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iCab Mobile for iOS is like a pro version of Safari
When I first used Safari on my iPhone, I was blown away by how much better it was than any other mobile browser, but since then, Apple hasn't done much with it. A recent Safari update brought significant speed increases, but there are many other limitations that finally led me to try something else, namely iCab Mobile. Is improving your web browsing experience on the iPad or iPhone/iPod touch worth $2? Before you object to paying for a web browser, let me remind you of a few Apple apps and their alternatives. On iOS, Apple gave you a Notes app, but many people prefer Simplenote or other text editors or note programs because they offer more features. If you subscribe to MobileMe, you have a 20 GB iDisk, but anyone who has tried Dropbox knows that it works much better. Apple gave you iCal, but BusyCal is a lot better. Apple gave you TextEdit in OS X, but BBEdit and TextMate are much better. You can read RSS feeds in Mail or Safari, but do you? Likewise, Apple gave us Safari, which is "good," but iCab offers many features that make it "great."
The best iOS apps I used in 2010
After looking back over Mac and Mac/iOS hybrid apps, it's time to look at the best iOS apps of 2010. As before, this list comes from my particular experience over the past year with these apps. 1) iCab Mobile (US$1.99, universal) is a replacement for mobile Safari. While it is hindered by the fact that iOS doesn't have anywhere to set a "default browser," and therefore most URLs that you open from the Springboard or email/Twitter/etc... will open in Safari, iCab offers plenty of features that make it worth the effort. It is the first app on my dock, and I much prefer it over Safari. Although it uses the same rendering engine as Safari, it comes with a host of features that Safari doesn't have. iCab Mobile will let you download files, which you can either offload to your computer later or upload to Dropbox from right within the app. Tap and hold an image, and you can save it right to your Dropbox. iCab on the iPad also does "real" tabs, with a visible tab present (it will auto-hide when not needed, if you want). You can set it to open links in new tabs, or open only links to different domains in new tabs. It has content filtering built-in, as well as module support for things like Instapaper, viewing HTML source or even downloading videos from YouTube. It also has a forms manager and a kiosk mode, and as Mike pointed out in November it supports VGA mirroring for presentation use. Web browsing is one of the primary uses of my iPad, and iCab Mobile is well worth the minimal asking price. Find out more at iCab Mobile's website. See the rest of my choices below.
SlideRocket brings web presentations to iPhone and iPad with HTML5
Since the dawn of time, traveling professionals have sought easier ways to present on the go. Pico projectors! Netbooks! Converting presentations to video to show them on iPhones! Then there was Keynote on the iPad, and it was good. Not great, however: presenters with libraries of PPT content have had to convert them over, and keeping your decks up to date with the latest and greatest from the sales department is a drag. Wouldn't it be better and easier if there was a nice cloud-based solution that played well with Mobile Safari? Enter SlideRocket's new HTML5 player; the freemium web service now supports playing back (not editing) presentations on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch with full-screen video, a handful of good-looking builds and transitions, and all the analytics and version control you want. While the normal SlideRocket player requires Flash or AIR to show content, this one works fine without them. Click on to learn more about SlideRocket's capabilities, and see a video demo of the HTML5 playback in action.
