The Benefits Of Integrating iPad POS To Your Small Business

An iPad POS is a revolutionary Point-of-Sale system powered by iPad tablets. Prior to the advent of iPad POS, the POS systems used to be powered by large and complex terminals, computer software and applications. However, such systems came with a lot of limitations, particularly when it came to features, functionality and cost effectiveness.
An iPad POS can be considered as a major breakthrough in retail technology, as with the help of this a proprietor may now spend prolonged hours in his store stowing inventories, placing orders, and performing other tasks that are often done by the computer in a large establishment.
In fact, iPad POS is a great tool for both small business and large business entrepreneurs. While it proves to be a cost-effective solution for small business owners considering that they cannot afford big budget expenses on point-of-sale system; for large business owners, an iPad POS can be a great way to boost business and expand sales through integration of multiple points at affordable costs.

How it works

Basically, an iPad POS system is an application software that has been styled to operate on an iPad tablet – but is not able to order items automatically. Developers can design these programs to integrate seamlessly with the Apple and Windows operating systems. Similarly, additional software can be used to print out an order form, and the shopkeeper can use his computer to print out the form.
Moreover, iPad POS are also used by small business retailers to track sales and also monitor employee man-hours; besides availing reports about the stocks with the support of inventory system. Bar code scanning options are also available for those who want to identify the products without any hitches.
Step # 1: Add Items
You may add items by just tapping, searching by name, or using a barcode scanner. Adjust quantities and apply discounts seamlessly.
Step # 2: Choose a Payment type
Choose a secure payment type that suits you. You may choose payments by cash, swiping credit cards, or any of the ‘designated’ mobile payment options offered by the system.
Step # 3: Adding a gratuity
Preset gratuity buttons to boost tipping.
Step # 4: Transaction Complete
This is the final procedure in iPad POS where the customers sign right on your iPad, the receipt is either emailed or printed as a conventional receipt.

Features of iPad POS

• One of the key features that make iPad POS indomitable is that the device is mobile and optimizes space.
• Manager reports can be generated in seconds with just the push of a button.
• Integrated staff time card systems help schedule hours and also generate payroll.
• Running inventory checks is easier with the iPad POS inventory that is wise and self-managing.
• The iPad POS is much less expensive to operate than the traditional POS.
• No bulky terminals required facilitating affordability in pricing due to fewer hardware requirements. While a cash register and related equipment would have cost you $300 to $1000, a wireless Apple iPad will cost you $300 to $500.
• Cloud-based solutions empower businesses to use their software without having to rely upon the Internet or third-party apps.
• Customization options enable iPad POS to be modified to accommodate various different small business operations.

Benefits of iPad POS

Why is it Important for your Business

An iPad POS system is an asset for businesses, especially small business. Besides being highly affordable and cost effective, it is user-friendly, has good synchronization, reduces administrative strain, and offers enhanced customer experience. Also, you can easily monitor your business from anywhere using iPad POS systems provided they have a smart phone, tablet, and/or a computer.

iPad POS is User-friendly

An iPad POS system is more user-friendly considering the fact that iPad offers an intuitive interface that is easy to learn. This can not only prove to be time-saving when it comes to training of employees, but the user-friendliness also helps reduce cases of errors.

iPad POS helps better Synchronization

An iPad POS system helps synchronization as it helps to improve communication with the tablets that are running the digital menu software for secure payment and real-time ordering. This feature is especially great for hotel industry. Here you will find menus with appealing features that enable guests to enter custom cooking specifications, place orders, request table service and order drinks among many other things.

iPad POS eases Administrative Strain

The administrative responsibilities used to show when managers had to schedule employee hours, compile manager reports by hand, keep track of time cards, handle reservations, do inventory checks and generate other reports, when performing tasks by traditional POS. However, with iPad POS and its entirely automated system, business administrators are able to integrate employee time card systems, manage the inventory and generate payroll and produce reports in seconds.

iPad POS offer Enhanced Customer Experience

Benefitting from the low cost, mobility factor and less optimization of space the iPad POS system offers place for more merchandise facilitating customers to avail products of their choice and make payments from anywhere – for immediate pick up or delivery to their home address. Moreover, the real time data it offers helps improve sales and prove to be a great assistance to the management in taking better decisions for the business.

iPad POS facilitates Effective data management

An iPad POS system helps manage receipts effectively and also store customer as well as credit card data, while ensuring the accurate processing of sales tax, cash and credit card payments. Thus eliminating the probabilities of erroneous computations such as double entries; besides facilitating tracking of sales in real time.

