Reading and Learning
Get the information you need faster and more clearly than ever before
Poison Maps $1.99 Platform iPhone, iPad
This app pairs a wealth of info from Open Street Map with an interface that makes it a breeze to drill down into categories. Mooching about Manhattan and fancy a bite to eat? Tap the food and drink icon. Something quick? Tap Fast Food. Pizza? Sounds good.
Each tap filters the POIs and buttons shown, arrows point at nearby locations when you zoom in, and maps and icons are easy to read. The only snag is it takes up 1.2GB, though there are regional versions, each of which is a free download with a 99¢ in-app purchase to unlock all categories.
Reeder 3 $4.99 Platform iPhone, iPad
With apps like Flipboard around, old-school RSS readers get a bad rep, yet it’s handy to read updates from sites chronologically. Reeder is straightforward for browsing and reading them, and its Readability view quickly loads text and pics from those that only supply brief synopses.
Duolingo Free Platform iPhone, iPad
Duolingo is entirely free from in-app purchases, which is extremely generous given the quality of the app and its potential for helping you learn a new language. It’s full of bite-size quizzes that you can dip into at any time to gradually build your vocabulary and grammar in the 10 supported languages.
V for Wikipedia $4.99 Platform iPhone, iPad
Although you can use this app to search Wikipedia in the normal way, it starts out by displaying a Nearby tab, providing articles about interesting things in your vicinity, with lines snaking their way from locations on a map to large clickable tabs at the foot of the screen. It’s a practical way to find out about a place without resorting to review-oriented web services. V for Wikipedia’s typography and layout are smart and sleek.
Kitchen Stories Free Platform iPhone, iPad
Most cooking apps and books make assumptions regarding your abilities. This one greets you with a wall of gorgeous photography; each step in its recipes has a picture that shows exactly how things should be. Some provide tutorial videos for potentially tricky parts. Fancy some Vietnamese pho, but not sure how to peel ginger, prepare a chili, or thinly slice meat? This has you covered. Its presentation – especially on iPad – more than makes up for the narrow range of recipes than in rival apps.
Google Translate Free Platform iPhone, iPad
When you’re online, this app translates written, spoken, or photographed text between many languages. Amazingly, between English and French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish (either way), it tries to translate in real time whatever’s in front of your iPhone’s camera — even when you’re offline.
Flipboard 4 Free Platform iPhone, iPad
Tell Flipboard which subjects interest you and it’ll show you relevant, highquality content in an eyecatching way. You can tell it to create custom magazines that you can share, or smart magazines that include the best content by source or based on a hashtag. Read our review of the new-look version on page 58.
Good Reader $4.99 Platform iPhone, iPad
This is the iPad’s best PDF reader, and a means of editing such docs. You can annotate them, extract text, rearrange pages, and split and combine files, making it indispensable if you often work with PDFs. The app can preview many other file types, and connect to a wide range of online services.