My top Apps of 2010

Everyone’s got a Top ‘some­thing’ of the year list, so I thought I’d jump in with my picks for Top Apps of 2010 — with a little twist; only one app, per plat­form, amongst the 3 plat­forms I use (Win­dows, iOS (iPad), and Inter­net). Yes, Inter­net, for my pur­poses is a plat­form — it’s mostly device agnost­ic, and had great new apps this year.

So, without fur­ther adiu…

Top Win­dows App for 2010 — Google Chrome
Bear with me on this one. The reas­on Chrome is at the top of the Win­dows App list for me in 2010 is simply because the Inter­net enables so much these days; my pick would have been a browser over any oth­er type of application.

Ded­ic­ated plat­form apps are a dying breed. Tied to par­tic­u­lar hard­ware, soft­ware developers just can’t lever­age the bene­fits that browser-based applic­a­tions can deliv­er. Using the browser inter­face, it’s a huge win for applic­a­tion developers as they can just code once, and have the soft­ware run any­where that the browser can run. Google Docs for example. Or the Avi­ary suite of cre­at­ive tools.

And right now, Chrome is the best-of-breed for browsers on Windows.

Top iOS (iPad) App for 2010 — Flip­board
It’s hard not to love Flip­board. It popped on the scene and sud­denly every­one was writ­ing about it.

Obvi­ously Flip­board addressed a need — that being to have a very clean and eleg­ant way to bring news to the iPad, in a way that takes advant­age of the iPad’s large dis­play screen and applies new usab­il­ity rules to the lar­ger interface.

And it was free. Sud­denly every blog and RSS feed could look be viewed and enjoyed on the iPad in a way that suited the hardware.

Awe­some win, and rumor has it that Flip­board is in devel­op­ment for oth­er OS and tab­let devices. Even Awe­som-er win 

Top Inter­net App for 2010 — Dropbox
Ah yes, the free ubi­quit­ous online stor­age pro­vider that’s a friend to tech­no­philes every­where. Brought to you through your friendly Inter­net connection.

Simple user exper­i­ence is how Drop­box con­tin­ues to be on the top of my lists; con­nect all your com­puters and devices to one Drop­box account, and any file you save into your private Drop­box dir­ect­ory on any device is then avail­able to any of the oth­er com­puters you’ve con­nec­ted to that account. Simple. Effective.

While it’s not new this year, Drop­box made big waves as they increased the amount of free online stor­age to 8GB. Which is cool, but it’s really the exten­ded multi-device func­tion­al­ity that Drop­box enables across many diverse oper­at­ing sys­tems and plat­forms that makes it a win­ner for me.

Oth­ers?
Yes, well, there were oth­er con­tenders, but for me they didn’t make the cut, and I’m sure I’ve missed your favour­ite app for this year. Some of you will have noticed that I didn’t touch on OSX or Linux — I don’t use the plat­forms often enough to stay up on the cool toys, sadly. But per­haps you can help fill that void and com­ment on your favour­ite app of the year?

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