Who is Bill Atkinson? Let's just say he had a hand (or both hands) in the first Macintosh computer, as well as the MacPaint and HyperCard Mac applications. Today he's a world-renowned nature photographer, which brings us to his app. Bill Atkinson PhotoCard is an inexpensive ($4.99) app that lets you create gorgeous high-resolution postcards and send them via either e-mail or the U.S. Postal Service. E-mail is, of course, free. And though sending by USPS costs between $1.50 and $2.00 per card depending on how many print-and-mail credits you purchase, the 8.25-inch-by-5.5-inch postcards are stunning. Printed on heavy glossy stock and on a state-of-the-art HP Indigo digital press, they're as beautiful as any postcard you've ever seen.

You can use one of the 150 included Bill Atkinson nature photos (as seen on the left in Figure 17-1), or you can use any picture in your Photos library. You can add stickers and stamps, as shown in Figure 17-1, and you can even add voice notes to e-mailed cards.

Figure 17-1. Your postcard can feature one of the gorgeous nature photos on the left, or you can use your own image (not shown here).

This brings us to perhaps the only time in this whole book that your authors had a disagreement. Both of us love word games and puzzles, but Bob loves Words with Friends HD while Ed prefers the real thing, namely Scrabble. Because neither of us wanted to eliminate our favorite word game from this chapter, we decided it would be best if each of us wrote about our fave. So the description of Words with Friends here was written by Bob, and the write-up of Scrabble later in the chapter is all Ed.

"Social media" is all the rage these days, but most multiplayer iPad games are either boring or not particularly social. Words with Friends HD ($2.99), on the other hand, is the most social game I've found and a ton of fun, too. It's kind of like playing Scrabble with a friend, but because it's turn-based, you can make a move and then quit the app and do other stuff. When your friend makes his or her next move, you can choose to be notified that it's your turn by sound, on-screen alert, and/or a number on the Words with Friends icon on your Home screen. Figure 17-2 shows a game I'm currently winning 299 to 242, as you can see near the top of the figure.

Figure 17-2. It's my (Bob's) move in five games, as you see in the overlay.

Try the free iPhone version (no free iPad version exists as of this writing), and I'm sure you'll be hooked. Then challenge me if you like; my username is boblevitus (although I often have the maximum 20 games going, so keep trying if I don't accept your challenge right away).

You already know we work with words for a living — and that we have a (slight) disagreement about favorite apps for playing such games. Ed appreciates a good game of Scrabble, while Bob, as we told you earlier in this chapter, prefers a virtual knock-off called Words with Friends HD.

Playing the $9.99 iPad version of Scrabble (from Electronic Arts and Hasbro) is the closest thing yet to replicating the experience of the famous crossword board game on an electronic device. For starters, check out the gorgeous high-definition graphics shown in Figure 17-3. The sounds of tiles placed on the virtual board are realistic too.

Figure 17-3. Ed says it's hard to beat Scrabble on the iPad.

In fact, you can build a decent case that Scrabble on the iPad even beats the original board game. Consider the following:

Do you fancy yourself an artist? We know our artistic talent is limited, but if we were talented, ArtStudio for iPad is the program we'd use to paint our masterpieces. Even if you have limited artistic talent, you can see that this app has everything you need to create awesome artwork.

We were embarrassed to show you our creations, so instead we whipped up a composite illustration (see Figure 17-4) that shows all the ArtStudio for iPad's tools and palettes at once.

Here are just some of ArtStudio for iPad's features:

Figure 17-4. ArtStudio for iPad's tools from left to right: brushes, colors, layers, special effects, file management options, and settings.

Don't believe us? www.appsmile.com rated it 5 out of 5, saying, "This is what Photoshop Mobile wishes it had been." www.slappapp.com also rated it 5 out of 5 and said, "I've dabbled in quite a few painting and drawing apps and this one has 'em all beat by a long shot." And by all means, check out what talented artists can do with ArtStudio for iPad at: www.flickr.com/groups/artstudioimages and www.artistinvermont.com.

One last thing: The app was only $0.99 when we bought our copies — a "special launch sale" price. Even if the price has gone up, we think this app is easily worth $5 or even $10 if you like to draw or paint.

Good pinball games require supremely realistic physics, and The Pinball ($2.99) nails it. The way the ball moves around the tables and interacts with bumpers and flippers is so realistic you'll think you're at an arcade. It's so realistic, in fact, that you can "shake" the table to influence the ball's movement.

Another hallmark of a great pinball game is great sound effects, and The Pinball doesn't disappoint. The sounds the ball makes when it bounces off a bumper, is hit with a flipper, or passes through a rollover are spot-on and totally authentic.

One thing that takes some getting used to is the moving camera used by the game in portrait mode. Although it occasionally pulls back to reveal the entire table at once, most of the time, it's zoomed in on the action and following the ball while showing only part of the table.

If you like pinball, we think you'll love The Pinball on your iPad.

We've already admitted to being artistically challenged. But that only applies to making art. But we both appreciate good art as much as the next person or even more. That's why we're so enthusiastic about Art Authority ($9.99).

Art Authority is like an art museum you hold in your hand. It contains over 40,000 paintings and sculptures by more than 1,000 of the world's greatest artists. The works are organized into eight period-specific rooms, such as Early (up to 1400s), Baroque, Romanticism, Modern, and American. In each room, the artworks are subdivided by movement. The Modern room, for example, has works of surrealism, cubism, fauvism, Dadaism, sculpture, and several more.

You find period overviews, movement overviews, timelines, and slideshows, plus a searchable index of all 1,000+ artists as well as separate indices for each room.

