10 Hot iPad Apps For Summer
Summertime--and the tablet apps are everywhere. With the recent launch of the Apple iPad 2, application developers just keep on finding new ways to exploit the tablet's portability and beautiful display. Check out these free and low-cost tools for planning summer fun, or just kicking back during your vacation time.
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BYTE.com
The summer months wouldn't be complete without America's favorite pastime—baseball. A great free app to keep you up to date is ESPN Score Central XL. It does include other sports like football and basketball, but when you start up the app, you can select only baseball under the My Sports tab. The app dishes up news on all MLB teams, video highlights, and scores in real-time.
Need a quick summer getaway? Hipmunk, created by Alexis Ohanian (co-founder of Reddit), is a new tool for finding cheap flights, pulling data from sites like Orbitz and airline sites. The iPad app shows available flights, ticket prices, and departure times in an easy to read graph. You can even pick flights based on agony—the length of layovers and connecting flights. Hipmunk provides a clean interface that's a nice break from chaotic and graphically busy travel sites.
Nothing says summer like outdoor barbeques. If there's a rainy day or you just need to brush up on your grilling skills, check out More Grillin'—a fun way to master your grilling skills virtually. You can cook food like turkey burgers, shrimp kabobs, and more than 20 side dishes to go with your grilled food. Share your score to the worldwide leader board, or share your meal creations via Skype and Facebook. Just remember not to overcook the steaks! The app will cost you just 99 cents.
If you enjoy summer athletic competitions of the track and field variety, try Summer Games 3D (99 cents.) This game lets you play different events like javelin, high jump, long jump, cycling, and 17 others. With nice graphics and easy to use controls, this is a good choice for killing time at the airport.
When planning your outside summer events, knowing the weather forecast is essential. Our favorite iPad choice for weather: The Weather Channel Max (free, ad-supported) for the iPad gives you quick access to what the weather is doing anywhere in the world. Now you won't get blamed for planning the company softball game during rainy conditions. You can also watch streaming video of news and programs that air on the TV channel.
Even though the 4th of July has passed, it's always fun to see fireworks. You can create virtual fireworks fun on your iPad with Fireworks Arcade (free, ad-supported). Drag your finger around the screen and tap to start the fireworks display. It's a time waster for sure—but will be fun for the kids on those long family road trips.
While on your summer vacations you'll need to track your expenses. The handly TripIt Planner (99 cents) runs in Portrait Mode and acts like a note-taking app for common expense categories like airfare and lodging. Log your trips, keep notes, and view a neat pie chart of where the money went. Maybe you'll learn a few lessons for next time.
See a bird in your backyard and aren't sure what it is? iBird Yard Plus HD ($2.99) is a field guide to common and backyard birds of North America. This definitive guide has beautiful photos, plus a social element that lets you check pictures that people have taken and uploaded to Flickr. If you're a bird watcher this app will please you.
Bing can serve as your one-stop helper for summer, for everything from maps to weather to locating theaters to watch summer blockbusters. Even if you're a regular user of Google on your PC, give the Bing app for iPad a shot. It's laid out very well and proved useful for many summer activities.
No summer is complete without some music outside at the park while you're playing Frisbee. Back in the day you'd bring your boom box out and blast your favorite music. Jamboxx (free) is a fun music player with a fun retro style boombox interface. It lets you create virtual mixtapes from you music library. While it won't crank out music as loud as your old boom box used to, it's a nostalgic, fun iPad app for summer. You can even put it up on your shoulder like you did in the old days!
No summer is complete without some music outside at the park while you're playing Frisbee. Back in the day you'd bring your boom box out and blast your favorite music. Jamboxx (free) is a fun music player with a fun retro style boombox interface. It lets you create virtual mixtapes from you music library. While it won't crank out music as loud as your old boom box used to, it's a nostalgic, fun iPad app for summer. You can even put it up on your shoulder like you did in the old days!
BYTE.com
The summer months wouldn't be complete without America's favorite pastime—baseball. A great free app to keep you up to date is ESPN Score Central XL. It does include other sports like football and basketball, but when you start up the app, you can select only baseball under the My Sports tab. The app dishes up news on all MLB teams, video highlights, and scores in real-time.
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