5 ugly but useful iPhone apps for the iPad

iPhone apps running on your iPad are as ugly and stretched-out as a botched facelift. But some of them are useful anyway. Here are five I find useful enough to overlook their grotesqueness. They're apps that help me write, and also notify me of incoming messages.

Virtually all the 185,000-plus iPhone apps in the App Store run on the iPad, but they have to be surgically altered to fit on the bigger display. That means either doubling the size of the app, which makes it big and blocky; or running the app at its native size, which means it will be lost on the big screen. Either way, it's ugly.

But it's still worth doing for some apps, which provide capabilities that aren't yet available in native iPad apps.

I put up with these apps because I have to:

Simplenote bills itself as a replacement for the Notes app, but it's really much more than that. Paired up with Notational Velocity on the Mac, and you can keep text files synced between your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

I do most of my work in plain text files, and the ability to have all my most important current work files synced to my iPhone is huge. Syncing them to the iPad is even huger, because the iPad screen is big enough that I can really dig in and work with the files.

Simplenote is free, with an $8.99-per-year premium version offering an ad-free display, automatic backup, premium support, and more.

The developers at the Cloud Factory say they've submitted an iPad upgrade to the App Store, which they expect will be available to users any day now. Until then, I'm copying text out of Simplenote and into Pages for the iPad, and back into Simplenote when I'm done and ready to ship the text back to my Mac.

Here's a screenshot of Simplenote for the iPad, to whet your appetite:

 

Pastebot for the iPhone is an attractive and fun app for managing text and pictures saved to the clipboard. You can copy multiple text snippets and images into Pastebot, organize them in groups, and paste them into other apps as needed. On the iPad, Pastebot isn't pretty, but it's still useful. The vendor, Tapbots, says it has no current plans for iPad development, but it's "definitely a possibility." The app is $2.00.

The next three apps are for notifications:

Push Gmail for the iPhone is an all-in-one Gmail client, which notifies you with push notifications when you have new messages. Open the app, and it's a single-purpose Web browser that points to your Gmail or Google Apps mail Web site. At $1.99, it's a good way to save valuable real estate on your iPhone home screen, while also getting instant notifications of incoming Gmail.

On the iPad, I just use Push Gmail for the notifications, and view my mail in the iPad's native Web browser.

Boxcar on the iPhone or iPad provides instant realtime notifications of Twitter, Facebook, email, RSS, Atom, and Growl notifications. I just use it for Twitter direct messages. You can read your messages in Boxcar on the iPhone, and also on the iPad, although it's uglier on the iPad. Either way, I find it more convenient to just read the messages in their native apps. But Boxcar is great for notifying me when there are messages to be read. It's free, which lets you receive messages from one service, with charges for additional services. Boxcar's developers plan to submit the iPad version to the App Store on Monday.

Facebook is a free Facebook client for the iPhone and iPad. When Apple announced support for native third-party apps in 2008, Facebook was a showcase app. The iPhone app is in need of a makeover; for example, it doesn't seem to show comments on notes or photos. However, it's great for notifications, on the iPhone or the iPad, and then you can check your messages at your desktop or on your iPad browser. Facebook declined to comment on when it expects to upgrade. ss

The iPad also has a variety of native applications to choose from, including apps for Netflix video streaming, Twitter, productivity, and more. Read my picks for my favorite iPad apps.