Smule's 99-cent Magic Piano app transforms your iPad into just that, an entrancing magic piano that is already among the iPad's most popular third-party programs.

Magic Piano is an oddly soothing app that presents you with a few ways to masquerade as Mozart. You can pound away on spiral or circular on-screen piano keyboards, play on a linear keyboard, or play by following beams of light with your fingers. Tap, drag, or pinch: Each gesture produces real notes. The generous-sized iPad screen means that you can play with all your fingers. You can freelance, that is, play notes at will. Or, you can select the Nutcracker March, Eine Kliene Nachtmusik, or (as this book was being published) about 15 other masterpieces from a classic songbook.

What's more, you can perform in a solo act or play in a duet with a stranger halfway around the world. Choose a name for your piano and a tagline to identify yourself.

You can listen to other people play too, without performing with them, by traveling through what Smule describes as a warp hole. A 3D representation of a globe shows you where on Planet Earth the music is coming from.

Had he been around today, we're sure that Mozart would have made wondrous magic on the iPad.

Think back to chemistry class when you first learned about the periodic table of the elements. Many of you found it rather dull. And even if the subject got you jazzed in your school days, we'd venture to say it was completely dissimilar to the treat of exploring the elements through this $13.99 app of pure gold. In fact, to call it an app is a bit of a misnomer because it has more — forgive the pun — elements of an e-book than a traditional app. It's based on the best-selling hard-cover edition of The Elements, by Theodore Gray. But the program is sold in the App Store, not the iBookstore.

Launch the app and it starts with a 1959 song by Harvard mathematician and musical humorist Tom Lehrer about each of the chemical elements that were known back then. When you tap an element — iodine in the example shown in Figure 17-5 — a stunning photograph takes over a huge portion of the screen, adjacent to such statistics as atomic weight, density, and boiling point. Now tap the right-pointing arrow to bring up the next iodine page. You see a complete text explanation of the element, along with additional pictures, such as iodine-based chewing gum and vintage bottles.

Figure 17-5. A chosen element up close.

All that said, even when we weren't rediscovering the elements ourselves, we used this app to show off the dazzling beauty of the iPad to friends. And if you, or perhaps your kids, are really into the science, you're especially going to be blown away.

Full-featured database programs have traditionally been the province for professionals and employees in a variety of job types and industries. FileMaker's Bento "personal database" programs for the Mac and iPhone, however, tend to be more inviting for mainstream consumers. The same goes for the iPad version, which, at $4.99, strikes us as a real bargain.

Indeed, Bento should appeal not only to salespeople, marketers, and field workers but also to students and pretty much anyone who wants to keep on top of hobbies, projects, lists, events, and then some.

The simple-to-use app comes with 25 premade templates, covering exercise logs, vehicle maintenance, donations, recipes, expenses, and so on. It contains 15 "field types" for such things as text, numbers, ratings, durations, currency, and phone numbers. And Bento is tightly integrated with the iPad's Address Book, Mail program, Safari (you can view Web pages without leaving the app), and Google Maps.

If you have Bento 3 for the Mac, you can sync the two programs so that any changes you make to a database on one machine are reflected in the corresponding database on the other machine. You need a Wi-Fi connection to sync the iPad version with the Mac version. However, because of memory constraints, Bento for iPad may not be able to handle the largest databases that you created for Bento on the Mac.

Bento for iPad makes good use of the tablet's large screen. In portrait mode, you can zero in on a single record. Rotate the iPad to landscape mode for a split-view listing of records on the left next to the details of a selected record on the right. Other neat stunts include text fields that expand and shrink when you tap them, visual check boxes, and the ability to admire photos, dispatch e-mails, and watch videos.

It's rather easy to get going with Bento. You can start out by tapping the Libraries button in the upper-left corner of the screen. As shown in Figure 17-6, libraries are groups of records you might want to track: Address Book, To Do Items, Projects, Inventory, Notes, Expenses, and so on. Tap the + to add a new library with one of the aforementioned (or other) templates or create one of your own.

From the Library window, you can remove an already created library, rename a library, or change the order in which a library appears on the list. Start by tapping the Edit button in the Libraries window. And then:

It's a breeze to move from record to record inside the app. Double-tap the right side of a record to advance to the next record, or double-tap the left side to go to the previous record. You can also swipe right to left or left to right to move in either direction. Or, tap left/right arrows to advance or go back.

Figure 17-6. Keeping track of your wine collection in Bento.

Customizing records is also a cinch. Take note of the labels in Figure 17-6 for an overview on how to add a new record, add new fields, add records to collections, delete records, and more.

Hey, you have to eat sometime. Zagat to Go from Handmark lets you access the popular Zagat ratings for restaurants, hotels, nightspots, and shopping locales around the world — you find more than 40,000 listings.

You can search and filter results by cuisine and food, décor, cost, and service ratings, and read Zagat's famous thumbnail commentaries. Foodies can tap into GPS to find decent restaurants when they're traveling and overlay the results on an integrated Google Map. Tap a Zagat pin, and the ratings and restaurant summaries appear, as shown in Figure 17-7. As you drag a map around, restaurant pins pop up in real time. Moreover, you can tap inside a listing to make it a Favorite, reserve a table online (through OpenTable), or save it to your contacts.

Figure 17-7. Finding an upscale Indian restaurant.

The $9.99 price (for annual up-to-date listings) is less than the print version of a local Zagat edition. We should point out that iPhone owners who purchase the app can also use the iPad app for no extra charge. It works the other way too, so if you buy the app first for the iPad, you can also have a version of it on an iPhone.