Awesome Apps

Version 3.0 of Skype’s iOS app brings video calling to both WiFi and 3G connections. Mobile Skype users can also hook up with desktop users, making Apple’s FaceTime even more useless.

Made by Otavio Good and John DeWeese, Word Lens is an OCR program for the iPhone that takes the original text and projects the translation in real-time. Absolutely magical.

For those who enjoy entertaining at home, the iPad Drinkspiration app offers 3,000+ drink recipes with images; it also creates shopping lists and suggests cocktails based on the ingredients in your kitchen.

The popular P2P file sharing program gets a mobile version. Forget about Bluetooth, Frostwire for Android lets you share files and chat with other smartphone users either locally or over Wi-Fi.

Like old movies? This nifty iPad app gives you free access to a growing library of hundreds of streamed classics and B-movies, all in a familiar interface that’s as easy to navigate as it gets.

This may seem silly to the youth and the patrons of the Web, but the simple truth is that every generation has its own sub-language. Get this for your old folks and laugh and learn together.

One of the entries in the King of Bing Maps app contest, Ricky Brundritt’s Taxi Fare Calculator gives a decent estimate of the cab fare from one destination to another in major cities.

The Flipboard iPad app is the magazine of the future. It aggregates content shared by your friends via twitter, facebook and from other online sources into a sleek and snappy magazine layout.

Simply choose your favorite sport, type/length of training and playlist on the Nike BOOM app and you’ll get blasts of encouragement from elite athletes and coaches throughout your workout.

A simple, intuitive planner for people with packed daily schedules – add an icon to the clock for each thing you need to get done. Choose from a variety of icons, or write your task on a blank one.

Here’s an app that should be on every smartphone: a parking space finder. The app shows parking spaces that have been marked by other users, color-coded to indicate how recent the update is.

Rexbox (of LittleBigPlanet fame) and MrFungFung (of Fable fame), are working on this iPhone app all about earning XP for doing things you need to do anyhow. Looks like Chore Wars, but fun.

Very cool abstract images generated by using Moscow designer Anatoly Zenkov’s IOGraph application, which tracks the movements of your mouse while you work and surf during the day.

From the expertly agile fingers of Japanese anime artist Yoshitoshi ABe comes this very cool video of him scribbling sketches on the iPad, fingerpaint style, using the LiveSketch HD app.

The Elements iPad app combines high-res 3D models with Theodore Gray’s humorous and simple prose to make learning about the elements a lot of fun. iPad skeptics, eat your heart out.

Tough to describe but nifty to use, Google Wave isn’t public yet; it’s essentially a real-time, open-source communications hub which mashes up chat, social networking, wikis and more.