How to Choose the Right iPad POS app

Research the Market

Researching your market is the first priority in choosing the right iPad POS, as vendor websites are always the perfect place to start your research and analyze retail POS system reviews. Remember that vendors often use phrases like “cashier software” and “cash register software” to describe their solutions; however, these terms are tantamount with point of purchase software.

Prioritize your Needs

While it is true that there are many solutions to meet your basic requirements, specific functionality is required in the new system. So, what is important is to understand if integration of e-commerce functionality is required; or the significance of the vendor having adequate experience to support retail software for small business.
Next, you need to assess if it makes business sense for you to invest in open source POS software. This is especially beneficial while you are actually on ‘POS hunting’ – going through reviews and trying to make the right iPad POS system.

Compile a list of Prominent Vendors

Once you have made up your mind and set your eyes on choosing the right iPad POS, compile a list of the best retail iPad POS systems that meet your priorities. Shortlisting vendors can effectively simplify the system search and ensure that you only evaluate systems that will be a good fit for your business. A few prominent ones are ShopKeep POS, Shopify POS, Paypal Here, GoPayment (Intuit) to name a few.
Have you chosen your iPad POS for your business? Share with us.

iPad For Productivity

Do you struggle with Productivity? Are you unsure what IT systems you should have in place? Would you like some insight into what may work as an alternative to the traditional systems? Well then, this might just be the post for you!
Productivity, a measure of the efficiency of production, can also be referred to as a measure of output from a production process, per unit of input. It is the ratio of what is produced to what is required to produce it. Usually this ratio is in the form of an average, expressing the total output divided by the total input.

A misunderstood buzzword

Productivity has become quite a buzzword in recent years, and is often referred to in terms of time management, stress management, employee assessment and self-development. It is clear that we can only be as “productive” as we believe, and it is often mistaken for effectiveness, whereas it is merely a measure of efficiency.
“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.” Peter Drucker
This is one of the many reasons that people often fail to be as effective as they intend to. I have discovered it is more than the WAY we do our daily tasks, be they business or personal based. It has as much to do with HOW we tackle those tasks. With this in mind I began to explore the value of changing my IT strategy in terms of doing computer, online and personal tasks (like writing this blogpost).

My story

I had been operating with a laptop and large external screen for working in the office, and then taking said laptop with me as I travelled or worked away from the office (in training for example). However, most of my training is with Microsoft systems, and as I use mainly Apple products, this posed a major problem, which I solved by buying a Netbook to take with me on the days I needed Windows. I had previously tried virtual PC and VMWare with little success.

It’s amazing what technology throws up for us. With the onset of BootCamp, Tablets and the App Store, my IT systems have been transformed. I now carry an iPad (that fits in my handbag), laden with productivity Apps for when I am away from the office, and all of the tools I need to manage my email, calendar and contacts and create documents in a space that I specifically don’t have to secure (the “cloud”).

So what are the major benefits to re-addressing our IT systems as a small business?

• We can move our work to the cloud (or iCloud)
• We (and our Accountant) can manage our books remotely
• We can access email, calendar and contacts through the cloud
• The cloud can be infinitely safer for the small business owner
• The iPad and certain other tablets allow for complete productivity
• A tablet / phone is far lighter than the lightest notebook
• We do tasks in shorter spurts than previously, and tablets allow quicker access to apps

Another major breakthrough for me personally was the fact that an iPad can only display one app at a time. This has completely cut down on having 20 tabs open in my browser, and allows me to focus on one task at a time.
So while looking for productivity tools to download, I realised that actually the iPad itself is a supreme productivity tool, in terms of effectiveness. [I have yet to find the perfect solution to allow me work with both OS systems, without using a separate machine to the iPad. The Netbook still has a spot in the office for now, and also fits in the handbag]
Have you changed the way you manage your IT systems as a small business owner?
Please share your suggestions below…

10 Beautiful HTML5 Video & Audio Players for WordPress

A flood of HTML5 video plugins has become available in the past few months for WordPress 3.0, as HTML5 video is rapidly becoming the new standard for showing videos online. When the iPad came out in April 2010 with no support for Flash, sites that wanted to cater to the iPad and other mobile devices started serving HTML5 video. WordPress users have plenty of options for HTML5 video and audio plugins and many plugins also provide Flash or Silverlight fallback players, in case a visitor has a non-HTML5 browser.

