Top 10 iPad apps – at home

Monday 19 April

With that gorgeous screen, the iPad is a gadget you need to take good care of. However, you don’t even need to take it out of the house to have a fantastic time with your iPad. Here are the apps to download to have an even better time with your shiny new gadget.

Brushes ($9.99) The iPad’s large, capacitive touchscreen is a fantastic surface for creating things on. Brushes is one of a small number of top-ranking painting apps, but it wins itself a place on our list thanks to its sheer ease of use. The fidelity of the brushes you can control with your finger means that you can create real works of art in minutes with Brushes.

Uno HD ($4.99) Gadgets are occasionally criticised for diminishing family values, but the iPad can be used like a board game surface for classic games like Uno. Uno HD lets you play with three other players using just the one iPad, or if your friends are just as iPad-obsessed as you, a Wi-Fi multiplayer mode is also available.

Alarm Music Clock ($0.99) One of the most popular alarm clocks on iTunes, Alarm Music Clock is a simple but reliable app that turns your iPad into a bedside alarm clock. It’ll wake you up with music or an alarm tone, and will look fab on an iPad propped up on a stand.

Kindle (Free) We’re still not sure if the iBookstore will make it to the UK in time for the iPad launch, so Kindle could be one of the most useful iPad apps for a while. It gives you access to the whole Kindle library, which contains around half a million books. Enough to keep you in bedtime reading for a few lifetimes.

BigOven iPad Pro ($4.99) This iPad cooking app gives you access to the 170,000+ recipes available on the Bigoven website. You could just browse to the website using the built-in iPad browser, but we think the iPad-enhanced interface of this app is worth forking out a few quid for. It lets you input what you have in your fridge to see what you can make. Perfect for when you’re lacking inspiration.

PrintCentral ($9.99) The iPad doesn’t natively let you connect to printers in your home – yet – but the PrintCentral app does. With it, you can print out pictures, web pages and documents directly from your iPad by connecting to a home network over 3G or Wi-Fi, depending on which version of the iPad you own.

Weather HD ($0.99) Practical weather apps are useful for when you’re out and about, but at home we’d rather gaze upon something gorgeous like Weather HD. Instead of relaying the weather simply, Weather HD shows you what’s going on in the sky with very pretty, artistic-looking animations. You can switch between 150,000 cities worldwide too, so Weather HD is more than just a pretty face.

Zen Bound 2 ($7.99) As much a relaxation tool as a game, Zen Bound 2 is perfect to chill out on the sofa with after a long day at work. Your aim is to wrap a rope around a series of objects by turning them around using the touchscreen. Aside from the hypnotic effect this action creates, the album-length soundtrack is designed to keep you ultra-chilled too.

Zinio Magazine Newsstand & Reader (Free) One of the things the iPad is best at is displaying media-rich content – e-magazines, in other words. Zinio lets you purchase popular magazines from across the world, all formatted to display properly on your iPad. An e-zine doesn’t have the tactile factor of a paper mag, but it looks just like one and is a lot kinder on the environment.

Wunder Radio ($6.99) FM radio may be heading towards the big switch-off some year soon, but it’s safe to say that internet radio isn’t going anywhere. You can receive thousands of radio stations with an internet radio app, including most of the BBC’s top quality stations. Wunder Radio is the iPad radio app to check out, and features a fab-looking interface to boot.