More Money, Fewer Problems

The right apps will make the iPad your new digital wallet.

If you’re running a small business -- especially a mobile one without a dedicated retail location -- the free Square app can be an absolute necessity. Using the free credit card reader attachment (obtained by mail at squareup.com), you’ll be able to swipe cards anywhere using a customizable and detailed point-of-sale app; Square takes 2.75 percent of the sale price as the total commission for the service. Customers can even open tabs or leave tips, as well as sign for the card right on the screen. It’s easily one of the most impressive iPad apps in any category.

If you’re just looking to manage your own personal finances, however, several helpful apps out there can be your bookkeeper. For simple budgeting of your monthly income and expenditures, try PocketMoney ($4.99), which lets you manually input your various debts and transactions and track them over a large period of time. And if you play the stock market, be sure to snag the free Bloomberg for iPad app, which lets you track various stocks and includes up-to-the-minute details on prices and fluctuations, as well as scads of recent news stories regarding each listed company.

The Bloomberg app is almost as impressive as those Apple stocks.

Many large banking institutions in North America have their own dedicated (and free) iPad apps, including Bank of America for iPad, Citibank for iPad, and Chase Mobile, the last of which actually lets you deposit paper checks by photographing them with the iPad 2 camera. It’ll save you time and a trip to the bank, but it’s also a damn cool innovation! Other banks have their own dedicated apps as well, so search around the App Store—or switch to one of these modern, iPad-supporting banks.

Chase Mobile deposits your checks right from the couch.

Head in the Clouds

Keep your important files handy even when your Mac is far away.

Until iOS 5 moves our documents to the iCloud and Apple finally dispenses with iTunes’ clunky, multi-step file-sharing method, we’ll all just have to rely on App Store solutions for a little longer. Of course, there’s always Dropbox (free), but anyone who uses it for more than storage knows that actually using files on your iPad sours the whole experience a bit.

Phone Drive: your files, right away.

There are, however, elegant solutions that’ll let you dump the MacBook and still work on your files back home. Phone Drive ($1.99) -- a web-based storage platform with quick uploads (more than twice as fast as Dropbox), customized view settings, built-in text editing and audio recording, and a web download manager -- is like a Swiss Army knife for your documents. It does so much, in fact, we half-expected its proprietary browser to load all those Flash movies we can’t watch with Safari. (It doesn’t.)

Phone Drive’s built-in text editor makes Dropbox users green with envy.

But it does offer a unique level of integration with your files and the closest thing to syncing this side of iCloud. Let’s say you have a Mac|Life deadline tomorrow but a day at the beach planned for today. Upload your documents (Pages files need to be converted for in-app editing), graphs, pics, and whatever else you need through your Mac’s browser, FTP client, or personal hotspot (in case you’re out of range of a secure Wi-Fi signal).

When you get to the shore, just launch the Phone Drive app on your iPad and start working. And when you get home, download the edited file to your Desktop and email it to your editor -- all without getting sand in your MacBook’s keyboard.

Sync to the Top

Take everything on your Mac while leaving the hardware at home.

As great as our iPads’ screens are for writing emails and watching the latest episode of Jersey Shore, iOS doesn’t quite measure up to the Desktop experience we enjoy on our Macs. For the most part, it’s an acceptable tradeoff -- after all, there are enough apps to fill almost every void—but there are still those times when we wish we could transform our iPad into one of our Spaces.

With iTeleport, the iPad runs Flash sites about as well as an Android tablet.

Sadly, OS X’s not quite there yet, but iTeleport for iPad’s ($19.99) fantastic VNC client is the next best thing. Simply download the accompanying iTeleport Connect server (free) on your Mac, sign in with a Gmail account, and your iPad masterfully mirrors your OS X Desktop, complete with Multi-Touch gestures and multitasking support. Plus, it’s one of the only ways to play Flash on your iPad, though it works about as well as Steve said it would.

Presence is the closest thing to the Finder you’ll find on your iPad.

As with any VNC/VPN client, usability is largely dependent on the speed of your network -- and things can get wonky, especially over 3G—so, if you need fast access to your files without all the magic, check out Presence (free), an enormously useful app that bridges the gap between simple file sharers and full-fledged virtual computing clients. Like iTeleport, Presence links with a Mac or PC desktop client ($40), but instead of bandwidth-hogging VNC, this sophisticated remote-access app strips your Desktop down to its bare files. Readable documents open right in the app, and non-iPad-supported files can either be downloaded for offline use or opened in the appropriate app. (Media files, however, are pretty useless.) You can even search with Spotlight and send edited Pages files back to your Mac using WebDAV.

An Apple for the Doctor?

The iPad might just hold the cure for what ails you.

The debate over the iPad as a consumption or creation device might never be settled, but a large chunk of its 30 million-plus users are using it at their jobs to break new ground every day. Take Dr. Henry Feldman. If you see him using his iPad at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, he’s probably not playing Angry Birds.

This is your brain on iPad. Any questions?

When Feldman is working on a patient’s diagnosis, he’s immersed in OsiriX HD ($29.99), which he calls “probably one of the coolest apps for the iPad.” OsiriX (image-processing software dedicated to the industry-standard Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine protocol) lets him “view and manipulate CT scans, MRIs, and other digital radiography images” without having to worry about his laptop running out of juice. “This is extremely helpful for showing a colleague an image on a case when we aren’t sitting at a computer,” he explains.

Another essential app on the doc’s iPad is ModalityBODY (free, with paid content), which “lets me carry my classic anatomy atlas on the wards.” Feldman uses Modality as the perfect complement to his bedside manner, showing patients drawings and images to “make complex imaging studies understandable…This is what really drives my use of the iPad—being able to bring all this to the bedside in the hospital.”

Modality is there when your doc needs a helping hand.

Feldman also uses Mediquations Medical Calculator ($4.99) and Universal Doctor Speaker ($5.99) when he needs to tell a patient “something simple” in their native language, but the real killer app for the doctor is FaceTime. Utilizing the iPad 2’s camera, Feldman can bring a team of doctors right to the bedside. Second opinion? There’s an app for that.