MediaElement.js – HTML5 Video & Audio Player

MediaElement.js is an HTML5 video and audio player with Flash fallback. It supports IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome and iPhone, iPad, Android. It’s got many audio and video shortcodes for easy use within posts and pages.
Check out http://mediaelementjs.com/ for a live example of the player.

Download Plugin

Projekktor Video Tag Extension

This plugin is based on the free (GPL) Projekktor Player framework and also includes flash-fallback. Notable extra features are the ability to generate a playlist, custom logo overlay, custom themed Youtube videos, and custom themed controls.

Download Plugin

VideoJS – HTML5 Video Player for WordPress

VideoJS, built on the VideoJS HTML5 video player library, is the most widely used HTML5 Video Player available. It allows you to embed video in your post or page using HTML5 with Flash fallback support for non-HTML5 browsers.
Check out a demo of the player at http://videojs.com/.

Download Plugin

External “Video for Everybody”

This plugin delivers ogg/theora (and optional webm) html5 video from an external storage location with fallbacks to flash, and links for download. It is designed to operate on media files hosted outside your WordPress site. Please note that it does not integrate with the Media library, and it does not create the media files.

Download Plugin

HTML5 and Flash Video Player

This plugin allows the addition of video (and other media) to a WordPress site. A full options menu is available with post-level overrides for endless customization. This plugin is low footprint, creating no tables, and uninstalls cleanly. It provides full support for Html5 Video, skinning the player, integration with Google Analytics and the capability to display ads from LongTail Solutions.

Download Plugin

Degradable HTML5 Audio and Video

The plugin enables HTML5 native playback for users with compatible browsers while offering an elegant degradation to other users through very lightweight Flash players. For HTML5 playback, it auto-detects and offers different alternatives, or degrades to Flash, and (failing even that) to download links.

Download Plugin

Universal Video

The plugin enables HTML5 native playback for users with compatible browsers while offering a simple degradation to other users through the use of the Flowplayer flash player. There’s no options panel – videos are added through the shortcode.

Download Plugin

HTML5 Multimedia Framework for WordPress

HTML5 Multimedia Framework is designed to be a highly customisable plugin for wordpress that allows advanced users to add their own JavaScript Libraries, or other JavaScript Libraries such as VideoJS and JW Player for HTML5. The framework is designed to be compatible with mobile devices that use WebKit or Opera Mobile/Mini and XML feeds such as RSS, and uses FlowPlayer for it’s flash fallback. Check out the demo.

Download Plugin

WP YouTube Lyte

WP-YouTube-Lyte inserts “Lite YouTube Embeds” in your blog. These look and feel like normal embedded YouTube, but don’t use Flash unless clicked on, thereby reducing download size & rendering time substantially. It also has experimental support for embedding html5 YouTube video is available (implementing YouTube’s new embed code), meaning WP-YouTube-Lyte allows for an entirely flash-less YouTube experience on your blog, displaying YouTube’s HTML5 video in h264 or the new WebM-codec.

Download Plugin

FlasHTML5 Video

This plugin is a WordPress implementation of the FlasHTML5 Video Javascript Library featuring HTML5 / Flash Video with Mobile Fallback. It supports all modern browsers (HTML5), all other browsers (Flash), and Android, iPhone, iPad, and iPod with HTML5.
Check out the demo at the plugin’s homepage.

Download Plugin

Ten Things To Think About When Designing Your iPad App

Like most well-designed things, the magic of an iPad app comes from a union of usefulness, usability and meaning. Games aside, the app must be useful by solving a problem that people actually have through the right set of functionality at the right time. It must be easy to use and, just as importantly, easy to get started using, without a lot of pesky setup and learning steps. And it must hold meaning for the user through visual beauty, an emotional connection, personal insights, etc. In this article, we won’t outline the entire design process for creating an iPad app, but we will explore 10 of the key things to think about when designing your app (and planning the design process).

