The iOS App Store is full of apps, both great and terrible. Keeping that in mind, here are some of the standout apps users should download.

Clear

Clear is a barebones, gorgeous and functional note-taking app - the three elements, developers often can't bring together. There's not much to Clear: once users open the app and get past the tutorial, simply swiping down brings up a rectangular entry for users to type in a brief note. Notes can be rearranged, and are colors from darker shades of red to lighter shades of orange in descending order to denote the most important tasks

Notes can also be grouped, and accessing them is as easy as pinching the screen. Clear is available now for $2.99.

Flipboard

Despite arriving on Android, Flipboard is still an incredibly popular social networking aggregator app. The premise of Flipboard is simple: bring all of a user's social networks, RSS feeds and favorite news topics into a faux magazine interface. Each topic is represented by a square, though the main headline with the most recent content is a bigger rectangle, and users just swipe down to go to the next page and vice versa. It's gorgeous, especially when combined with the Retina display.

Flipboard is available now, for free. The app is also universal, so it works on iPhones and iPads.

Sparrow

There has been criticism that Sparrow, the makers of the minimalist Mac e-mail client, doesn't support push notifications but it still remains arguably the best Mail alternative on iOS devices and is arguably better than Mail for iOS.

The design resembles the Facebook iOS app, with a main news feed and a panel appearing on the left when swiping in that direction which allows users to switch between areas such as the Inbox and Starred messages (when using Gmail, for example) or Spam. There's also another panel, which shows added accounts. A compose button is in the bottom right corner.

Sparrow is available now for $2.99.

Articles

Articles has been around for a few years but remains one of the most beautiful and functional Wikipedia apps around for iOS. Opening the app presents a search box for finding Wikipedia entries, and when on an entry users can tap a menu button at the top to show the subsections of the page. A problem with mobile Wikipedia Web site is that users have to scroll through the page to find a specific section.

Articles is available now for $2.99.

Reeder

The simple RSS reader Reeder for Mac comes to iOS, having previously been in beta in 2011 on the desktop. Opening the app presents users with the RSS feed, and tapping on it shows an additional pane to the right with the stories and source. More feeds can be added and grouped, so feeds don't collect in a single place. Articles can also be read from within the app, just by tapping on the story.

Reeder is available for $2.99 on iPhones, and $4.99 on iPad.