#FF00AA

The selection is more and more random, as apps are pretty much public now, there are apparently thousands of them (with each new estimate my hopes of striking gold in the Second Great Gold Rush are further dashed), and I just notice some of them and not others.

Twittelator looked ugly and weird on the small thumbnails I’d seen, but real screenshots seem nice. Reading Twitter doesn’t require a full iPad screen (just like you’re not going to run it full-screen on your computer), so having a lot of prettied-up empty space makes perfect sense.

…unless of course you’re a TweetDeck kind of guy. This looks good for power users, if the performance on a real device is adequate (which the developers can’t have tested, obviously). I’m downloading it right away, since it’s free.

Box.net has a — oh my god, run for your lives! — giant Windows icon as a home screen. Guys, who did you think the iPad’s early adopters would be?

Evernote looks prettier than I would have expected. (Though, for the record: blending in with the environment is good, but it becomes an issue when each new declination of the client looks completely different from every other version.) With its syncing abilities and cross-platform compatibility, you’re probably not going to need anything else. Too bad I find the Mac client a little too bloated for my taste, so I’m reluctant to switch.

Weather HD makes a very interesting choice for its home page, with a huge background and a tiny operational window, which works perfectly for the app’s purpose. And the graphics inside are very nice (although some work should probably be done on the text legibility). I’m surprised it isn’t more expensive.

The Wall Street Journal app looks splendid, and I’m glad they let you play a bit with the free version. (I don’t care about the outlandish subscription prices, since I was never going to be interested anyway.)
The New York Times is much less fun. (Okay, “fun” is definitely not the right word there.)

Zen Bound doesn’t make a huge deal of sense to me on the iPad. I know that it was originally on PC, so it was played on even bigger screens, but I just feel that having it in your hand, in the iPhone’s format, was the perfect venue for that game.
And I also feel that its fifteen minutes of fame have passed.

The Gmail web app looks fine and that was nicely reactive of Google. Of course, it will also work on Chrome OS-based tablets, I’m sure.