11 Must-Have iPhone Apps

10 Epic iOS 7 Tips

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Apple sees iOS 7 as a way to distinguish its products from the competition. The company has been encouraging developers to redesign their apps to take advantage of the new features and new look. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior VP of software engineering, has suggested that installing iOS 7 software makes old iPhones seem like new devices.

Third-party apps help sustain that illusion, which is becoming more and more important to Apple as each generation of mobile hardware fights harder to distinguish itself from the preceding generation. The most noted hardware change in the iPhone 5s is the addition of the Touch ID fingerprint sensor. While this year's iPhone is substantially similar to last year's iPhone, the software delivers the functional difference.

What follows are 11 apps that matter, most of which have been retooled to take advantage of iOS 7. It's not an exhaustive list, by any means. There are simply too many apps for that. But the apps that follow are worth looking at.

1. Kindle
Updated to version 4.0 in September, the Kindle app for iOS adopts the flat design of iOS 7 without the ebullient color. It includes a new feature called Collections that simplifies the organization of libraries. Though it lacks the page-turning animation of Apple's iBooks app, it's nonetheless nice to have as an alternative reading application.

2. Yahoo Mail
Yahoo Mail received a significant redesign in October and version 2.0 looks great. It makes effective use of transparency, supports group conversations and large attachments, and provides optional user-selected themes. The search and scroll functions have also been improved.

[ These apps not fitting the bill? See 13 Favorite iOS, Android Apps. ]

3. Reeder 2
An elegantly designed app for reading RSS feeds, Reeder 2 received a design overhaul in September. Though not much changed in terms of capabilities, it's still a worthwhile app, even for $5. Though some users who paid for the first version complained about having to pay again for version 2, the blame for that should fall on Apple for not implementing a paid upgrade mechanism for apps, and on app makers for pricing apps too low to support fractional upgrade pricing.

4. Yahoo Weather
Like Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Weather is one sharp-looking app. Apple itself recognized Yahoo Weather, overhauled in April, with a design award at its developer conference this year. So you know it isn't shabby. It conveys the necessary weather data, but its vivid images, culled from Flickr, invite an emotional response that other weather apps can't quite match.

5. Pocket
For people who tend to browse a lot without reading articles or watching videos all the way through, Pocket can help. The app provides a way to bookmark online content for later consumption. The current version adds iOS 7 design sensibility and support for background syncing even when the app is closed.

6. TiltShiftGen2
Though not the most full-featured photography app, TiltShiftGen2 does a great job of simulating a tilt-shift lens, which can be used to selectively blur portions of an image. As happened with HDR photography a few years ago, this effect has become quite trendy as a way to make real-life objects look like toys. Revised for iOS 7, it's a tool that does what it was designed to do.

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