Balance Book is a simple, easy, clean way to track your income and expenses on a daily or monthly level. You set up categories and assign colors to keep them straight, and then you just make entries based on how much money you bring in or spend. It automatically calculates your net values to give you an idea of where you are on any given day.
Now I know that I’m probably spending way too much money on sour bears. But in my defense, they are delicious.
Source:Balance Book – Free | Tree Planet
Developer Pangea Software’s well-regarded Enigmo series of puzzle games has been around for a while, and they’ve turned over development of the latest installment, Enigmo: Explore to a new team, but the idea is the same: See that liquid dripping from a pipe over here? Get it into that jar over there.
The game gives you a suite of tools to accomplish this, including trampoline-like items that the drops bounce off of and little cannons that can send them even farther. It’s up to you to decide which items in which combinations to use to complete levels, which offers you a decent amount of freedom when you’re playing it.
But a couple other features work just as hard against you, and it’s kind of a shame.
Sometimes, print is too small or your eyes get tired. Or you just want to see what something looks like really close up. Enter Zoomer, a simple-to-use, completely uncluttered app that lets you magnify things up to 10x just by swiping to the left. You can swipe to the right to zoom back out, turn on your LED flash, and even reverse colors to make things look all weird (it’s probably for night-time reading, but it does also make things look totally weird).
You can also use it to look at ants close up without accidentally setting them on fire. And I’m sure the ants appreciate that.
Source:Zoomer – Free | LightBulbOne
I’m all about helping cute animals get home or get candy or whatever. Believe me, I am. But I’m also kind of a hypocrite because the most important word in that first sentence is “cute.” Give me a yeti or a little alien or whatever the hell Om Nom is in Cut the Rope, and I’ll give them whatever they want.
Show me something like the title characters in The Rainbowers, however … I mean, I’ll still do it. But I’ll look around first to see if any fuzzy bunnies need help gathering carrots or something.
But the game is fun, despite my terrible, terrible prejudice.
It’s enough for some people just to plunk one value into a box and watch the conversion come out the other end, but we’re savvy here, right?
The newly released free version of Aperture Mobile’s Converta app thinks you are, and that’s why it actually bothers showing you what it’s doing. The free version calculates the equivalent values of angles, lengths, mass, temperatures, and volumes, and the $0.99 paid version includes things like illumination, radiation, velocity, and energy. You can also choose between a keypad and a clever gestural interface.
I’m not sure how useful the radiation conversion would be to most people, but it’s nice to know it’s there.
When I was a kid at Showbiz Pizza (back in those carefree days before that upstart rat staged his coup), the Dragon’s Lair cabinet always fascinated me. People would step up, watch a cartoon for about three seconds, and then they’d put another quarter in. They’d watch the same cartoon, and then they’d put another quarter in. And so it went until they said some words that my parents didn’t want me using and went off to play Dig Dug.
I didn’t understand what Dragon’s Lair was until much later; all I knew was that it looked like a movie and annoyed people.
This week, the iOS port of its 1991 sequel, Time Warp, made its way to the App Store, and it’s pretty much here to ruin your day and make you hate your fingers and your slow, stupid brain.
So basically, the old-school experience is intact, and I love it.
Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?
Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.
Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include a sleeping aid for nerds, a clever alarm, and a way to avoid looking at other people’s lunches.
Here you go:
Developer Fixdit sees no reason why your nerd love should have to stop just because you’re unconscious. So now we have Hypersleep, a space-themed sleep aid that includes white-noise-ified versions of the engine noises of various science-fiction vehicles. You can nod off to the engine idle of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D or the background hum of the 10th Doctor’s TARDIS. Or some other equally dweeby drones.
And that’s where the Nerd Tax comes in: The default noise is free, but additional (read: recognizable) sounds cost $0.99 each. But I’m pretty sure that if the sound of Serenity’s engine will help you nod off, you’re willing to pay that dollar.
Hypersleep – Free ($0.99 for additional sounds) | Fixdit
My Smart Alarm wants you to be on time, but it also knows that you can’t just walk out the door looking like that. So it lets you build up a list of things you need to do to get ready (showering, shaving, impromptu Nerf-gun battles) as well as travel time. You tell the app when your event/appointment is and check off your pre-game tasks, and it will alert you when you need to start getting ready.
It won’t tell you if that outfit looks dumb, though; you’re on your own there.
