Watching the iPad’s first television spot on the Oscars Sunday night, I got giddy all over again in anticipation of getting my hands on this hot new product. Though it’s still a few weeks away, I’m even more excited for the applications that will be coming to the platform. Here’s my top 10 list of apps that I want to see developed for the iPad.

Coda

As a graphic designer and web developer, Coda is a staple in my workflow. It features a built-in FTP system, which could be problematic to port to a mobile device, considering there isn’t a traditional file structure to store data. However, perhaps the iPad’s new file storage system will provide an adequate solution. Regardless, as someone who codes, it would be awesome to sit next to a client and modify code and push changes to a site all from my iPad while they load and test the revisions on their own desktop.

Photoshop

Before you laugh, remember that Adobe has already released Photoshop Mobile for the iPhone, and all things considered, it’s not such a bad application. A larger iPad version could allow support for opening and manipulating native Photoshop files as well as working between multiple files. CS4 introduced a new tabbed approach to viewing multiple documents at once. A similar setup could easily be implemented on the iPad.

Katamari Damacy

What’s a fun touchscreen device without a fun game? Katamari already exists as an iPhone app so it’ll scale up decently on the iPad. But given the advanced graphics of the iPad and the larger screen, a native iPad version is a must. If you’ve never played Katamari, check out this clip below.

iMovie

Call me crazy (it doesn’t hurt to be wishful) but the feasibility of an iMovie-like app is certainly within the realm of possibility. I would have never expected Apple to introduce video editing on the iPhone. Nevertheless, along with a video camera, the iPhone 3GS allows for simple video edits. Why couldn’t we have a larger implementation of this on the iPad, provided it gains a video camera at some point? With the larger screen, there’s plenty of room to view a larger timeline, add transitions or effects and with one tap, upload your masterpiece to YouTube.

iChat

I’m actually quite surprised this app still hasn’t made it to the iPhone yet, but as a platform that’s designed to be “the best way to experience the web, email, photos and video,” the iPad seems like the perfect device for iChat, especially if a future model gains a video camera.

Screen Sharing or Remote Desktop

There have been a number of third-party developers that have created similar apps for the iPhone, but I’m honestly shocked to see that Apple hasn’t implemented its own solution yet. With a larger screen and almost full-size keyboard, remotely accessing and interacting with other Macs on my network would be a breeze on the iPad.

Preview

While the iBooks application will open books that are in EPUB format, I’d love to see a more robust implementation of Preview available on the iPad (and iPhone). Specifically, an app that is capable of annotating PDF files and provides support for links within PDFs. Since I’m also an academic, some of the journals I read (as PDFs) contain bookmarks to other articles or chapters and currently, none of the built-in applications on the iPhone support interacting with them.

Hulu

I don’t care how it has to happen or if it involves Flash or not. Who doesn’t want Hulu on the iPad? Even if it required a small subscription, I would love to be able to access my Hulu queue on the go. Better yet, since the iPad is a closed system, the app could download and cache content so it wouldn’t necessarily have to be streamed in real time. This could be a great solution to save AT&T’s crowded bandwidth for 3G models and allow WiFi-only models to still play even if a network isn’t around. I’d pay for that; would you?

Bento/Filemaker

Now that we have iWork, how about a real implementation of Bento (or FileMaker if that’s not too much to ask)? The current iPhone version is pretty pathetic and really hard to use to manipulate larger databases. While FileMaker may be a stretch, I’d put serious money on seeing an iPad version of Bento before the year is out.

An Improved iTunes App

It looks as though the new iTunes app represents a step ahead of the current iPhone version, but there are still some missing features that would make this app a rock star on the iPad. Adding support for Internet radio, browsing my other libraries by Home Sharing or support for iTunes Extras and LPs would be amazing. Honestly, why hasn’t Apple announced support of iTunes Extras and LPs? The specs call for a viewing area of 1280×720 (the 720p high definition standard). They also call for building your iTunes Extras with what’s called a bleed graphic, or a graphic that can “fill in the extra space” if you’re viewing it at a size greater than 1280×720. Now given that as a way to compensate for a difference in aspect ratios, if you were to scale down an iTunes Extra for the 1024×768 display, wouldn’t it just make sense? Come on, if the Apple TV can do it (and we all know how excited Apple gets about that product), shouldn’t the iPad as well?

What are your thoughts on apps you’d like to see? Share your thoughts in the comments below. The great thing about Apple’s developer community is that they keep up with what’s discussed in the blogosphere. You never know; a developer might see your suggestions. So, share what you’d like to see on the iPad!

When it comes to web site development IDEs, Coda is one of the “must have” Mac applications.

The premise is simple: one application that handles all aspects of site development and promotion: editing browser code, cleaning up schemas and tables, wielding CSS, managing versioning and promoting changes to staging and production. If you’re stuck on syntax, just open up Coda’s handy library to find that missing parameter or HTML entity. You really need to see Coda in action to get a feel for how much it helps improve your web workflow.

Apart from the 63 improvements Panic has baked into version 1.6 there are four new features that make this great program even better. While they may have added syntax highlighting for Objective-J/Cappuccino, “smart” spell checking (so that the editor only cares about your words and not your code) and the ability to find and open files with speed and ease, the real fun comes with Coda’s new found support for plug-ins. Users of BBEdit/TextWrangler, TextMate and a host of other OS X editors can attest to the power of plug-ins. They can speed up coding dramatically and let you accomplish some tasks that would be impossible by hand.

Panic has made Coda plug-in creation even more accessible by providing a “Coda Plug-in Creator” application that lets scripters (i.e. Python, Perl, Ruby, shell — anything that works on the OS X command line) into a world that is usually left to full-on Cocoa programmers. With Coda Plug-in Creator, you can drag scripts you create outside of Coda into the builder or start coding right in the application. All input is provided to the standard input stream for the script and Coda enables all plug-ins to select which portions of the document they want to process. Similarly, plug-ins (including the scripting ones) just provide their replacement text on the standard output stream and instruct Coda what to do with it.

If you are a TextMate user or “commander”, Coda can also import commands from TextMate bundles, greatly increasing the number of available plug-ins right from the start. Cocoa developers should not fret as Panic also provides a fully documented API with examples.

This is really great news for Coda fans and should help increase Coda’s visibility among hardcore OS X web developers (and may even convince some TextMate users to switch). The application costs $99.00 and runs on OS X 10.4 & 10.5 (some features are 10.5-only, though). The Plug-in Creator is free.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

A quick rundown:
Delicious Library 2 goes home with the Best Leopard Application award – can’t wait to get a look at that piece of software, eh?

Coda takes the Best User Experience award – having played with the demo, that’s not surprising at all.

Best Developer tools went to CSSEdit (first) and rooSwitch (runner-up) – I’ve seen the former and been impressed, and just recently purchased the latter and am very excited about the prospects it offers of switchable application preferences.

On the Best Student Project, Picturesque grabs the honors – I’ve recently seen this and played a bit, and it’s REALLY simple and fun to use.

Great work to all the developers, and Congrats on the recognition to those who won!

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce