Evan Killham - page 26

I’m a big fan of words. The idea that you can arrange letters and spaces in such a way as to change minds, inspire emotion, and create art is powerful and almost magical.

And the idea that you can do the same thing to ruin someone’s day or knock them down a peg is a different kind of magic, but just as eagerly sought. Spell Quest: Grimm’s Journey falls into the latter, “words can hurt” camp.

But they’re hurting monsters, so it’s probably alright.

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 happen in real time.

It’s kind of eerie, actually.

Colour by Numbers – Milo Lavén

The History Channel has gotten a little weird over the past few years.

It used to be all about World War II and the Industrial Revolution, but ever since around 2008 or so, something has been creeping in. Something decidedly un-historic. Now, we flip over to History to learn about UFOs, prophecies, and pseudoscience. So it makes sense that the channel would release a fake documentary about a War of the Worlds-style conflict that took place instead of World War I.

The Great Martian War is an endless runner that shares its name with that program, and it places you in the middle of the conflict as a scout trying to deliver intel to Paris on foot. You’ll run, jump, and slide to avoid obstacles and massive alien walkers.

And you’ll die. You’ll die a lot.

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.

But 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.

iHud – Anders Sperling

Love is difficult sometimes.

You’ve seen it: the unrequited, the ill-matched, the people who just never should have met in the first place. People who are so much opposite that you wonder why they don’t just murder each other. Alright, that last one is a bit extreme. Actually, it isn’t. I know some people.

Anyway, Pyro Jump is about a flame who is in love with a paper doll, and he will overcome any obstacle, jump any gap, and avoid any spike that stands between him and his cherished one.

She’s not too into it for obvious reasons, but the game’s fun. When I don’t hate it.

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 party to its own rejection and disposal, and that’s pretty cold.

Phone Price – K Mobile Solutions

It’s been, like, a whole day since I’ve reviewed an endless game, so it’s a good thing they come out so regularly. I don’t even know how to handle games that don’t constantly scroll anymore.

Marvel Run Jump Smash! features cartoon-styled versions of Marvel Cinematic Universe characters (and some other superpowered guests) who are perpetually sprint after Loki, the adopted brother of Thor and villain from The Avengers, to reclaim the Cosmic Cube, which is what I will always call it because “The Tesseract” makes me cringe, and all of this just makes me sound like a giant nerd, but the point is that it’s an endless runner with superheroes.

It’s not a great one, but hey. Marvel.

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 collectors of videos and interesting articles, an app to help you get better sleep, and another that might give you something to do while you’re doing that.

Here you go:

Spender: Expenses Only — Finance — Free $0.99 [thanks, commenters]

If I want to be reductionist here, money management has two general components: maximizing income and minimizing expenses. For many people, the second part is more difficult because sometimes you really, absolutely need to own that box set of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.

Spender: Expenses Only is a quick and easy way to itemize and organize your bills, and it even tells you how much you’re spending on average daily. And once you look at your costs in that vacuum and see just how much you’re blowing on Pez and action figures without seeing the income to offset it, you might want to change some things.

Spender – Expenses Only

Inlight — Lifestyle — Free

If you have a few minutes to stare at your phone, and you don’t really feel like watching a video, you might want to look into Inlight. It’s a really good-looking app that collects articles from the Internet in one place and lets you browse by categories like “Me Time” and “Nourish.”

So that’s a little weird, but I found a lot of interesting stuff in there. For example, now I know, as a man, which 21 compliments I crave. And that’s just news I can use.

Inlight

5by — Entertainment — Free

Everyone likes funny and/or interesting videos from the Internet, but who has time to go look for them? Especially when you just have a few minutes to kill while you take care of business in your “second office?” StumbleUpon is here to help with 5by.

The video aggregating app has been out for a little while, but it just got a shiny, updated look that makes it look all current and fabulous. You can find videos based on what you’re doing and how long you have, and it’ll just stream them along to you. So don’t worry; you don’t have to just sit there staring at your shoes anymore.

Or like your knees, or whatever.

5by

2014 Team USA: Road to Sochi — Sports — Free

The 2014 Winter Olympics are coming up fast, and if you feel like a bad American for not having any idea who is competing on our various national teams, The U.S. Olympic Committee has an app for you.

Here in one simple interface, you can find athlete bios, news, team rosters, and more handy information to prepare you to watch people in ridiculous shape do incredible things while you sit on your couch and create new and elaborate curses for various judges.

It’s the true spirit of the Olympics, really.

2014 Team USA: Road to Sochi

Best Sleep Hygiene — Health & Fitness — Free

Alright, so “sleep hygiene” is kind of a weird way of describing one’s sleeping habits, but this is a pretty useful app, regardless.

It starts out with a questionnaire that asks about your pre-bed routine, including how much TV you watch, alcohol consumption, and when you ate your last full meal, and then it ranks your results and offers suggestions for how you might make your sleepytime more effective.

My results put me in the bottom 25 percent of respondents, which is probably why I spend all day lapsing in and out of consciousnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn–huh? I’m up. What are we doing?