Take A Goal-Oriented Approach To Simplify Functionality.

Good iPad apps are about simplicity and doing a few things well. This means you have to be selective about the functionality you include and not throw in the kitchen sink. Consider following a goal-oriented approach to figure out what functionality you need. List all of the high-level goals a user might have when using your app (better yet, watch users doing things that you hope your app will help with in order to get a full picture of what the user’s goals are — but that’s an article for another time). What would someone be trying to get done? Then, brainstorm all of the functionality that someone might want in order to accomplish that task. Look at that big list, and start pruning, with an eye for the minimum that is needed to help the user succeed. And then select a few magical, delightful features to complete the package.
For example, Epicurious does an excellent job of giving the multi-tasking cook exactly what they need. When viewing a recipe in landscape format, users can easily scan ingredients on the left while keeping track of the next instruction on the right, with a bright placeholder that can be dragged with the finger to the current spot. Reviews and additional tips for the recipe are easily accessible via tabs, but the main screen is kept clean and uncluttered, with just the basics.

Epicurious provides a clean interface for recipes, with an orange marker to keep your place.
By contrast, the Whole Foods app starts off being helpful by letting you add recipe ingredients to a shopping list. Unfortunately, it neglects to combine repeated ingredients, so items are listed multiple times. In the screenshot below, bananas appear three times, once for each recipe that requires them, instead of being combined into one entry.

Whole Foods should enhance its app by merging duplicate list items.
Also, don’t provide a button for every control the user might need to accomplish their goal. Think about what the user can infer about the UI through gesture. For example, Apple’s Notes app doesn’t have an “editing” mode; instead, you simply touch the screen to bring up the keyboard, and it auto-saves when you’re done. Basic editing controls such as cut, copy and paste also appear only in response to gestures as needed (and undo is accomplished by shaking).

The Notes app limits on-screen buttons and presents controls only if it detects they are needed.

Leverage What You Know To Create A Fully Personalized Experience.

No one wants to spend a lot of time setting up a $1.99 app. Leverage as much of what the iPad and other websites know about your users as possible (with their permission, of course). Could you use the user’s location, calendar, Twitter feed or contacts list to make the app smarter and more personalized?
Zite is a fabulous RSS reader for iPad that doesn’t wait for you to add sources, but rather connects to your Google Reader, Twitter or Delicious account and then presents articles based on what it has learned about your interests. I connected it with Delicious (where I store all of my bookmarks), and in five seconds it created a personalized magazine for me to explore new and interesting content! And just like Pandora, the more you use it, the more relevant and personalized the content becomes. So far, even though some argue that Flipboard’s UI is more elegant, engaging with Zite is easier because it’s all set up.

Zite sets things up immediately by connecting to an existing account.

Zite created my own personal magazine by learning about my interests through my Delicious account.

Think About The Place Of Use.

Assume that your user will be out and about when using your app — in a restaurant, in the car, in the kitchen, on a sofa, etc. How does that change the list of goals you’ve put together? For a user browsing recipes, are their needs different on the sofa than in the kitchen, or in a restaurant?
Open Table’s Web app for reserving tables displays a list of restaurants as the default view for search results (i.e. without a map). On the iPad, the default view is a large map with a list of restaurants on the right, along with an option to search your vicinity. This accommodates the common use case of someone trying to find a place to eat when they are out and about.

When you’re out and about with the iPad, Open Table shows you what is near.
Awesome Note opens with a set of default categories that reflect the various places that people might take notes on an iPad.

Awesome Note complements traditional categories like “My idea” and “To-do list” with out-and-about categories like “Travel diary” and “Shopping.”
GroceryIQ is a shopping list that organizes items by aisle to speed up shopping. It also allows filtering by store, which is handy.

GroceryIQ offers functionality to make your shopping trip more efficient.

Consider Multi-User And Multi-Device Cases.

