There are a lot of apps for Apple's (News - Alert) iPads, and if you're an iPad user, no doubt you have your favorite. But which one, we might wonder, is Apple's personal favorite?
Wonder no longer. Apple has just named Flipboard (News - Alert), the app that turns Twitter and Facebook into a magazine-like experience, its official “iPad App of the Year.” Flipboard is likely to get very popular in the coming days: billed as a “whole new way to read articles” on your iPad, the app apparently strives to capture the “beauty and ease” of print and bring it to the Web. Essentially, you can “flip” through pages of content like you would a large glossy print magazine (no ink smell, though).
Notes SAI Business Insider, “From a higher level, it's also illustrative of how Apple thinks about the iPad. Flipboard is an app that translates the web into something unique for iPad users. That's exactly what Apple wants.”
Apple is currently in the process of highlighting all the year's most popular apps in iTunes right now. The “iPad game of the year” award goes to Osmos, in which a player (curiously enough) is represented by a single-celled organism or mote. To move up, the player deliberately collides with motes smaller than himself or herself (itself?) to absorb them. Crashing into a mote larger than yourself will get you absorbed by the larger mote, at which time you lose the game. Changing course is done by expelling some of your mass. It's sort of like physics meets gaming.
As for iPhone (News - Alert) apps, Apple has chosen for its favorite Hipstamatic, an app that allows users to take square photographs and apply filters to them so they resemble old-fashioned photos taken with an antique analog camera. For iPhone games, Plants Vs. Zombies (which is pretty self-explanatory) is the game app of the year.
Tracey Schelmetic is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Tracey's articles, please visit her columnist page.Edited by Tammy Wolf