There are a lot of iPad apps that we've talked about in the forum and in articles here on the site; but with a library of about a million apps, 350K of which are designed for the iPad, there's a incredible variety of apps that could be very useful to support your gaming habit. And, many of them are not specifically designed for gaming.
So, here's a quick roundup of a few Apps to consider adding to your collection.
1. Feedly. [Free]
With the announcement that Google Reader is going to be shut down in July, a mad scramble ensued to try to figure out the best replacement for google's excellent RSS reader. Lifehacker.com rated Feedly as the best of a field of good options, and I've been using it for while now and can report that it's very good. The default interface is a lot more magazine-style than Google Reader was, but there's a plugin to make that a bit more like the old google reader.
Feedly isn't just an iPad app -- it's a web-based service with apps for iPad, iPhone, Android, and can be used in a browser (so it works on PC & Mac as well).
2. Dragon Dictation [Free]
Dictation software for PCs and Macs -- Dragon Naturally Speaking and it's lesser cousins -- has come a long, long way over the years. What used to be a laborious, clunky tool has become much more usable and functional.
However, it's pricey. But there's an alternative. Dragon has produced an app, for iPad and iPhone called Dragon dictation. The app offloads the processing of your spoken words to their cloud servers, so it doesn't require processing power from your phone. This also means that, unlike the full-blown dictation software, there's no need to train the software.
The iPhone app is nice and useful for things like dictating messages and emails -- the text created can be shuffled off to twitter or Facebook or an email, and so on. The iPad, however, takes advantage of the greater space available and adds multi-document capabilities, making it possible to keep multiple projects you're dictating into at any given time.
The price is the best part -- both apps (iPad and iPhone) are free.
3. Comic Life [ $4.99 (iPad)]
Often I like having handouts for my group, but I'm not much of a graphic artist. But tools like Comic Life make it quick and easy to put together cool documents for your game, either session recaps or introductions or even backstory.
There are some other options out there that will let you create cool alternatives to a word document full of text. Keynote, for example, could be used to create a slide show that you use to manage illustrations of key scenes and NPCs. What's fun about Keynote and Powerpoint, in this case, is that the tools come with multiple output options -- so you can use the slide show to show key NPCS and locations for a game session, then print a handout for your PCs that includes the images and space for notes, 3 or 4 slides to a single page.
4. Ambiance [$2.99] or Resounder [ $4.99]
Adding music and sounds to your game is one of those things that always sounds like a great idea, but at least in my experience it's very difficult to coordinate that when you're working on everything else.
These two apps, in different ways, approach the task of having a soundtrack for your game.
In Ambiance, you can use their tool to create playlists that include some of their collection of thousands of sounds (a variety of street market sounds, for example, or background audio from a park in Glasgow) can be supplemented with music from your iTunes library and organized into playlists for each scene.
Resounder gives you the ability to create much more hands-on sound board functionality. Again, you can import from a lot of different sources (including your own libraries) and set up boards of up to 64 buttons on a single screen to play the sounds you've collected. This gives you a quick and easy dashboard for getting the sounds you want, right when you want them.
5. VideoScribe [$4.99]
I saved this one for last, although it might have been able to be included in #3. This is an app that will help you created an animated whiteboard presentation -- setting your audio (including music and recorded voice) to an animated presentation created with your own pictures, stock art, and text within the app.
I've only started playing with it, but the potential to be able to create animated whiteboard drawings to help illustrate things in my game seems VERY cool.
Here's a sample video I made :http://youtu.be/EF8DZCJlfqY
[video=youtube_share;EF8DZCJlfqY]http://youtu.be/EF8DZCJlfqY[/video]
Got an app that you're using? Tell us about it!
So, here's a quick roundup of a few Apps to consider adding to your collection.
1. Feedly. [Free]
With the announcement that Google Reader is going to be shut down in July, a mad scramble ensued to try to figure out the best replacement for google's excellent RSS reader. Lifehacker.com rated Feedly as the best of a field of good options, and I've been using it for while now and can report that it's very good. The default interface is a lot more magazine-style than Google Reader was, but there's a plugin to make that a bit more like the old google reader.
Feedly isn't just an iPad app -- it's a web-based service with apps for iPad, iPhone, Android, and can be used in a browser (so it works on PC & Mac as well).
2. Dragon Dictation [Free]
Dictation software for PCs and Macs -- Dragon Naturally Speaking and it's lesser cousins -- has come a long, long way over the years. What used to be a laborious, clunky tool has become much more usable and functional.
However, it's pricey. But there's an alternative. Dragon has produced an app, for iPad and iPhone called Dragon dictation. The app offloads the processing of your spoken words to their cloud servers, so it doesn't require processing power from your phone. This also means that, unlike the full-blown dictation software, there's no need to train the software.
The iPhone app is nice and useful for things like dictating messages and emails -- the text created can be shuffled off to twitter or Facebook or an email, and so on. The iPad, however, takes advantage of the greater space available and adds multi-document capabilities, making it possible to keep multiple projects you're dictating into at any given time.
The price is the best part -- both apps (iPad and iPhone) are free.
3. Comic Life [ $4.99 (iPad)]
Often I like having handouts for my group, but I'm not much of a graphic artist. But tools like Comic Life make it quick and easy to put together cool documents for your game, either session recaps or introductions or even backstory.
There are some other options out there that will let you create cool alternatives to a word document full of text. Keynote, for example, could be used to create a slide show that you use to manage illustrations of key scenes and NPCs. What's fun about Keynote and Powerpoint, in this case, is that the tools come with multiple output options -- so you can use the slide show to show key NPCS and locations for a game session, then print a handout for your PCs that includes the images and space for notes, 3 or 4 slides to a single page.
4. Ambiance [$2.99] or Resounder [ $4.99]
Adding music and sounds to your game is one of those things that always sounds like a great idea, but at least in my experience it's very difficult to coordinate that when you're working on everything else.
These two apps, in different ways, approach the task of having a soundtrack for your game.
In Ambiance, you can use their tool to create playlists that include some of their collection of thousands of sounds (a variety of street market sounds, for example, or background audio from a park in Glasgow) can be supplemented with music from your iTunes library and organized into playlists for each scene.
Resounder gives you the ability to create much more hands-on sound board functionality. Again, you can import from a lot of different sources (including your own libraries) and set up boards of up to 64 buttons on a single screen to play the sounds you've collected. This gives you a quick and easy dashboard for getting the sounds you want, right when you want them.
5. VideoScribe [$4.99]
I saved this one for last, although it might have been able to be included in #3. This is an app that will help you created an animated whiteboard presentation -- setting your audio (including music and recorded voice) to an animated presentation created with your own pictures, stock art, and text within the app.
I've only started playing with it, but the potential to be able to create animated whiteboard drawings to help illustrate things in my game seems VERY cool.
Here's a sample video I made :http://youtu.be/EF8DZCJlfqY
[video=youtube_share;EF8DZCJlfqY]http://youtu.be/EF8DZCJlfqY[/video]
Got an app that you're using? Tell us about it!
