10 Cool iPad Apps From Uncle Sam

'Tis the season for Top 10 lists.  This one's for fun, and a demonstration of potential.

1. Marines Magazine - a quarterly interactive multi-media publication.  Online version at http://marinesmagazine.dodlive.mil/ 
2. LeafSnap HD - in case you're wondering what kind of tree that is, snap a pic of a leaf, and they'll let you know.  They'll also let you access a lot of info about whatever it is.  (I've tried this myself).  Brought to you via the Smithsonian, Columbia University, and the University of Maryland.
3. NASA App HD - access thousands of images and videos, the NASA TV feed, and mission info.
4. Recovery.gov HD - supposedly identifies and allows tracking of all those Recovery Act projects.  Nice idea, but the data has proven to be less than reliable.
5. Federal Register app - coming from academia (U. of Central Florida) but with real-time links to the Government Printing Office, an online version of the Federal Register, which records all government actions.
6. Army Onesource Services Locater - lets you search for local U.S. Army programs, services, and resources.
7. U.S. Federal Reserve System app - you guessed it, info about the Federal Reserve banking system.
8. Set in Style - online guide to a jewelry exhibit at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City,  Fairly typical museum app.
9. NASA Visualization Explorer - accesses some animations and simulations of geographic and astronomical phenomena.
10. Turning the Pages app - from the National Library of Medicine, accesses the digitized content of some of its holdings (digital captures of scanned pages), with some annotations and comments.

Looking over the list, there's really two I'd call innovative - the Marines Magazine (as they thought about how to make it a new experience on mobile), and LeafSnap (as the idea of really being helpful).  The two NASA apps are worth downloading because of the content available, but really just are mobile versions of online sites. The two museum apps, Set in Style and Turning the Pages, are nice in providing access to collections for those unable to visit the real thing, but are typical of what many libraries and museums are doing.  The rest are really just mobile versions of more typical online accessible databases.

I guess it's tough to come up with 10 really innovative and interesting government projects, so some padding was necessary.

Source -  10 Cool iPad Apps from Uncle Sam, Information Week