My Smart Alarm – Free | Aliyu Odumosu
An official Metacritic app exists, but it’s pretty basic; it only shows you new movies. Metascore is also basic, but in a completely different way. It allows you to look up the Metacritic aggregate number for anything on the site, including movies, video games, TV shows, and music. You just type in what you’re looking for, and it gives you the number.
And when I say it gives you the number, I mean that it only gives you the number. You’ll have to go somewhere else if you want to read the reviews, but this is still a handy app if you’re just looking for a general rating.
Photo-sharing social apps like Instagram are fine and all, but most of them have one flaw: You can’t tell them not to show you pictures of people’s lunch if you don’t want to see them. Enter Just…, a quick-and-easy place to post and look at photos that asks you upfront what you want to look at. So far, it includes 11 categories including Automobiles, Cats, Dogs, and, yes, Food, if you’re into that.
It’s easy to put up your own work and like and share others’, and the feeds already have some beautiful pictures for your enjoyment.
(Apologies to Mr. Albano for the crop job up there.)
Just… – Free | FiveIron Software
We’ve already covered multimedia platform Narr8’s transition from iPad to iPhone, but this week, the company released a standalone app just for biographical comics about some of history’s great thinkers and doers. Biographics offers 13 “episodes” that offer tons of information about some fascinating figures. The first two episodes, which cover Nikola Tesla and Sigmund Freud, are free, and the rest are available for $0.99 each. Subjects include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Vlad Dracula, and Martin Luther King.
That’s a lot of ground they’re covering, there.
I’ve covered a few list-makers before, but this one just replaced Notes as my go-to item tracker.
It’s called UpWord Notes, and it is a simple but powerful app that lets you create, manage, and update lists with just a few simple commands. You can swipe left to make bullets and mark things as important, and you cross items off with a swipe to the right. Coolest of all, you can pull down, refresh-style, to remove all crossed-off items at once.
Plus it all syncs to Dropbox, so you can rest assured that you can always get your grocery list anywhere.
Tengami has gathered a bit of a following during its development due to its beautiful, pop-up-book art style and zen-like demeanor. It has relaxing music, a dialogue-free narrative, and puzzles that are clever and occasionally very tricky.
The game is out now as a universal app for iOS devices, and it has a lot of expectations to live up to. Can it live up to the excitement?
It absolutely does, delivering an endlessly fascinating experience in one of the most beautiful packages you have ever seen.
Biographics — Books — Free
We’ve already covered multimedia platform Narr8’s transition from iPad to iPhone, but this week, the company released a standalone app just for biographical comics about some of history’s great thinkers and doers. Biographics offers 13 “episodes” that offer tons of information about some fascinating figures. The first two episodes, which cover Nikola Tesla and Sigmund Freud, are free, and the rest are available for $0.99 each. Subjects include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Vlad Dracula, and Martin Luther King.
That’s a lot of ground they’re covering, there.
What do monsters, Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros. series of chaotic fighting games, and steampunk have in common?
Nothing, you guys. Absolutely nothing.
But those are all elements in Fright Fight, a new free-to-play, online-multiplayer brawler that has players controlling a variety of spooky monsters in fights to the death atop floating platforms. It’s chaotic, insane, and mostly fun.
It’s a Frankenstein’s Creature of disparate parts cobbled together, and the arcane force that brings it to lurching life is in-app purchases.
Just… — Photo & Video — Free
Photo-sharing social apps like Instagram are fine and all, but most of them have one flaw: You can’t tell them not to show you pictures of people’s lunch if you don’t want to see them. Enter Just…, a quick-and-easy place to post and look at photos that asks you upfront what you want to look at. So far, it includes 11 categories including Automobiles, Cats, Dogs, and, yes, Food, if you’re into that.
It’s easy to put up your own work and like and share others’, and the feeds already have some beautiful pictures for your enjoyment.
(Apologies to Mr. Albano for the crop job up there.)
Fans of Cartoon Network’s megahit Adventure Time are probably familiar with “Card Wars,” an episode in which heroes Finn and Jake square off in a ludicrously complicated collectible card game.
If your first thought after seeing that installment was “I have to play that crazy-ass game,” you’re in luck: It’s now available for your iPhone or iPad. While not quite as complicated as the on-screen version, Card Wars offers the same basic card-and-board gameplay with 3D monsters battling it out for fortune and glory.
And behind its zany exterior lies a deceptively deep experience with Floops galore.