Best Sleep Hygiene

Lucid Dream Ultimate — Utilities — Free

While you’re getting all that sleep we talked about in the last app, you might as well pay some attention to your dreams.

Lucid Dream Ultimate is a dream journal and reality checker that plays a noise during the day that cues you to remind yourself that you’re awake. It’ll send you the same noise throughout the night; the idea is that when you hear the noise in your dream, you’ll realize you’re dreaming, and then you can start the important business of conjuring up all the Ancient Psychic Tandem War Elephants you’ve ever wanted.

Plus one of the tones is an Inception-esque “BWAAAAAAAH,” and that’s just straight-up magical.

Lucid Dream Ultimate

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.

Slip – Yodel Code

I love developer Halfbrick’s endless runner Jetpack Joyride as much as anyone, but it always felt like it was missing something. And I never realized what it was until very recently. And then it hit me: baleen.

Baleen didn’t actually hit me; that would be gross. It’s all stringy.

Moby’s Revenge is a new endless title about a cute whale who escapes from an aquarium and has to avoid harpoons, mines, nets, and boats on his frantic and infinite swim toward freedom and wholesale slaughter of evil, Seaworld-running humans.

It sounds dark, but it isn’t.

Lucid Dream Ultimate — Utilities — Free

While you’re getting all that sleep we talked about in the last app, you might as well pay some attention to your dreams.

Lucid Dream Ultimate is a dream journal and reality checker that plays a noise during the day that cues you to remind yourself that you’re awake. It’ll send you the same noise throughout the night; the idea is that when you hear the noise in your dream, you’ll realize you’re dreaming, and then you can start the important business of conjuring up all the Ancient Psychic Tandem War Elephants you’ve ever wanted.

Plus one of the tones is an Inception-esque “BWAAAAAAAH,” and that’s just straight-up magical.

Lucid Dream Ultimate

If you’ve ever played an older role-playing game, you know the feeling of reaching a point at which you realize that your characters are too weak to progress, which means that you have to take them back to previous areas and kill boars or something to earn the experience to level up and become strong enough to actually continue playing the game.

Loot Hero is a game that is all about that moment. It’s an action-RPG, kinda, that has you running back and forth like a crazy person, killing monsters to gain experience so that you can continue running back and forth like a slightly stronger crazy person. And once you hit a wall, you have to go back to older levels with easier enemies so you can run back and forth there to gain experience and money to make your character better equipped to run back and forth among stronger enemies.

It sounds like a drag, and it kind of is, but it’s also surprisingly engaging.

Best Sleep Hygiene — Health & Fitness — Free

Alright, so “sleep hygiene” is kind of a weird way of describing one’s sleeping habits, but this is a pretty useful app, regardless.

It starts out with a questionnaire that asks about your pre-bed routine, including how much TV you watch, alcohol consumption, and when you ate your last full meal, and then it ranks your results and offers suggestions for how you might make your sleepytime more effective.

My results put me in the bottom 25 percent of respondents, which is probably why I spend all day lapsing in and out of consciousnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn–huh? I’m up. What are we doing?

Best Sleep Hygiene

Obsorb is hard.

It’s not that it’s complicated or the enemies move too quickly or even that its controls are tricky. But it’s one of those games where you’ve lost as soon as it starts, and all you can do is delay the inevitable.

In theory, if you were good enough at it, you could play it indefinitely. But that’s not going to happen because it’s impossible.

2014 Team USA: Road to Sochi — Sports — Free

The 2014 Winter Olympics start in just a week and a half, and if you feel like a bad American for not having any idea who is competing on our various national teams, The U.S. Olympic Committee has an app for you.

Here in one simple interface, you can find athlete bios, news, team rosters, and more handy information to prepare you to watch people in ridiculous shape do incredible things while you sit on your couch and create new and elaborate curses for various judges.

It’s the true spirit of the Olympics, really.

2014 Team USA: Road to Sochi

I’m a sucker for two kinds of mobile games: ones featuring improbably cute characters (preferably animals because they are more cuddly) and those that promise to scare the crap out of me.

In Fear I Trust, a new horror title by developer Black Wing Foundation, falls under the second category, but this first bit is just the first two chapters of a longer story, so we can’t really write off cuddly animals completely yet. But it’s the story of a person who has survived insane and amoral experiments at the hands of crazy Russian scientists, so I’m not going to hold my breath.

So far, it’s a dark and gloomy experience with more puzzles than frights, but it still has a lot going for it.

Inlight — Lifestyle — Free

If you have a few minutes to stare at your phone, and you don’t really feel like watching a video, you might want to look into Inlight. It’s a really good-looking app that collects articles from the Internet in one place and lets you browse by categories like “Me Time” and “Nourish.”

So that’s a little weird, but I found a lot of interesting stuff in there. For example, now I know, as a man, which 21 compliments I crave. And that’s just news I can use.

Inlight

Recently, I was playing my favorite match-three game, and a thought occurred to me.

“This is all well and good,” I said to myself. “But it could really use a lot more punching.”

And then, because I am apparently some kind of wizard, I found Zez, an oddly-named puzzle title that has you clearing groups of three (or four) robots in order to propel a cat with a boxing glove farther into the sky so that he can inflict the maximum amount of damage to his opponent in the ring below when he comes crashing back down to Earth.