Assume that multiple members of a family will be sharing an iPad or viewing the device at once. Unlike a personal computer, the iPad is not necessarily a personal device but could be treated more like a coffee-table book or magazine that multiple residents share. In addition to allowing users to switch accounts, indicating who is currently logged in is also important. An added benefit of accounts is that they facilitate syncing between devices (for example, an iPad and a smartphone).
Flipboard is a great example of shared use through multiple accounts. When you sign in, your name is displayed on the home page.

Flipboard makes clear that it knows who you are.

Like Flipboard, FedEx displays the name of the logged-in user (although the app’s heavy grayscale appearance is odd).
eBay, on the other hand, supports accounts but provides no indication of who is signed in until you touch the “My eBay” button in the corner.

eBay doesn’t make clear who is logged in until you touch “My eBay” in the corner.

Don’t Do Crazy Navigation Unless It’s A Game Or One-Hit Wonder.

Crazy, spinny, eye-catching interactions are fine for one-hit wonders and games. But stick with standard navigation for frequently used apps, such as news readers. If you do want to do something innovative, make sure it supports the task at hand and is extremely usable.
Martha Stewart Living, which is built on the well-designed Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, uses horizontal and vertical scrolling in a novel way by reserving horizontal scrolling for navigating between articles and vertical scrolling for navigating pages of an article. This is paired with a clever pane that visually shows how scrolling works, plus an overview of the current issue for even quicker navigation. With all that and a clickable table of contents, the whole experience is quite lovely.

Martha Stewart Living’s overview pane shows the clever horizontal and vertical scrolling scheme for content created with the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.
The best thing you could do is actually use an iPad constantly for all kinds of things, and see what works for you. You’ll quickly discover inconsistencies and annoyances all over the app world, and you’ll figure out where to be consistent and where to branch out.
Here are three different methods that news readers follow to enable users to exit articles:

Huffington Post: top right.

New York Times: bottom left.

Zite: top left.
People tend to rest their thumb near the top left when holding an iPad, so putting the button there is easiest because then people wouldn’t have to change their grip. Also, Zite enables you to click anywhere on the screen outside of the article to close it, which makes for a nice flexible gesture. Similarly, the New York Times enables you to pinch an article to close it and return to the home page, which is even better, especially because the controls disappear once an article has been open for a few seconds — although a one-finger gesture closer to the top left would have worked better, because the two-finger gesture would probably require the user to change their grip.
Be mindful of how you yourself use features, and notice when something is usable and when you have to move your hand awkwardly or do something that disrupts your flow. Look around to find apps that do what you’re trying to do, assess their usability, and decide whether being consistent or doing something different would make more sense. iPad apps are still a new frontier, so now is not the time to buckle down and set conventions — but we should assess whether a new idea really adds something useful or is just novel for the sake of novelty.

Provide A Home Page.

People are used to home pages that orient them to what’s available and that give them a base of operations. Without one, discovering and browsing content can be disorienting and frustrating. Take the NASA news app, which has no home page. Upon launching the app, users are dropped directly into a news article. To view other articles, they would use the carousel arrows on the left and right, or press the tiny list icon in the bottom-left corner of the screen. The list view allows users to browse content in a small scrolling pop-over window that has only enough room for thumbnails and short headlines. The navigation is generally unwieldy and disorienting.

NASA does not provide a home page, but rather drops you into an article with vague pop-over navigation.
Pulse, on the other hand, is a great news app that uses a home page to quickly orient users and to introduce the navigation scheme, which is consistent throughout the app. From the home page, users can easily browse content, having plenty of space to view the large thumbnails and article descriptions to see what interests them. Drilling down into an article will collapse the navigation to the side so that you don’t lose context.

Pulse presents a horizontal scrolling list of articles on the home page.

Opening an article will collapse the navigation to a side panel in landscape view.

In portrait view, Pulse displays the navigation for one content source at the bottom, with easy access to the next page.

Beware Of Awkward Pop-Overs.

iPad offers the nifty interaction of a pop-over to help users retrieve content and navigation in context. But the interaction can also make for a jerky flow, cramming a lot of information into a tiny peephole. Given the limited width and height of a pop-over, avoid stuffing too much in it. Awesome Note tries to cram the interaction for editing a list of folders into a small pop-over, presumably to maintain context. Instead, we get a confusing interaction, with tabs duplicated on the screen and not enough room to get things done.

