Apps are the ideal last minute gifts.  After your Amazon Prime account can no longer help you this holiday season, an app store is ready to serve you.  Wait until the very last moment and, without leaving home, you can send a gift delivered straight to the recipient’s mobile device.

Giving apps as gifts has other advantages, too. Smartphone owners love them and are quick to tell you about the latest new app they‘ve found. And yet they are amazingly inexpensive. Most are less than $3 dollars and the high price range starts at around $20. Gift a cool app and the recipient will be showing it off to friends and family in no time.

As the apps trade association, the ACT staff have compiled our Top Ten list of our favorites to help guide you in the final hours of this season’s holiday shopping.

PC Mag has a good description of how to gift apps among different platforms. It’s easiest on the Apple iOS and Blackberry platforms. Amazon helps a bit with the Android platform but is less direct.

Carl Szabo

Paper Camera
 This cool app uses the smartphone’s camera to take photos applying effects to make the resulting pictures look like line sketches or comic books. I am looking for a more artistic flare to my photographs, but am terrible at using PhotoShop. This little app takes pictures using the cell-phone camera, and then converts them into an image looking like a pencil sketch, a dot matrix-printer, or even an Andy Warhol print.
CamCard
 This app converts business cards into contact information. How many of us receive business cards that just go into a drawer or the trash? This app allows me to easily take these cards and extract all the information off of them into my online address book. All I need to do is take a picture of the business cards, and the app does the rest. It uses OCR (optical character recognition) to fill in the name, phone number, email, address, and business fields which can be integrated into my phone’s contacts.

Sara Kloek

White Noise
 Sometimes the holidays get a little overwhelming. Get away from it all with a little white noise. People yelling a little too loud in the mall? Escape to an ocean beach and listen to the waves crash on the sand. Long line at the grocery store? Put in your headphones and listen to the roaring fire. Air horns on New Years Eve prompting a headache? There’s a bubbling brook to calm your nerves.

Camera+
 A seemingly simple camera app that will blow you away with its quality and functionality. It packs more features than the camera on your phone including image stabilization, a timer, and a burst photography option. You can edit photos with a number of options and then save them to a directory in the app or on your phone’s photo stream.

Morgan Reed

iAnnotate
 This app is great for managing and editing PDF documents.  It has every imaginable pdf editing feature, but what sets it apart is iAnnotate’s own storage system that ties into cloud services like Dropbox, so it’s a true all-in-one package for your documents. I demonstrated the usefulness of iAnnotate when I testified before the House Committee on Administration, a congressional panel seeking to encourage tablet use and wireless connectivity among Members of Congress and their staff.

Stop Motion Recorder
 Awesome fun. This app allows you to make stop motion movies with incredible ease. The app lets you set up the “motion” by superimposing the previous image right being your next shot.  So you see exactly how far you need to move.  My daughter and I have made dinosaur adventures that rival anything out of the 1950’s.  Go Triceratops!

Jonathan Zuck
ACT’s president Jonathan Zuck is also an accomplished filmmaker. His latest short film was screened at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival and he’s recently completed filming his first feature length film. Jonathan’s picks are essential for filmmakers and photographers.

LightTrac
 LightTrac is a must have app for filmmakers and photographers shooting outdoors. After identifying the location of your shoot, consult LightTrac to find out where the sun will be at a given time of the day, and how long and in which direction the shadows will be. LightTrac overlays this information onto a Google map to help you visualize your best shot.

pCam Film+Digital Calculator
 Our only entry to have been honored at the Emmy Awards, this app has become an industry standard. Using the phone’s camera it determines settings and measurements for depth of field, focal length matching, aperture settings, running time, illumination and a host of other cinematography variables.

Jonathan Godfrey

Fox Soccer 2Go
 For the fan who can’t miss a minute of the latest English Premier League or MLS soccer match, this app from the Fox Soccer Channel is a terrific gift. Streaming video of both live and on demand matches for subscribers, the quality on the tablet is often better than can be achieved on a desktop computer and often broadcasts more games than available on cable. This app is particularly useful to soccer fans who want to keep up with the action during their travels.

Bill Split OCR How often have you been out to dinner or drinks with a group of friends and the time you take to settle the bill is almost as long as your meal? Bill Split OCR helps to automate this process by using OCR and your phone’s camera to capture each item on your bill or tab. Identifying each person by a color tab, you then assign each tab to the bill items that person consumed. The app apportions tax, provides totals for each individual and suggests a tip amount.