I had a fever dream once with a similar premise, but it wasn’t nearly as much fun.

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 another cool timer, a money-saving challenge, and a thing to help you unwind.

Here you go:

52 Weeks Money Challenge — Finance — Free

If you haven’t heard of the 52 Weeks Money Challenge, you probably don’t have a Facebook account. And I envy you for that.

Anyway, the challenge is a way to help you build up a nest egg through regimented saving. You put away one dollar the first week, two dollars the second, and so on. At the end of 52 weeks, you’ve set aside a total of $1,378. This app tracks your progress and grand total, and it will even send you weekly reminders in case you’re the forgetful type.

52 Weeks Money Challenge

Relaxatron — Entertainment — Free

People keep telling me I’m too highly strung, which is probably why I keep finding relaxation apps to write up. It might also be why I just yelled at my TV for 15 minutes for refusing to contain any episodes of Quantum Leap.

Anyway, Relaxatron has two things going for it: a badass name and a little more interaction than some of those other calming apps. You create a “seed shape” by placing dots into a grid, and then you just tap the screen and watch calming patterns emerge, and …

That was two hours ago.

Relaxatron

Night Sky Guide 3D+ — Reference — $1.99

Alright, this one’s really cool.

Sometimes, I’m outside at night (fewer bees then), and I’ll see something in the sky and think, “Is that a planet, or should I call NASA and tell them that we’re all probably about to die?”

Night Sky Guide 3D+ will save me a lot of embarrassing phone conversations with scientists. It uses your iOS device’s GPS and compass, so you can just hold it up and it’ll show you a notated view of the patch of sky you’re facing.

So it was just Jupiter. Sorry, NASA operator.

Night Sky Guide 3D+

Tico Timer — Education — $0.99

Here’s another app from the maker of the very clever Humming Timing. Developer Ricardo Fonseca made Tico Timer for children, and it counts down using animated shapes instead of numbers. So the clock will expire when, for example, all the squares disappear from the screen. Or when the large circle shrinks down to a point and disappears. And all of this happens while some very relaxing music plays.

The goal of the app is to teach kids a sense of time, but I’ll probably use it myself because it’s the most relaxing timer I’ve ever seen.

Tico Timer

Spender: Expenses Only — Finance — Free $0.99 [thanks, commenters]

If I want to be reductionist here, money management has two general components: maximizing income and minimizing expenses. For many people, the second part is more difficult because sometimes you really, absolutely need to own that box set of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.

Spender: Expenses Only is a quick and easy way to itemize and organize your bills, and it even tells you how much you’re spending on average daily. And once you look at your costs in that vacuum and see just how much you’re blowing on Pez and action figures without seeing the income to offset it, you might want to change some things.

Spender – Expenses Only

We have no shortage of cute games about adorable characters who need your help to get home or something comparable, but here’s something a little different.

Kid Aviator is about a young carnival daredevil fired from a cannon who is trying to fly as high as he can to spite gravity. He has a cape. He has goggles. He is awesome.

The only problem is that the sky is full of all kinds of random crap that wants to ruin his affront to physics and Nature, and that’s where you come in.

Tico Timer — Education — $0.99

Here’s another app from the maker of the very clever Humming Timing. Developer Ricardo Fonseca made Tico Timer for children, and it counts down using animated shapes instead of numbers. So the clock will expire when, for example, all the squares disappear from the screen. Or when the large circle shrinks down to a point and disappears. And all of this happens while some very relaxing music plays.

The goal of the app is to teach kids a sense of time, but I’ll probably use it myself because it’s the most relaxing timer I’ve ever seen.

Tico Timer

Science is cool, and Atomic Fusion: Particle Collider wants you to know that.

It’s a tough game to describe. It’s kind of like a shooter, but you don’t shoot anything. It reminds me a bit of Tilt to Live except that nothing is really trying to kill you. You’re basically just flying around collecting stuff. So maybe it’s also a little like Katamari Damacy but not nearly so goofy.

Whatever it is, though, it’s fun.

Nobody likes to see a cute baby animal in danger. Sarah McLachlan has worked very hard to ensure that.

Lost Yeti is a cute game about an adorable baby yeti having a cuddly adventure. I never even knew an adventure could be cuddly, but this game taught me that it is not only possible, but preferable.

It’s also a smart, deceptively complicated puzzler that will keep you thinking, tapping, and swearing at those good-for-nothing monsters who pick on that poor little lost yeti for no reason other than that they are jerkfaces.

Night Sky Guide 3D+ — Reference — $1.99

Alright, this one’s really cool.

Sometimes, I’m outside at night (fewer bees then), and I’ll see something in the sky and think, “Is that a planet, or should I call NASA and tell them that we’re all probably about to die?”

Night Sky Guide 3D+ will save me a lot of embarrassing phone conversations with scientists. It uses your iOS device’s GPS and compass, so you can just hold it up and it’ll show you a notated view of the patch of sky you’re facing.

So it was just Jupiter. Sorry, NASA operator.

Night Sky Guide 3D+