Awesome Note has a somewhat confusing pop-over that duplicates the information on the screen in a cramped space.
NASA’s complex navigation, which we saw in the preceding point, is a similar example of a bad pop-over.
Consider when opening a new page would make more sense than opening a pop-over. Unless context is critical, don’t be afraid to take users to a full-screen view to give the content some room to breathe.
Or consider using split views in clever ways:

Houzz has secondary navigation for each category in a convenient split view.

Martha Stewart Living displays the table of contents for an issue as a full-length pop-over, opening up space for images and descriptive headlines.

Flipboard favors a slide-out panel to give the navigation enough room to do its job.

Avoid Gratuitous Splash Screens.

Remember when the Web had splash screen, and then everyone got annoyed and left? They are even more annoying on the iPad because you’re usually trying to access content while someone is waiting for either you or the iPad. If you need a splash screen because something has to load, display it for the minimum amount of time possible. Better yet, display useful content while the rest of the app loads to give users a head start on the interaction.
Zite piques your interest by loading the first few photos on the home page while the rest of the app loads. When the app is ready, those initial photos animate into place, making for a delightful little welcome interaction.

Zite draws you in on the splash screen, with thumbnails of articles that will be ready once the full app loads.

Use Gestures In Clever Ways, But Don’t Overdo It.

Cool, useful gestures are a mainstay of iPad use. But the line between effective gestures and gesture overload is fine. For example, don’t provide a swipeable carousel and then also allow a generic swipe gesture on the same screen, because this would put competing swipe gestures at odds with each other.
And if a gesture is not obvious, give users a hint.

Zite indicates more content with a cute little “swipe” text at the bottom.
Discovr, a music-discovery application, integrates information about gesture controls right into the UI. The red circle in the screenshot below says “Tap me,” leading to information on how to expand nodes.

Discovr educates users with a red dot explaining the gesture options for the current screen.

Once basic information has been provided, another red node appears saying “Tap and hold me,” informing users how to access more content with a new gesture. With this information baked into the app experience itself, users learn about powerful features of the UI without having to be psychic.

Make Clear What’s Touchable, And Make It BIG.

Many apps suffer from what Jakob Nielsen calls “read-tap asymmetry,” whereby the font may be legible in size, but the tappable areas are so small that users are prone to missing the targets or are unsure whether the areas are even tappable. In the advertisement below, from the Martha Stewart Living app, the arrowed questions in the middle of the screen are tappable, but you wouldn’t know it because they have no affordance. If you’re going to go through the trouble of making more content available, then make it clear where to tap, and make the tappable area nice and big.

It’s not obvious where you would tap in this ad to get more information.

It turns out that tapping the light-gray boxes in the middle shows more information.
The image areas at the top of the Cool Hunting application are actually swipeable galleries, but we get no hint of it. What if there was some kind of affordance, such as dimensionality or a peek at another image to indicate there was more to the right?

Cool Hunting does not indicate that swiping the top image would reveal more images, which makes this functionality hard to discover.
In iOS itself, double-tapping the home key and then swiping left in the multitasking bar reveals a bunch of controls for sound and music, yet this functionality is pretty well hidden. Why not provide some affordance of what is available?

Double-tapping home and then swiping left on an iPad reveals hidden functionality.

What Else?

These are just 10 of the many things to consider when designing your iPad app, but it’s a good place to start. We’d love to hear your top considerations and examples in the comments. We especially lack a strong repository on the Web of examples of good and bad iPad app design. Please share examples of the different ways that apps treat the same functionality (such as exiting articles), and explain why certain solutions are better than others. Have you discovered other techniques through your own design work that you think everyone should put on their list of do’s and don’ts? Let us know.

Further Reading

• “iPad Usability: First Findings From User Testing,” Jakob Nielsen
• “iPad Usability: Year One,” Jakob Nielsen
• “Design for iPad: Reality Check,” Oliver Reichenstein
• “Thoughts on Designing for iPad,” Derek Powazek
• “Touch Gesture Reference Guide,” Luke Wroblewski

10 Essential iPad Apps for Web Designers

It’s hard to find a great set of iPad apps that you can rely on as a designer amidst the constantly growing App Store, and most articles are filled with irrelevant apps — like social media clients — and apps with duplicate functionality, like three vector apps that all do the same things. In this article, I want to help you narrow it down to just ten insanely useful apps that each fill a specific function in the list, and that will be useful for any web designer. You might have found alternatives that suit your tastes, but for the designer with a new iPad, this should be a great starting point.

