14 Best iPad Apps for Dad

May 03, 2011, By Buzz Bishop 0 comments

The iPad and iPad 2 are getting a lot of love as great toys for tots. I’m on board with the touch screen as a great way to teach your kids to read, keep them entertained with thinking games or even as a personal tv when loaded with some of their favorite videos. At $600+, however, the iPad is a pricey kid’s toy, so you’d best be taking advantage of all it can offer once the little ones go to bed and let you have some time online.

One thing you might want to settle for is getting iPhone editions of the apps. Developers slap an HD on the iPad versions and often charge four or five times more for what is, essentially, an app that is just fine when upscaled from the iPhone edition.

Here are some of the best apps for dads (and moms).

News, Books and Magazines

I love to consume information on my iPad. My wife will use it to read newspapers before bed, and I have it to scan through my news feeds and find fresh stories. Sure I've heard the studies about how screen time before bed can affect sleep, but I still find it helps me unwind.

Flipboard is one of the best ways to read your feeds, because it pulls excerpts and photos into a magazine style. It’s a great way to read the newsy content your contacts on Facebook and Twitter are posting.

Zite is a new app that is chasing Flipboard as the best personal magazine. Zite takes an approach similar to Pandora by measuring the stories you read, open and recommend and then digs deeper to find more content that’s similar. You give it some guidelines and let it go.

I also love Instapaper as a way to curate content I want to have more time and focus to read. I email links to my Instapaper address and the content gets synced in a clean, simple style that makes for great undistracted reading.

While the iPad is not the best eReader on the market (especially if you take it outside or try to read in front of a window), it is the most versatile because it can do so much more than just serve you books. Amazon’s Kindle app is available for the iPad and let’s you easily access their eBook store for content.