iPad App List Goes Public: Top 20 New Apps

The Apple iPad reviews are out, and so far critics are giving the hardware thumbs up. But now we wonder, is there an iPad app for that?

As if by magic, a massive list of iPad apps appeared on Apple’s servers, two days before Apple launches its touch screen tablet. The Web site App Advice has created a directory for you to peruse, but I’ve compiled a short list of apps that make the best use the iPad’s big screen and beefy hardware. Here are 20 of the neatest-looking iPad apps so far.

As mentioned in the iPad reviews out today, Scrabble for iPad is remarkable because players can use iPhones or iPod Touches as tile racks to hide letters from their competitors. Then, they can flick the letters wirelessly onto the iPad game board via Bluetooth. Price: $9.99

Who says the iPad doesn’t support multitasking? Desktop doesn’t let you run multiple apps at once, but it includes its own suite of utilities that can run in the same window, including a Web browser, calculator, unit and currency converters, maps, translator and dictionary. Price: $4.99

The iPad’s big screen looks to provide bliss for baseball fans. MLB’s official app has a pitch-by-pitch game simulator, flanked by stats and scores in every corner. And if you’re an MLB.tv subscriber, the app will stream live ballgames as well. Price: $14.99

An iPhone wouldn’t be able to do the Ouija board justice, but the iPad’s larger screen is perfect for huddling around, asking the deep questions. But will people believe the iPad has magical powers just because Steve Jobs says so? Price: $0.99

Music makers could quickly fall in love with the iPad’s touch screen, if Groovemaker’s any indication. Like any beat machine, this one lets you layer drums, bass and rhythm to create electronic music on the fly. Except this beat maker doesn’t cost a time. Price: Free, additional sound sample packs for sale

Nothing fancy here, just a nice way to browse photos online. Image Finder uses Bing’s image search to create a strip of thumbnails along the bottom of the screen, with large images occupying the rest. Perfect for finding cute cat pictures, as seen here. Price: $1.99

Keyboard apps abound for the iPhone, but it’s pretty much impossible to perform any chords or complex melodies on them. Create your own synth tones and save your masterpieces for later. Should be a blast for people who can define the terms subtractive synthesis and envelope filters. Price: $9.99

Apple may primarily be for entertainment and content consumption, but iMockups is all business. The app lets you create design mockups for Web pages or other documents using boxes and wireframes. Projects can be exported as images, but there’s also a presentation mode, which should impress as long as you’re the only one in the room with an iPad. Price: $9.99

The Craigslist iPad app makes it easier to browse for housing, work, couches, romantic encounters or whatever it is you hope to find in your city. With the iPad’s larger screen, search results are displayed alongside the listing themselves. Why doesn’t the actual Web site do this? Price: Free

iPad apps needn’t be complex to be useful. Imagine a basketball coach on the sidelines, his team down by two with 10 seconds left. He calls a time out, busts out the BasketballMat app on the iPad, and draws up a play in the huddle. Why use a pen and paper when you’ve spent $500 or more on a touch screen tablet? Price: $0.99

No need to keep the stock ticker running on your PC. Just prop the iPad on your desk, running E*Trade mobile, and you’re good to obsess over stock prices all day. Price: Free

For people who cannot speak, the iPad can do it for them with this app. The panel of buttons trigger synthesized speech developed at Carnegie Mellon University, and the app promises to improve over time with more voices, words and features. Price: $29.99

If you own an iPhone or iPod Touch, you’ve probably played some version of air hockey on it. But with the iPad, two players can easily face off on the same device. Compared to playing at an arcade, it practically pays for itself. Price: $2.99

If you’re willing to spend $29 on an iPad dock, you might as well throw in an extra buck to the app store and get this basic photo frame. Set the categories you want to see, and it automatically creates a slideshow of images from Flickr. Price: $0.99

iCardboard will let you stand on the streets begging for work, spare change or a hot meal, all while holding a $500 device. Just another way for hipsters to be ironic. Price: $0.99

For all the curmudgeons who say Guitar Hero doesn’t encourage people to actually learn an instrument, here’s the answer: Piano Lesson combines the “catch the falling note” sensibility of music video games with a two-octave piano roll. And it’s less expensive than an overbearing teacher. Price: $2.99

Hulu may be content to let mobile devices pass it by, but at least the ABC player is coming to the iPad, with full-length episodes and the ability to pause a show and come back later. Not that you’d have the willpower to pause an episode of Lost. Price: Free

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, meaning that it can look at an image with text and convert it to a text document for editing. Of course, this would be a lot more useful if the iPad had a camera, but that’s another story. Price: $1.99

Wikipedia fans know the site can be a rabbit hole down which your time and productivity disappear. That’s where Wikipanion Plus comes in handy, letting you save articles for later reading. An unlike the iPhone app, the iPad version lets you see pages in their full glory. Price: Free

This app’s main feature is the ability to wirelessly display documents or applications to other computers over a local network. But it also has a Swiss Army knife-full of productivity tools, such as wireless printing over a local network, fax functionality and document storage. Price: $4.99