Adobe Ideas

Adobe Ideas is a sketching app for the iPad that allows you to get ideas down while out and about for later reference. It’s at the top of the list because this is probably the most common use case for design work on the iPad — capturing ideas for later. The app lets you configure a palette, work with different brush sizes and opacities, and keeps quite simple. Despite its limitations, some users have done interesting things with it, as you can see in the screenshot. Oddly, after spending $5.99 on the app you’ll need to shell out another $0.99 on an in-​​app purchase if you want to use layers.

Adobe Photoshop Express

Photoshop Express is a handy companion to Ideas that lets you edit photos, from the basic crop, color adjustments and a smattering of novelty effects. It is on the surface a free app, but like Ideas it delivers extra functionality through a $4.99 in-​​app purchase called the Camera Pack. The Camera Pack introduces noise reduction, a camera timer, and auto review. The app also features sharing functions through Photoshop​.com.

OmniGraffle

Continuing in the vein of apps that let you flesh out ideas on the iPad for implementation on the computer, OmniGraffle is a great app for wireframing layouts, and developing sitemaps. It is, like most of Omni Group’s iOS apps, a hefty $49.99, but comes highly recommended. If you’re an OmniGraffle for Mac user, you should even be able to use most of your stencil library on the iPad.

SketchBook Pro

If you want something with some power, SketchBook Pro might be the app to check out. With a quality set of brushes and other tools, including dynamic symmetric drawing, SketchBook is an app that is one of the few apps that is often used to create great art that doesn’t need to be redone ‘for real’ on the computer later. For $4.99 you get up to 12 layers on an iPad 2 at 1024 x 768 pixel resolution, or 4 layers with a 2048 x 1536 pixel resolution.

Penultimate

Penultimate is a notebook app, where you can take notes, draw simple sketches, and even include photos, making it a great app for organizing plenty of ideas and even moodboarding. Penultimate is a pretty cheap buy at $1.99 and you can extend it through a variety of in-​​app purchases that’ll  give you templates for task lists, music paper, and so on.

Moodboard

Moodboard, as the name suggests, is an app purely for creating moodboards. These are boards that allow designers to organically build up an aesthetic for their next piece by placing and playing with colors, fonts, images and textures, whether you’re working on a website, a print piece, or the look and feel of an entire brand. Moodboard will run you $9.99.

The Font Game

The Font Game won’t help you get any design work done, but it will help you keep up in a room full of more experienced designers. It’s described as a “rapid-​​fire typeface identifying” game to help you train yourself to identify over 1,000 popular fonts. There’s even a game mode for identify the elements of type, such as ascenders and inclined stems. The Font Game is $1.99.

iDraw

This collection wouldn’t be complete without a vector app, and iDraw fills that role. For $8.99 you can use vectors to create illustrations, or even get diagramming if OmniGraffle’s price is a bit too rich for your tastes. iDraw uses Dropbox integration and SVG import and export to ensure you can use your desktop assets to design with on your iPad.

Gusto

There’s nothing more annoying than realizing there’s a bug on a site you’ve designed while you’re away from a computer and helpless to do anything about it. It’ll probably remain a nagging distraction in your mind until you get back to the office. Fortunately, getting connected to FTP and making changes to your code is simple with Gusto, which costs $9.99 and comes with all the bells and whistles like tabs for working on multiple files and syntax color coding.

Analytics HD

I don’t know many designers who can resist the urge to check out how traffic to their sites is doing each day. There are free Google Analytics apps for the iPad out there, but I haven’t found one that doesn’t suck — so the reasonably priced $6.99 Analytics HD is a great buy to round out your collection of iOS apps for designers. A lot of these apps allow access to a limited subset of your Google Analytics data, but with this one you can access just about any data available in the web app itself. It’s also great for meetings with clients since it can turn your data into great full screen charts.
Have we missed out your favorite design-​​related iPad app? Found a great design-​​related use for the iPad’s smaller sibling, the iPhone? Let us know about it in the comments.