Metascore — Entertainment — Free
An official Metacritic app exists, but it’s pretty basic; it only shows you new movies. Metascore is also basic, but in a completely different way. It allows you to look up the Metacritic aggregate number for anything on the site, including movies, video games, TV shows, and music. You just type in what you’re looking for, and it gives you the number.
And when I say it gives you the number, I mean that it only gives you the number. You’ll have to go somewhere else if you want to read the reviews, but this is still a handy app if you’re just looking for a general rating.
The original Eliss wowed everyone back in 2009 with its multitouch controls, cool music, and increasingly frantic gameplay. Now, we have Eliss Infinity, which includes the original game and a few more modes to keep even veteran players interested.
Eliss is a puzzle/action/insanity game in which you have to manipulate the sizes of “planets” to make them fit inside of rings. You do this by combining smaller ones by dragging them into each other or splitting larger ones by pulling them apart with your thumbs. But differently colored planets can’t touch, or they’ll eat each other away.
That’s the basic idea. But Infinity has a lot more to offer.
My Smart Alarm — Productivity — Free
My Smart Alarm wants you to be on time, but it also knows that you can’t just walk out the door looking like that. So it lets you build up a list of things you need to do to get ready (showering, shaving, impromptu Nerf-gun battles) as well as travel time. You tell the app when your event/appointment is and check off your pre-game tasks, and it will alert you when you need to start getting ready.
It won’t tell you if that outfit looks dumb, though; you’re on your own there.
We have no shortage of endless running/flying/floating/swimming games in the App Store. And here’s another one.
Avoid: Sensory Overload is a techno-skinned endless game in which you guide a ship through a perpetual series of obstacles and traps. All the while, the thumping music and neon-infused background light show do their very best to distract you.
It’s flashy, annoying, challenging, and ultimately a lot of fun.
Hypersleep — Health & Fitness — Free ($0.99 for additional sounds)
Developer Fixdit sees no reason why your nerd love should have to stop just because you’re unconscious. So now we have Hypersleep, a space-themed sleep aid that includes white-noise-ified versions of the engine noises of various science-fiction vehicles. You can nod off to the engine idle of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D or the background hum of the 10th Doctor’s TARDIS. Or some other equally dweeby drones.
And that’s where the Nerd Tax comes in: The default noise is free, but additional (read: recognizable) sounds cost $0.99 each. But I’m pretty sure that if the sound of Serenity’s engine will help you nod off, you’re willing to pay that dollar.
Heroes went and got themselves in a big damn hurry.
It’s not enough anymore that they just get through the dungeon and fight the terrifying monster at the end. These days, they feel some strange need to do it all without stopping. It’s escalation, I guess; the new guys want to show off, so they run. Endlessly.
Dungeon Highway is the story of one such valiant champion who runs and shoots and dies a lot. And then you start over, and he runs and shoots and dies some more.
Bed Bug Proof — Utilities — Free
America is seeing a resurgence in bed-bug infestations, and here’s an app to help you screen a room and identify the little biters before they introduce themselves.
To be perfectly clear, Bed Bug Proof is an app created in part to sell an anti-bed-bug spray. But the practical information and tools it provides, like the inspection guide, comparison photographs, and a magnifier/light to let you use your phone to search for eggs and poop, are useful enough to let it stand on its own.
Although it will make you itchy just looking at it. Seriously.
This just in: Someone has made a game about zombies.
You probably weren’t expecting that, huh? A zombie game? It’s crazy on the face of it.
Now, look: I hate zombies as much as the next person. Maybe a bit more, even. Stupid shambling a****les. But that doesn’t mean I want to spend all of my gaming time killing them. I have a lot of other things to pretend to kill, like Nazis and Pokémon. So I’ll admit that I wasn’t immediately sold on Overlive, a new undead-themed gamebook with role-playing-game elements, even though it’s hard to go wrong with me once you start offering choices and stats.
Once I started playing it, though, Overlive won me over.
Numerus — Reference — Free
Numerus is one of those weird apps that shouldn’t be as interesting as it is. But once you spend a little time clicking around it, you will feel the random knowledge dropping into your head.
Did you know that in 1950, the Canadian postal system processed 1,362,310,155 items? I don’t know why you would, but you do now. Also, the human body has 248 organs, there were 129 episodes of the CBS sitcom Becker, and China contains 56 officially recognized ethnic groups. I can’t stop.
