Best iPad Apps

Juggling Documents

Best App for Creating Beautiful Documents

Pages

$9.99 Version: 1.2 | Apple

Note the name of this award. We’re not talking about simply slingin’ prose here (though Pages can handle that, no problem). Instead, you’re getting a forehead-smackingly easy way to mingle words and pictures. Shoot, you can actually embed movies into the documents you create. Whatever your creative ingredients, the power here is the ability to shape each page. For example, touch and hold an image with two fingers, wait a moment, and then rotate. With wonderful touchscreen controls, you’re no longer stuck trying to tell a mouse and menus what you want to see. It’s just you: touching and tweaking, like standing next to an art director and showing her: no, not like that…like this.

CUSTOM FRAMING: The menu bar’s “i” button holds lotsa fun styling options. When a photo’s selected, you’ll find an art store’s worth of framing choices. Regular text gets its share of makeover options: you can apply styles (canned formatting rules, though they have to be created in the Mac-based Pages), set alignment and line spacing, pick font size and color—even create columns.

TAKE A SWIPE: Moving objects works just as you’d expect: tap, hold, and drag. But if you need finer-grained control, try this: while holding one finger on an object, swipe a finger on your other hand in the direction you want to move. Each swipe ...