing physical surroundings, set a threshold for noise elimination, and press the processing button. Much of the noise of the background is effectively gone from the audio monitor and from subsequent recordings.
Art Design iC
- iC Colors. This one is apparently not currently working on my iPadOS device, so I can't offer a review of it, but it should have been a good and useful app. Hopefully it'll be updated to work with the newer operating systems.
- AITaglio 2. Edit light, color, selective colors, or gamut (range) of colors in an image.
- MetaBrush. MetaBrush does a PhotoShop-esque job of managing brushes, based on image sources.
- iC Brushes. Allows for the importing and management of .abr Photoshop format brush files.
- iC Painter. A beautifully done painting app and Image compositing app.
- Iconik Studio. A low-poly image creation app.
- iColorama. Katerina Alieksieienko does so many beautifully well done photo and video image editing and tool apps. iColorama is one of her flagship apps, as a full-featured photo editor and brush painting app on iOS and iPadOS.
- Carbo. An Object and Character Recognition app; also does translation of detected text, and allows the user to skew and manage the image frame captures. Offers save functioning.
- ImageConverter. Whereas the macOS operating system (and legacy Mac OS X) is a powerhouse of functionality in supporting ad how file name changes in native app support, the iPadOS file management system is much more finicky. ImageConverter does an ‘official’ image file type conversion so that the next app in your workflow will accept the file, as changed and as named.
- FondFont.
- CircularText
- Tree Fractal
- ShellTRI. A neat app for doing low-poly triangular image creation, done point-by-point.
- WheelMasks
- Prêt-à-Template. A fashion drawing app, with many templates within the app itself.
- logotacular
Google
- Google Photos. Google’s photo management app sorts your images and videos in to albums automatically, and it incorporates Artificial Intelligence to create special stylized images, as well as decode QR codes and other photographic image data using Google Lens.
- Drive. Google Drive is an app with extensible features, and Drive Enterprise is a lean and elegant additional set of features atop the familiar free Google Drive app. Drive Enterprise includes workspaces for arranging files while working on a more permanent place for things to go.
- Google. The Google app is the de facto in Google searching, featuring the latest build of Google Search. The app provides specialized faceted and richly-featured results.
- Cloud Console. The Cloud Console app gives limited viewing and access to Google’s Cloud Platform, which you must have a subscription to, whether it be one of their free-pricing or trial models, or whether you pay for the service. The app also allows you to access the Cloud Console Command Line Terminal, which gives the user access to virtual machine resources, code repositories and libraries, and Application Programming Interfaces of the Google Cloud Platform.
- Chrome. Google’s omnibox-based web browser.
- Docs. Docs is Google’s answer to the Microsoft Word app, and it is fairly full-featured.
- Sheets. Google’s Sheets app is more than a spreadsheet app. It is also a tool for dynamic app creation within Google’s developer sites and app-creation models.
- My Business. The Google My Business app allows business owners to manage their business presence on the web, in a neat and tidy quick app and web interface known as My Business. Here, business owners can register and verify their business, set the location and hours, add products offered, and create a free website, on top of it all, to showcase the information displayed on Google’s search results in a web page.
- Allo. This is Google’s discontinued Artificial Intelligence assistant, based on a Russian model. The responses offered by Allo are sometimes quirky and humorously sly.
- Assistant. The Google Assistant is an Artificial Intelligence assistant that is triggered by saying ‘Hey Google!’ The Google Assistant has many features, such as games, trivia, recommendations, and more.
- Google I/O 19.
- GoogleDeviceManagement
Maps GIS
- Street View
- m|traffic
- Map Measure
- MapMyPlaces
- Batphone
- Find My
- Maps
Writing
- Phraseology
- LiquidText
- Documents
- Notes
- Books
MIDI
- Lemur
- MF Keyboard
- MF Splitter
- MF Limiter
- MF Randomizer
- MF Scales
- MF Motion
- Rozeta
- MIDI Converter
- Knob Lab
- Web MIDI
- Ringtone
- Clean OSC
Daily Stuff
- Coffivity. A great app to use when external noises become too invasive and an autonomous control over the conversational and ambiance noise threshold becomes desirable to have control over. Coffivity offers three environments - for morning, day, and evening. Have a random environment fill your earbuds with a completely remote café’s conversations. At times, it even seems like the other clients of the place chime in to the user’s own environment.
- Qleedo+. An orthodox Christianity daily Bible meditation and verse.
- HourlyChime-... For keeping track of the hours.
- Objectality Biz.
- Facebook Page
- Creator
- Reminders
- Target
Weird Music, etc.
An eclectic collection of music-making apps, as well as some random apps that felt like they fit here.
- s t r n g
- elsa
- MIDI Scope
- Sketch 3D
- Lirum info. Full device hardware specifications and capabilities. Check everything, from CPU speed, RAM, storage space, network connectivity speed, sensor information, battery life, and much more.
- nils
- vBot
- TextMusic
- Virtual ANS.
- bent.fm
- mPING. mPING allows users to submit timely weather reports to the National Weather Service.
- frekvens
- ström
- PhonoPaper
- Night Camera
- Nature-Oscillator
Bleeding Edge
- BlueFeed
- Clean Text
- Analytics. Google’s Analytics app for websites that the user owns, or has rights of administrative access to. Metrics are provided for ad revenue, e-commerce, end-users, growth and change over time.
- Mirror
- WhatToWear. This app checks the weather based on your location and makes a suggestion for how many layers to wear, or whether or not to wear shorts, for example.
- SVGmUnlimited
- GNSS Status
- Wear OS
- Knuff
- Network Tools
- Pockethernet
- md5generator
- HomeHub
- AmpliFi Teleport
- mFi
- Admin. Google’s
Video Post
- Pixel Nodes. This app is somewhat a throwback to old post-production visual effects apps such as Shake, by Apple, and some other workflows that some of the Autodesk apps had about them, in having a node-based processing manner of applying effects to visual content and to the motion graphics involved in the editor’s determination.
- ColorTime. A simple and effective video grading app. Apply filters such that you would find in a standard photo editor, like brightness, contrast, temperature, etc.
Adobe
- Lightroom. This app features highly nuanced controls over photo color and grade.
- Adobe Scan. Adobe’s document scanning app features integration with Adobe’s Document Cloud online sync and workspace feature set. Some of the great features of this app are skew-image realignment and OCR text recognition of documents. Scan turns documents in to PDF form, from images.
- Adobe Capture. Capture is a unique and elegant app which uses the device’s camera in novel ways. You can create prismatic patterns, light | darkness vector images, color palettes, create material objects with various textural features, create brushes from images, and more.
- Creative Cloud. This is one of the anchor apps of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, which is Adobe’s offering of various creative apps, spanning both mobile (iPadOS) and desktop apps. Creative Cloud offers free storage for projects across all of their creative app product offerings, and it is one of my most relied-upon go-to apps for quick workflow processing and automated sync and save features of past and current projects alike.
- Behance. This app is used for creative professionals and aspiring artists to feature their works done with Adobe apps, and it features user feedback from the community.
- Adobe Draw. A simple app in its elegance, Adobe Draw is a vector illustration app with various brush and pen-type tools that are best implemented by pairing the app with the Apple Pencil. You can create multiple transparent or opaque layers, import shapes to trace within, and export directly to the desktop companion apps Photoshop and Illustrator. One of the great effects of this app is that it creates a frame-by-frame record of the brushstrokes, and at the end of creating you illustration image, you can opt to have the app render the workflow as a video, which it does in short order.
- Adobe Comp. This app is a composite image layer app, good for doing quick mockups and as an intermediary app for creating professional-looking memes.
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