Alright, maybe one more.
Is that a Bill and Ted reference in there? This app is amazing.
Here’s the thing about touch controls: You’re controlling the game with the same thing you’re using to see what you’re doing. This creates a problem when your dumb, clumsy fingers start blocking your view and lead to cheap and preventable deaths.
Some games prevent this by putting the control areas off to the side or in an otherwise unused place on the screen, leaving the view clear. Lego Star Wars: Microfighters, the latest in the synergetic juggernaut of a series, is not one of those titles.
It’s surprising that developers and publishers as experienced as Warner Bros. and Traveller’s Tales would allow such a clumsy and stupid thing to happen, but here it is.
Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?
Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.
Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include some interactive art, a quick way to exchange contact information, and a really rude personal trainer.
Here you go:
Slip — Utilities — Free
Slip knows that exchanging business cards can be annoying. You have to find your cards and then take theirs and then maybe jam it into the back of the thing where you keep your cards, and hopefully it fits. And then later, you find their card and can’t remember why you’d met in the first place.
So instead of that, Slip uses Bluetooth to exchange contact information wirelessly. You go in and toggle which bits of information you want to share and just flip it over to another user with a single swipe. You can also text or e-mail it to people without Slip, but that’s not as much fun.
CARROT Fit — Health & Fitness — $1.99
It isn’t hard to find a fitness app that offers enthusiastic and positive encouragement to keep you motivated and working toward your goals. CARROT Fit is not one of those apps.
Following its predecessors, CARROT To-Do and CARROT Alarm, Fit brings the you-deprecating artificial intelligence program to bear on your weight-loss plan. You set your goal, and “she” gives you points and virtual medals for doing well and mocks you if you don’t. It’s basically like if GLaDOS, the comical, murderous A.I. from developer Valve’s Portal series, were sent to whip you into shape.
By which I mean that CARROT Fit is kind of amazing.
CARROT Fit – Talking Weight Tracker
Phone Price — Reference — Free
If you’re due for an upgrade to your iPhone, you might be wondering what to do with your current one. You could go to a bunch of different websites and search for buyback values or try to just sell it yourself, but that sounds like a lot of work, and living in the future like we do means things should be easy.
Phone Price is an app that aggregates phone trade-in values from a variety of sources so that you can get the most for your old device. So you’re basically making the phone a party to its own rejection and disposal, and that’s pretty cold.
Phone Price – K Mobile Solutions
iHud — Utilities — Free
You can pop into iTunes and find several dozen apps that will use the GPS in your iPhone to create an accurate speedometer, but most of them have a major problem: You have to look down.
iHud tries to solve that issue. You open it, and your velocity appears. It reads backwards, but if you place your phone up under your windshield, the reflection will look right, and you won’t have to look away from the road to check your speed.
I’m not sure how you keep your phone from sliding off your dash when you turn, but that’s for the engineers.
Colour by Numbers — Lifestyle — Free
Have you heard of Colour by Numbers? It’s a light installation in Stockholm in which anyone with a mobile phone can participate.
The top 10 floors of the Telefonplan tower contain colored lights, and you can change their hues by either calling in and punching in a bunch of numbers or using this app. For five minutes at a time, you can select floors and mix red, blue, and green to create any color you want. And you can watch the live feed online to see your contribution in real time.
It’s kind of eerie, actually.
Colour by Numbers – Milo Lavén
Contact Alias — Utilities — Free
People love their privacy, but you can’t play Phone Goalie all the time. What if there were some way to hide who your iMessages and texts are coming from, even if whichever nosy person you’re with is looking right at your screen?
Enter Contact Alias, an app that lets you set alternate names for anyone on your list and toggle them on and off with a single touch of a comically large button. I’m sure it has practical applications for sneaky sneakers, but I’m probably just going to use it to quickly change people’s contact names to “A**hole” when I’m mad at them.
Contact Alias — Utilities — Free
People love their privacy, but you can’t play Phone Goalie all the time. What if there were some way to hide who your iMessages and texts are coming from, even if whichever nosy person you’re with is looking right at your screen?
Enter Contact Alias, an app that lets you set alternate names for anyone on your list and toggle them on and off with a single touch of a comically large button. I’m sure it has practical applications for sneaky sneakers, but I’m probably just going to use it to quickly change people’s contact names to “A**hole” when I’m mad at them.