Fabric, Journey Below, and other awesome apps of the week

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If you're appy and you know it, check our list!
'Appy weekend everyone.
Photo: Cult of Mac

From a promising smart journal app to a fantastic auto-runner game, we’ve sifted through this week’s most exciting apps to bring you the ones you absolutely need to download now.

Check out our picks below. Trust us, this is the way you want to spend Sunday!

Fabric

Fabric
Fabric wants to be your new life journal.
Photo: Fabric

Fabric is a journal app with a difference. That difference? For starters, it’s got some impressive creative pedigree behind it in the form of former-Facebook engineers Arun Vijayvergiya and Nikolay Valtchanov: previously two of the devs behind the popular social network’s Timeline feature.

More importantly, however, is the fact that Fabric automatically updates itself: basically aggregating content from different social media accounts, combined with your iPhone’s location features, to document everything you do. It then uses all of this context to create aggregate visualizations of, say, the cities or restaurants you’ve been to — becoming, as it describes itself, your “personal location-based journal.”

The app’s not perfect yet, and has a number of bugs which will hopefully be ironed out soon — but the concept of creating a blow-by-blow, one-stop-shop for life tracking is a good one. And downloading it now gives you the chance to be in the cool “early adopter” crowd.

Available for: iPhone, iPad
Cost: Free
Get it from: App Store

Google Docs

Google Docs in Split View
Google Docs in Split View.
Screenshot: Cult of Mac

Google’s official Docs, Sheets and Slides apps for iOS finally got Split View multitasking for iPad this week, giving users the ability to finally compose reports and edit their spreadsheets, while simultaneously using a second app.

All three apps also received bug fixes and performance improvements, making them snappier and more stable.

Available for: iPad
Cost: Free
Get it from: App Store (links above)

FAST Speed Test

Netflix
Netflix’s new speedtest app is a keeper.
Photo: Netflix

Created by Netflix, the new FAST Speed Test app doesn’t let you tune into video content, but rather tells you if your internet connection is up to the challenge.

It’s essentially a native version of internet speed testing site Fast.com, but makes it a tiny bit easier by not requiring you to visit a website to use it. It’s not got the in-depth ping, latency, jitter and other stats reportage network engineers may be after — but it’s straightforward user interface makes it more than adequate tool for everyday users.

Available for: iPhone, iPad
Cost: Free
Get it from: App Store

Journey Below

Journey Below is a tremendous auto-running platformer, placing you in control of a knight as he journeys through dungeons slaying baddies, en route to saving the kingdom from an evil monster.

Controls are easy-to-pick-up, and the game is overall a whole lot of fun — as well as picking up a whole lot of replayability from its randomly-generated maps, which means you’ll get a different 12 levels every time you play. A strong recommend.

Available for: iPhone, iPad
Cost: $2.99
Get it from: App Store

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