It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.
This time, we review Fox Vs Duck, GW Monkey, National Trust, Photogene, Reeder, and TinyPixels.
APP OF THE WEEK
Reeder: Superb Google Reader client. Elegant, usable UI + image caching, state saving & services integration. 5/5 $2.99 https://is.gd/blPVj
Fox Vs Duck: Beautifully designed tilt-based ‘avoid’ minigame. Simple, but fun & great attention to detail. 4/5 $0.99 https://is.gd/bblZg
GW Monkey: Modern take on Nintendo’s G&W Chef game. Polished, but dull & comes off as rather charmless. 2/5 $1.99 https://is.gd/blQkk
National Trust: Handbook for Eng/Wales/NI NT sites of interest. Sleek & efficient, but content sometimes lacking 3/5 Free https://is.gd/blQvO
Photogene: Intuitive, usable app for basic image edits (crops, levels, etc). Naff filters, but otherwise great. 4/5 $1.99 https://is.gd/blQI3
TinyPixels: Pixel art creator. Iffy pan/zoom, but otherwise good toolset, incl. copy, grid, art import/export. 4/5 $1.99 https://is.gd/blRvv
Only six reviews this week, but four great apps among them. TinyPixels is a decent editor for pixel art, for the most part bettering equivalent desktop apps, despite iffy zoom/pan controls that mean both tend to happen at once. Photogene’s a nifty image editor for basic tasks such as cropping and level adjustment. Edits are non-destructive, and while the built-in filters are poor, the rest of the app makes it well worth two bucks.
Fox Vs Duck was the best game I reviewed this week, and it again shows how versatile the platform is. The game is simple: tilt your device to make your round duck escape the pond, fleeing from the hungry fish and avoiding the fox. It’s elegant, fun, surprisingly moving when you lose a duck, and you know full well it just wouldn’t get any kind of chance on a rival platform.
App of the week, though, has to be Reeder. The 2.0 upgrade to the popular Google Reader client has upped the app’s game significantly, and it actually ousted Messages for a permanent place on my dock. If you use RSS/Google Reader with any kind of regularity, you need this app—it really is that simple.
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